After pulling out a collection of tumbleweeds, dust and garbage...

I found my old blog.

I feel like someone sleazy and contemptible has just handed me their business card.

I feel my response should be to give their business card a serious once over and then begin picking my teeth with it.

I'm not sure if anyone is aware, but Canadians are arrogant.

In politics, we seem to declare ourselves as morally superior because of our foreign policy and the fact that it doesn't antagonize half the world in the same way we view Americans as antagonistic. Despite this, almost half of the children in immigrant families live in poverty. Shocking revelations have been made about the ability of immigrant families to get ahead and escape impoverished conditions. Conditions which are steadily getting worse. And in the face of our inability to help the newest members of our society get ahead, we have declared that we will begin welcoming almost 300,000 new Canadians every year starting very soon.

France had this kind of complacency regarding its immigration 20 years ago. They felt themselves a superior environment for people to become French and live in the glorious egalitarian paradise they had created. If you squint you can see this paradise lit by the flames of some trashed Peugots and a Citroen. Twenty years from now, you will read over the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the light of a flaming Chrysler.

For what we keep our fingers out of in the international scene, we make up for by fucking up in our own backyard. France has long been used as a model for Canada. It is usually the European nation we are most compared to. France's development is often seen as slightly ahead of our own. Ironic, since the French model has proven itself to have more internal problems than the French would like to admit. As is with us. It wasn't so long ago that a string of petty corruptions led French politics down a path dominated by a few like-minded politicians to the point of deep level organized crime and murder.

Have you heard of the sponsorship scandal?

But what do I know? We may not be rolling down the grease coated hill towards the failures of the French. At least we can hold ourselves above the Americans.

Can we really? Are we so far off? We may not consider ourselves as the walk in pilferers of natural resources and treasures, but we sure have a way of stealing a nation's development from them. A man practising as a doctor in Nigeria is seduced by the ailing Canadian health care system where he can have the skill level of of a Western trained doctor in very little time, with far more pay and better living conditions.

Is it any better to deprive a poor nation of its doctors than its national resources? A nation who cannot afford care and treatment for all manner of illnesses, including great human-cost epidemics such as AIDS, malaria, leprosy?

Make no mistake about it. We have done this. The "haves" always conquer the "have-nots". To keep our healthy bourgeois lifestyle healthy, we steal the chance for such conditions overseas, by taking the very people who could provide it to their nation.

Mr. American, we are not so different you and I. And Mr. American, my sins are far greater. Along with my greed, I live blinded by arrogant pride.

The main reason I changed the name of my blog to Lingua Franca has been my growing fascination with languages and how they affect our perception and how we have ultimate control in their creation, application and destruction. Sometimes it is useful to come up with a language for what we fail to acknowledge. Sometimes it is even better to describe an existing condition in your own language, so that people more fully understand it.

I have chosen to write about arrogance in Canadian English so you can understand it. I have used the invented language of Anti-Americanism to describe someone other than Americans.

I make no excuses for who I am, I probably wouldn't learn anything that way. Least of all should I accuse someone else of my own crimes.

And I'm not being negative. I merely hold no value for any "essence" of North American experience.

Existence precedes essence, and I precede definition.

It is good to be back.