The Books of My Life: The Vimy Trap

 

Humans, as all social scientists should know by now, need myths and fairy tales to live by. Myths and fairy tales, particularly in their disneyfornicated form, help weak humans, both individually and socially, survive the struggle that is life just as religion has done for centuries. If history is a guide it is clear that most humans need myths and fairy tales, for example, that explain why, or so it is perceived, good things happen to bad people and bad collectivities in real life and vice versa, myths and fairy tales that generally deflect attention from the real factors that cause suffering in life such as class, status, gender, ethnicity, and unequal cultural capital, to note a few examples. They give humans a sense of purpose. They provide humans with meaning for their lives, and meanings to their lives within the collectivities they are part of. They provide the happy or stoic faces humans need to live by in order to survive in a world of chance, pain, tragedy, drama, and comedy.

Collective human myths and fairy tales, of course, are, generally speaking, deeply embedded within and deeply imbibed and imbibe from the universal waters of ethnocentrism. Australians, for example, think they are the bee's knees. Americans think they are the best thing since sliced bread. South Koreans think they are the real middle kingdom. One central form that ethnocentrism takes in modern and postmodern life is nationalist or civil or civic religion. Like myths and fairy tales in general, national myths and fairy tales socialise most humans in modern and postmodern societies and cultures into comic book like emotional and sentimental laden tall tales in which we are superior to them, in which we are innocent and good while they are devious and bad Boris's and Natasha's.They create civic rituals associated with these ethnocentric nationalist faiths, rituals that take place, for example, at monuments to those killed during one of humanity's many and seemingly never ending biggest cock on the block wars. Finally, these nationalist myths and fairy tales have symbolic and iconic hero figures that are akin to those in earlier stone age tales and in contemporary superhero comic books who have been transformed into the saints they never were and never could be in real life because they are human,

In their follow up to their excellent Warrior Nation Ian McKay and Jamie Swift explore, in their The Vimy Trap or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016), one of these nationalist myths and fairy tales of late twentieth century and twenty-first century Anglo-Canadian life, the Vimy myth and fairy tale. McKay and Swift do an excellent job exploring the Vimy myth and fairy tale. They note that the myths and fairy tales associated with Vimy, namely that it created or helped create a Canadian identity (if one erases Quebec entirely, of course) which today dominates much of Anglo-Canadian civil religion has actually been contested in hot and cold culture wars between dominant, counter, and sub cultures since the Great War even beyond French Canadian culture. They show that the Vimy myth and fairy tale is the product of what is essentially a power grabbing advertising campaign by late 20th century Canadian elites with their Canada is a city on a hill public rhetoric in order to promote a variety of things including a common Canadian (translation Anglo-Canadian) identity and the need for Canadian militarism in alliance with that other city on a hill, imperial America. They note the similarities between the publicity and advertising campaigns that turned the limitedly effective Canadian Vimy battle and its close Australian cousin, the dismal failure at Gallipoli, into stirring mythic and fairy tale tales in which Canadians were made Canadian and Australians Australian. Even tragedy and meaningless wars, you see, can be turned into comic book superhuman triumphs in nationalist fairy tale myths. They explore the humans who the national faith turned into inhuman saintly hero icons and symbols such as Currie, the romanticised and sanitised Canadian grunt and villainous others, to wit those dreadful British officers who thought father knew best and the Hun, of nationalist manichean myths and fairy tales. And they explore the attempt of official and semi-official court polemicists--some of them academics--to demonise those on the "wrong side" of manichean myth and fairy tale "history" such as critics of these fairy tales and myths and pacifists, who pointed out again and again the surrealist absurdities and human rights violations association with almost all wars.

I highly recommend The Vimy Trap to anyone interested in cultural history, cultural anthropology, cultural sociology, ethnocentrism, and the human ability, or at least the ability of some powerful humans, to create hybrid fictional and factual discourses to live by. I particularly liked how McKay and Swift drew on Martin's Caedels's ideal types--militarists, crusaders, defencists, pacificists, and pacifists-- to explore the contradictions and complexities of this Canadian (and Western) culture war over war and its associated myths and legends. My only qualm about the book is that I wish McKay and Swift had explored in greater detail the role power and the media--mainstream media, after all, has been and is generally controlled by those embedded in the nationalist passion play--played and play in the construction of the mythic and fairy tale worlds most Anglo-Canadians live by today.