I am quite certain that in my 22+ years as a resident of Ontario, I did read a Macleans magazine or two. I say I’m pretty sure I’ve read Macleans because you spend a lot of time queuing up for free health care in Canada. Like bread or meat in the former Soviet Union. And for similar reasons.
In most doctors’ offices you had scads of time to read those 6 month old magazines that are a feature of North American health care. Macleans must have been among them, and reading a Macleans would be preferable to the idle thoughts you might otherwise entertain during the 2 hour wait preceding your vasectomy.
Anyway, maybe a link to Mark Steyn’s book review, in Macleans, of American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States by Canadian Michael Adams has not appeared in any of the Canadian blogs I visit because “everybody” reads Macleans these days, so there’s no point in a post.
Well, few Americans have probably ever heard of Macleans, and that would seem to be one of Steyn’s points.
Here’s an excerpt, but check the link above for all for the best bits.
…Americans at least come by their ignorance of Canada without effort. Michael Adams has analyzed reams of data, cited thousands of examples, and the cumulative effect is only marginally less dotty than a discussion of Judaism by an Islamic scholar. As it happens, I agree with one of his larger points — that the red state/blue state divide is much exaggerated — though for different reasons. Democrats may think they’re Europhiles, but only in the same sense that John Kerry thinks he’s fluently francophone. Outside the godless coastal redoubts and college towns, few blue-staters would willingly join the Continentals in a moribund economy on the brink of a demographic death spiral. In the end, the blues are closer to the red states than they are to anywhere else on the planet.