As soon as you cross the border, Canadians insult your intelligence. They've installed signs just inside Canadian territory to inform visitors "Our Speeds Are In Kilometers." What am I?--a fsckin' moron. That may be my excuse when the police arrest me for doing 160.9 KPH, but that doesn't mean I was unaware of the system change. And let's be honest, the police may write tickets for Americans, but no money is leaving United States checking accounts for Canadian coffers. It's not like Canada is going to send its army after us.
Americans understand kilometers. The inside dial of our speedometers is calibrated in KPH. In school, we're taught the metric system just so we can ignore it in Canada. We may act stupid to avoid a ticket that we're not going to pay, but that doesn't mean we are stupid. The problem is not American comprehension of the metric system. The problem is that Canadians sell gas by the quart.
In middle school American children are taught that a quart is .946 liters. Coca-Cola sells its high-fructose carbonated sugar water in two liter bottles. Fat Americans are certainly aware of the approximate size of a liter. But all that knowledge flies out the window when Canadians start advertising gas for next to nothing. "Fifty-three cents! Why the hell did I buy gas in the States when the shit is fifty-three cents up here?" This deception is unbelievable. Squeeze the handle and the numbers fly around the dial faster than you can read them. It takes roughly a BILLION liters to fill a tank. "WTF? Sixty dollars?"
And if a sixty dollar tank of gas isn't bad enough, the clerk pays your change in coins. As far as I can tell, Canadians have a coin fetish. You can't do anything north of the border without somebody handing you freakin' a coin. With pants that weighed roughly a billion kilograms -- or 453.6 million pounds in the United States -- I started handing out those damn things like they were candy. Homeless people, bellhops, coffee attendants... Everyone got a fistful of coins. Finally my wife asked, "What are you doing?" Huh? "You just tipped her three dollars for a two dollar cup of coffee." Huh? "Those are dollar and two-dollar coins." Whhhhaaaaahh? And you thought those Sacagawea things were a pain in the ass...
Sacagawea was a shoshone indian who trudged across the North American continent with Lewis and Clark. The United States killed her people and stuck her image on a one-dollar coin. The Canadian government never systematically herded indigenous peoples to the brink of extintion like its southern neighbor. Consequently, they have a much higher percentage of native peoples. Canadian indians hock cigarettes at rock bottom prices from gaudy shops stocked with trinkets for the dumbest Americans. They are a featured player in Canadian racial jokes.
Every ethnic joke you've ever heard in America is re-told in Canada with an indian as its butt: What do you call an indian on a ten-speed bike?--a
thief. How do you starve an indian?--put his welfare check under his work boots. And on and on. This phenomena is strange to Americans since we've killed most of our indigenous people years ago. Those who remain are just the nice folks who run the casino.
The most disappointing aspect of Canada is its television. Basically, Canadian TV is American TV with a spattering of Canadian shows that bitch about America. It's difficult to begrudge those shows for their antagonistic view of the United States. If my opinion of a country was shaped largely by American television, then I could hardly imagine that my view would be favorable.
Canada needs more home-grown television. An abundance of programs that feature Canadian actors protraying Canadian people in situation comedy won't change Canadian attitudes about the United States, but it will help prevent them from feeling too "uppidy" about themselves. Consider, American perception of its northern neighbor was shaped largely by SCTV. Think about it...
