Self-Hating Canadians Tell UN Culture Czars (Tsars?) To Take Off, Eh?
A while back, Reason's Tim Cavanaugh attacked the UN's Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions like Bill Clinton with a pizza delivery girl, noting that two of the major malefactors in the deal (Canada and France) lap up American pop like so much Labatt's Blue spilled on the bar at 3AM NST.
Now Wendy McElroy, longtime friend of Reason and proprietor of the great ifeminists site--and a Canadian resident herself--turns her back on Maple Leaf protectionism. And she does so with the help of yet another Canuck cultural collaborator, Neil Hrab. Writing in her Fox News column (always worth a look), McElroy notes:
Culture is the accumulated knowledge, experience, beliefs, and customs within a group, which emerges over time and can be passed to others through literature, music and other expression. It cannot be created by government. You can't vote culture into being; you can't pass a law to turn a movie into a beloved classic. Culture emerges spontaneously and defies political control.
The freer a society, the more vigorous and diverse its culture, and vice versa.
Hrab asked an intriguing question in his commentary [at Tech Central Station]. "Thanks to the spread of personal electronic devices and the rise of sites where you can download content from the Internet, will this 'right' to regulate mean anything? Can governments seriously influence the viewing/reading/listening habits of citizens anymore?"
Whole McElroy col here.
The short answer to Hrab's query, btw, is yes: governments still can influence the cultural habits of their citizens. It's always a losing battle in the long run and--this is the key point--they can do it less efficiently than ever before.
For two signature Reason takes on the flow of culture across even the most iron of curtains, check out In Praise of Vulgarity (which ends with a glorious shout-out to "Hobbit re-enactors in Kazakhstan" and pachinko-playing dissidents in Cambodia) and "Bert and the Infidels" (which answers the question of how Ernie's longtime companion ended up standing with Osama Bin Laden in the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh)
Requiem for former Molson pitchman "Joe," who moved to the US, here.
