Quebec

   You know, they seem harmless enough... but I just don't trust the Canadians.

   I go up to Quebec every now and then. It's a tremendous long weekend getaway for Massachusetts folk, a sort of B+ France that you don't have to get into some death-trap jet to go to.

   If you can handle French people who know English but refuse to speak it, it's a nice October drive through foliage country to a charming riverfront city.

   It's ancient as far as American cities go, with Jacques Cartier planting a cross there in 1534. The Algonquins there were dealt with easily enough- where the English killed them, the French traded with them, and few Froggers were hatcheted by the men who would later become the more Southern Englishmen's sports team mascots.

   Quebec- an Algonquin word for "narrows" (n)- dominates a bend in the St. Lawerence River, in that it has nice hills from which to rain cannonballs on any sucker from another crown who might try to sneak a troop transport past it downriver.

 

   Whoever owned it owned the American interior, as the US influence at the time stopped at the Appalchians... and wasn't that solid at all more than a mile from the coast in most places.

   This led to settlements that lasted after the Brits won Canada in 1763. A lot of these settlements were sold to make cash for Napoleon's war machine... we Americans know this as the Louisiana Purchase, and it doubled the size of our nation for crazy dumb cheap fundage.... like a nickel an acre.

   The Froggers were having enough trouble with the rest of Europe (and especially within France itself), and the last thing they needed were 20,000 Apaches falling on their unprotected settlers before the Smallpox kicked in. They were happy to dump some wilderness on Thomas Jefferson for a little Cannon Cash to try to kill Russians with.

   This probably doesn't concern you unless you live in Kansas... or Quebec. The British needed the French to cow the aboriginals, and they allowed New France to remain somewhat French... especially Quebec.

 

   French is the official language of Quebec, all the signs are en francais, and there is an ugly little separatist movement that could result in a hockey game terrorist bombing someday.

   But that isn't what I'm here to tell you about. I'm basically telling you why, even though Montreal is closer to NYC than Denver is... Canada may as well be friggin' Jupiter as far as I'm concerned.... and keep in mind that I am 100% French, and fit in there as seamlessly as I didn't fit in when I went to Houston:

- Cigarettes come in these purse-hating side-sliding packages, and taste like bad homegrown dope.

- Homosexuality is rampant here, what with the gay marriage laws and the ability of both partners to watch the hockey game while performing the sex act.

- Speaking of hockey... if you go to 3 or 4 bars on a Sunday afternoon, you'll see nothing but Ottawa Senators games. The patrons could be called "very much opposed" to the idea of turning on an NFL game instead.

 

   This fact alone justifies a pre-emptive nuclear strike, as far as my tax dollar is concerned.

- They call real  Americans "Upper Mexicans."

- They have their eyes on Greenland.

- If the next war involves wood-splitting or lots of skating... they'll conquer us like Iraq vs Kuwait.

- They will be diplomatic about it, but you can tell that they think their bacon is better than ours.

- They have a more soulful National Anthem than we do, and they know it.

- If you've never seen a woman who has lived nowhere but Covington, Louisiana try to order Marlboros from a French-Canadian-Asian, you can't imagine how funny it is... even after 3 minutes or so.

   At different points of the conversation, I saw the poor clerk hold up whiskey, tampons, aspirin, batteries, a Hustler... it was reality show-surreal. You could have taught a monkey to type faster than old Cindy Lou was going to get her cancer straws. "Dagumnit, just gimme some tobacker,"  she drawled out at one point.

   I didn't intervene... even though I'm fluent in French, and the Cajun was my roomie when I went to school in Rhode Island. I never took my lips off my Slurpee for the whole episode... except to laugh.

   Only the future liberal application of Rum to this Slurpee stopped the laughter, and it resulted in a terribly ugly scene at what the Quebeckers think is a pizza place.

   Sometimes, you have to get yourself out of these kind of jams with the resources you have at hand.... and the sooner Cindy figured all this out, the better.

   I'm pretty much all for making Oh Canada the 51st state, whether they like it or not. I don't trust them, and guys who may have been on our dollar bills were repelled attacking Quebec.

   I just feel better owning all that timber and uranium. We can force football on them, and they'll recognize the superiority of our beer in a generation or so. The sooner we do it, the sooner the killing will stop... and it gets the troops out of those God-forsaken deserts and mountains that Bush has them in.

   We'll win every Olympic hockey medal between now and the Mars colonization. It also gives us an enormous buffer zone if Earth ever gets ugly in a decade or ten... sort of a huge, frozen Latvia. You never know when the Swedes are gonna try something sneaky across the Pole, and I'd rather fight them on Baffin Island instead of Buzzards Bay.

   If the New Americans resisted, I'd shoot them down in the street like mad dogs. That whole lack-of-NFL thing is truly disturbing, and they deserve whatever happens to them when the Big Red One rolls in out of Montana. I'd have no bloody pity at all.

   Once we have them all pimped up, I'd pull a PR move and let them keep the whole French scene up there in Quebec. Diversity is what makes this country great... and every New Englander knows that if we can tolerate Vermont or Mississippi, we can incorporate Montreal somehow. Can they be goofier than some Amish buggy-jockey, or a Mormon with 6 wives?

   The fact that we have such a wide range of peoples is what makes this country great. Nothing shows this off better than a nice War of Conquest.