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Hello George.,

  Is it the truth ... Almost what can be said for Scotland
who's only misfortune is having that neighbour to the south.

 -=> Quoting George Pope to All <=-

 GP> This is a good read - funny how it took someone in
 GP> England to put it into words...

 GP> Sunday Telegraph Article
 GP> From today's UK wires: Salute to a brave and modest
 GP> nation
 GP> Kevin Myers, The Sunday Telegraph

 GP> LONDON - Until the deaths last week of four Canadian
 GP> soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in
 GP> Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home
 GP> country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed
 GP> in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its
 GP> dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget
 GP> its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly
 GP> everything Canada ever does.

 GP> It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to
 GP> the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete
 GP> strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well
 GP> and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower
 GP> that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone
 GP> to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she
 GP> risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and
 GP> suffers serious injuries.But when the hall is repaired
 GP> and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower
 GP> still, while those she once helped glamorously
 GP> cavortacross the floor, blithely neglecting her yet
 GP> again.



 GP> That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North
 GP> American continent with the United States, and for being
 GP> a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For
 GP> much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two
 GP> different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old
 GP> world, yet had an address in the new one, and that
 GP> divided identity ensured that it never fully got the
 GP> gratitude it deserved.



 GP> Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of
 GP> freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any
 GP> democracy. Almost 10%of Canada's entire population of
 GP> seven million people served in the armed forces during
 GP> the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. Thegreat
 GP> Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian
 GP> troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire
 GP> British order of battle.



 GP> Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by
 GP> downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory
 GP> being absorbed into the popular Memory as somehow or
 GP> other the work of the "British." The Second World War
 GP> provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a
 GP> half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of
 GP> the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120
 GP> Canadian warships participated in theNormandy landings,
 GP> during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-
 GP> Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest
 GP> navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.

 GP> The world thanked Canada with the same sublime
 GP> indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian
 GP> participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if
 GP> it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a
 GP> campaign in which the United States had clearly not
 GP> participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of ourse,
 GP> Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a
 GP> separate Canadian identity.

 GP> So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers
 GP> arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality - unless,
 GP> that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter
 GP> Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William
 GP> Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek,
 GP> Art Linkletter and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular
 GP> perception become American, and Christopher Plummer,
 GP> British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous,
 GP> a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret
 GP> Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or
 GP> Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to
 GP> find any takers.

 GP> Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to

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