And the White House Burned Burned Burned (But the Americans Won't Admit It)

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

   -- Michael Scott, The Office

Canada is celebrating the bicentennial of the War of 1812 this year. All year.  In 1812, the United States declared war on Britain for various stated reasons, none of which included conquering Canada.  Then they promptly tried to conquer Canada (or what was then known as Upper and Lower Canada, to be specific).  The British forces, allied Indian tribes and Canadian militia repelled several attacks by the US. Ten American armies invaded Canada.  Ten armies were sent home.

Read all about it on Wikipedia.  The article itself insists that the war was a tie or that all sides (except the Indians) won. It’s quite a little rah-rah piece if you’re an American, waxing poetic about great feats of the nascent American navy against those nasty British.  The idea that the US would invade Canada for reasons as base as US expansionism is dismissed.  Americans?  Expand?  Fie!  The Americans had no interest in Canada at all, and were quite surprised to find themselves there!  Sure Thomas Jefferson said that conquerig Canada was a mere matter of marching--but he was talking about a game of Risk.  And I'm sure that if one of the reasons the US declared war was to snatch Canada while Britain was busy with Napolean, then the politicians at the time would have said so.

The Talk page that accompanies every Wikipedia article forbids any more discussion about who won the war.  Not that that stops anyone; it's practically the only topic of conversation, and even when not being discussed directly is not far below the surface influencing everything.  Mostly filled with outraged blustering Canadians and gormless Americans shocked--shocked--that anyone would accuse them of bias.

One outraged commentator insists that Wikipedia “is not a popularity contest.”  Really?  I beg to differ.  That is exactly what Wikipedia is.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the first step to recovery is acceptance. Acceptance that, yes,  Wikipedia is a popularity contest.  Anyone (in principle) can change an article, so it stands to reason that, given equal zeal, the side with the greater numbers will eventually see the article they want to see. 

And just about every wiki commentator swears up and down that he is not biased, and is just taking time out of his busy day as a Perfectly Objective Observer to correct bias he sees.  Hogswash and Codswallop!  We’re all biased.  I’m biased.  Do you think, if I were a Nepalese Buddhist monk, I’d be cruising the “Talk” page of the War of 1812 Wikipedia entry?  I wouldn't be getting snippy right now if my (biased) Canadian nationalist sensibilities were not offended. The very fact that I am reading the piece at all means that I have some interest in the subject.  


Yes, we’re all biased.  But that's not the problem. The problem is when we refuse to admit as much.

Wikipedia is a great place to learn about a Taylor series expansion or what a pancreas does.  But head on over to controversial social, cultural or political topics and there's a roiling thunderstorm underneath that clean Wikipedia front, a subterranean world populated by folks with sensitivities as delicate as a desert orchid, and the zeal of a Jehovah Witness on speed.

And so, behind the scenes a the War of 1812 page, the arguments go on and on and on and on.  And this is some relatively obscure war from 200 years ago.  You should see the pages regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Those articles are clenched up tighter than Rick Santorum’s buttcheeks at a Gay Parade, and it’s a real bunfight over in  the Talk pages.

But you have to remember that this is the Era of the Internet; we live in a post-objective world and Rule 1 in the Post-Objective World is:

Not  a bad definition really.  I don’t think philosophers have managed all that much better as far as a workable definition of truth goes.  After all, we say that a  psychotic is suffering “delusions” based solely on the fact that he is experiencing a reality that is not shared by the consensus.  Conversely, if nine out of ten people tell you that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings, then the truth is that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings. And the War of 1812 was a tie.

I've submitted an edit to the War of 1812 page (it, like most popular Wikipedia pages is locked, and you have to submit to some anonymous person somewhere to make a change) mentioning the results of a recent poll (where Canadians rate victory in the War of 1812 second only to universal health care as defining their national identity), and also pointing out that Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie released a popular song in Canada called "The White House Burned (The War of 1812)" that pokes fun at Amercian sensitivity on the outcome of the war.  We'll fly that one up the flagpole and see who salutes, so to speak.

I’ll let you know how it goes:

Here’s the refrain the song:

And the white house burned, burned, burned.

But the Americans won't admit it,

It burned, burned, burned.

While the president ran and cried,

It burned, burned, burned.

