Quote, unquote: On Canadian culture
To have a healthy culture you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don’t have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
-- Writer Douglas Coupland, responding to a question in the New York Times magazine. (Aside: Coupland got a leg up early in his career by writing for Vancouver magazine.)
Labels: quote
posted by D. B. Scott at
12:29 pm
7 Comments:
Is he actually saying that countries without stable healthcare, arts and sports funding have unhealthy cultures? That third-world countries have unhealthy cultures? The arrogance is as stark as a parking lot.
Never mind the third world - you only have to take a peek into European history to see how ridiculously untrue that it. Tsarist Russia comes to mind just as a start.
A lot of people would actually argue that a little bit of hardship can be healthy for cultural development (gives people something to create art about).
The quote does seem troubling because we're sort of lacking a context here but...I think what he was getting at was that a culture can't be healthy without government funding. Certainly the bulk of our lib-left Canadian magazine types would agree (as does our dear blogger here...call it affirmation via quotation.) But, yes, why this sort of arrogance and historical ignorance goes largely unchallenged is quite amazing. But if Coupland Himself said it, it must be valuable and insightful. I mean, he wrote for Vancouver Magazine.
You're free to go to the source and see the context; that's why the link is embedded in the headline and the body of the post.
great quote! the author's last name is coupland, though :)
Oops. Managed to spell it right 50% of the time. Now corrected. Thanks.
I read the article. It's a random pronouncement without any context. It's still arrogant, shrill and smug.
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