America: Utterly Wounded

Gawker.com, the reliably snarky New York media watchdog website is on the defensive after Maclean’s gentle (read: Canadian) swipe at its post made on Wednesday “Meet Michaëlle Jean, the Sarah Palin of Canada,” a response to news that our GG’s taste for wildlife might be even rawer than that of the failed vice-presidential candidate. Gawker blogger “Cajun Boy” rails away about Maclean’s writer Anne Kingston’s retort, “Michaëlle Jean the Sarah Palin of Canada. Really?,” as well as the tenor of the Maclean’s comments thread in a nation-blasting posting: “Canada: Utterly Humorless.” Like a stand-up comic berating an audience who didn’t laugh, Cajun Boy assumes we didn’t grasp his “playful attempt at absurdist humor,” writing: “we reckon that it never dawned on Anne Kingston or any of the other offended Canadians that the post in question wasn’t meant to be a serious analysis of the similarities between Palin and Jean, something we actually thought was rather thinly veiled.” The Palin/Jean comparison was “intended to be logically inappropriate in every possible way,” he over explains, “thereby serving to not only bring attention to a truly ridiculous piece of political news from our neighbors to the north, but also to lampoon this country’s blissful ignorance of all life outside of its borders at the same time. We suppose our expectations were set a wee bit too high.” All ends happily, however, with Cajun Boy boasting of his own Canuck bona fides (“Hell, some of our ancestors have been traced back to Nova Scotia!”) and offering some helpful advice to his unfunny neighbours to the north: “get your big, salmon-eating heads out of your asses, and lighten the hell up.”

Gawker

Maclean’s — Michaëlle Jean is Canada’s Sarah Palin. Really?