Carnival of the Canucks, Part 5: Fiiiiive Goooooolden Tooooooques

Yes, I’ve met him, and as a matter of fact, he does glow in the dark. When Gamma Fodder isn’t studying noo-cue-lar physics, he’s hanging around my neck of Accordion City and writing some pretty funny stuff. In one of those “it’s a small world” coincidences, he’s a friend of Rob “King Floyd” MacDougall, with whom I wrote for the humour paper Golden Words at Crazy Go Nuts University. Rob’s Canadian, but he lives somewhere in the Boston area, like this cute girl I know.

(Look, it’s my blog, and I can get all Redhead-sappy if I want to.)

Like Gamma Fodder, Relapsed Catholic is not afraid to handle hot material. We agree to disagree much of the time, especially in areas where immigrants are concerned — I’m an immigrant, and sometimes she’s of the “Ever since my family came to Canada, we’ve had nothing but crap from immigrants!” school. I have to admit that we sometimes agree, and that her Don Cherry-meets-Don Rickles approach to religion, politics and pop culture is fascinating. Agree or disagree, she always makes for an engaging read.

Kathy recently wrote a poem poking fun at Kwanzaa, which has been described as a phony holiday created by a criminal by her and Jewish World Review (Tony Pierce, who’s black and left-leaning, also thinks of Kwanzaa as fake or at least fake-ish).

And then it hit the AOL fan. If freedom-of-speech and racism issues are your cup of political tea, you should take a peek.

My own feeling is that although Kwanzaa’s roots are pretty dubious, but I’m still looking for a non-drooling-right source to corroborate the evidence gathered against it. However, there is a precedent for the meaning of holidays to be supplanted — take Christmas being moved to knock out Saturnalia (and alas, maybe Spendmas knocking out Christmas) — and instilling more of a “Yes, we’re black and we should be proud” spirit, while realizing all the while that what holds us together as humans far outshines the differences. You know, like that little dream of Dr. King’s.

Of course, that may be a long time coming.