And things were very historical,

And the Americans ran and cried like a bunch of little babies (Wah-Wah-Wah)

In the war of 1812.

Anyways just in case you thought Wikipedia was bad, check out Cracked.com Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model  just for lulz.


Edit:  For clarification, I'm not suggesting that Canadians (or Upper Canada militia) burned Washington.  My understanding is that the British Navy burned Washington, and there were probably as many Upper Canada militiamen involved as there were impressed American seamen, i.e. not many.  I'm sure Three Dead Trolls knows this too.

How the Baby Boomers Ruined Everything for Gen X (But I'm Not Bitter)

As a young up-and-comer in the federal government in about '96, I was invited to a talk for generally more senior managers by Linda Duxbury.  Duxbury is an academic from Carleton who has made quite a name for herself in academic circles speaking about demographic changes in the workforce and such.  She's got the whole "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" thing happening and is quite an engaging speaker, if not particularly edifying.

In this particular talk, she would say that the pre-Baby Boomer generation--I forget what pet name she had for them--were set in their ways, and wanted everything to stay the same, because in their generation you were a company man.  The Baby Boomers--like Duxbury herself--were fun, inquisitive, interesting.

Then she moved on to Gen X--those she defined as born after 1964.  We  really fare too well in her analysis. I believe "bitter" was the adjective used.  She asked at one point "So what does Generation X want?"  It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, and she was just about to launch into her prepared answer when I piped up, "Not to be called bitter?"  I was one of only two or three Gen Xers in the room, the rest being Baby Boomers.  Duxbury jumped on the opportunity to portray my "outburst" as evidence that the Gen Xers are, indeed, bitter.  She had the perfect little argument really.  Any evidence against her argument was evidence for her argument.  It's like:

"You're in denial"

"No, I'm not"

"See!"

I still don't readily apply the word "bitter" to myself, but I would go so far as to say "rueful."  It's not that the Baby Boomers are bad, it's just that, as the demographic majority in a democracy, they’ve managed to fashion society to their liking through the decades. It's a tyranny of the majority, plain and simple.  You can't get mad at a mathematical reality.

Think of it. When the Boomers were kids, they had the 50s, which was all about family values.  In the early 60s you had bubblegum pop which ripened into the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll of the late 60s. The Boomers were young adults and in the exploratory stage they had an explosion of art the likes of which we have not seen since, they had a commitment to ideologies of peace and love.  And they had an insatiable curiosity that put a man on the moon (allegedly!).  The 80s turned into the "Me Decade" as Boomers, in their 30s now, put away childish things and focused on accumulation.  

With the advent of the third millennium, mortality hit the Boomers like a meringue pie in the face.  Change was now to be feared--thus this new wave of social conservatism.  Life was dangerous--thus the advent of mandatory safety and the nanny state.  And death was the new enemy--thus the explosion of life-extension and youth-preservation medicine.  The War on Cancer is, I think, a proxy War on Aging and Death.  (Especially if you research carcinogenesis and its similarities to the aging process and cell senescence.)

I was reminded of this when Newt Gingrich floated (no pun intended) the idea of a moon base, and was unanimously laughed off the stage.  No one laughed when Kennedy wanted to put a man on the moon.  Back then science was revered and the young, ideological Boomers were ready for any challenge.  But to present such an idea "in today's economy" was ludicrous, said the pundits. The cost of a moon base is estimated according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in 2007 would be about $35 billion, and about 7.5 gigabucks a year to keep it going.

But medical research funding in the US, according to this study is estimated at about $90 billion in 2008 (4.5% of total health care costs) in the US.  A good chunk of this was in research diseases that are more common in the last trimester of life (cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers). Add to that (let's be perfectly bloodless about this) the fact that life extension applies primarily to retired people who are no longer working and often drawing upon as opposed to contributing to the social safety nets, and your economic cost increases.  And add to that the fact that Old Age Security / Social Security are now openly admitted as being essentially pyramid schemes that will see the Boomers through to their dotage and then collapse, and the economics of life extension spending takes another hit.

So it's nothing to do with "economic reality" and everything to with "biological reality."  The naïve promise of the stars has been replaced by the biological imperative to stay alive, and is the new priority because of course, of the Boomer's majority demographic.

So no, I'm not bitter.  I just think we need to take all the Boomers, mulch them up, and shoot them into the atmosphere to stop global warming.