Canadians are nice...

...They have to be.

I was just telling (literally, in the flesh world) The Economist En Su Laberinto that yesterday in connection with his posting Proud to be an American. His thesis:

I always have troubles understanding the real meaning of sentences like this..."Proud to be an American" , "Proud to Be a Bolivian" or "Proud to be an Iranian"?...what are we really saying? One can be proud of winning a tennis tournament or proud to have a kid that behaves well and does well in school. In general, one can be proud of having achieved or accomplished something in life. The dictionary defines proud as "feeling self-respect or pleasure in something by which you measure yourself worth." A necessary condition to be proud, therefore, is to have control over the outcome of some enterprise or venture you pursue in life.

Forrest Gump, in this sense, cannot feel proud of having achieved so many things in his life. They all came randomly to him. He was just lucky.
...
[Moreover,] Patriotism can have severe pervasive implications when [it] places nations before individuals.

Sequentially (but not with a casual link) in the serendipity that is the cyberworld, EclecticEconomist has posted on the subject of Canadian WMD's. His thesis:

My proposal is that Canada should develop a nuclear weapons programme. The U.S. has shown with both Iran and North Korea, especially when pressured by other gubmnts, that it is willing to try to buy off the gubmnts of other countries that appear to be well along the way toward development of nuclear weapons. For this strategy to work, the Canadian gubmnt would have to get the project well underway, lest the U.S. treat us like Iraq.

The Canadianne spelling of program is a nice touch. One must do everything one can to protect one's cultural identity, starting with bi-lingual cereal boxes and the name of one's post office (Post Canada).

If you read Spanish you may find it interesting to check out the webpage of the first commenter on The Economist En Su Laberinto's post.