Holiday Hijinks
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
August 17, 2005
Labour Day's only a couple of weeks away, so like most redblooded Canadians you're probably thinking about how not to enjoy the rest of the summer.
Canadians, of the anglophone variety at least, dislike leisure. Give them a chance at leisure, they'll turn it into work. As another article by our distinguished staff semiologist observes, for example, they've transformed the harmless fun of bingo into a simulacrum of assembly line work. A British bingo parlour is full of people enjoying themselves, a Canadian one of people stamping cards like robots.
Another typical Canadian way of enjoying oneself is to go to the cottage. In central Ontario that means loading the car and plunging into freeway traffic that makes rush hour in Toronto look like midnight in Iqaluit, then two days later doing the same thing. Yes, you get to rest and recreate once you're at the cottage, but it wouldn't be right to do that without doing some taxing work before and after.
Over the past twenty-five years Canadians also seem to have become devotees of the Golden Mean. Everybody's way responsible. Cities that were once full of pubs and nightclubs are now full of coffee shops and newsstands.
According to Aristotle, there is a defective way of doing anything, an excessive way of doing the same thing, and a way halfway between those which is the effective way to do the thing – the Golden Mean.
For example, Aristotle thought cowardice was defective, foolhardiness excessive, and courage the Golden Mean. Miserliness was defective, being a spendthrift excessive, and liberality the Golden Mean.
Wait a minute. The miser gets to keep his money and therefore his independence, the spendthrift gets to enjoy a whole lot of stuff (at least for a while), while the moderate spender gets to enjoy not liberality but being a servant of the bank. The coward gets to keep his life, the foolhardy get lots of thrills (at least for a while), and the courageous get to be cannon fodder..
Teetotallers save money and reduce the number of incidents they have to be embarrassed about by about eighty or ninety per cent. Drunks get to enjoy being drunk. Moderate drinkers get to be killjoys and to be mistaken in believing that their moderate consumption of alcohol is improving their health.
And if hilarity and terror are the defective and excessive extremes, then the Golden Mean is boredom. And antidepressants.
This is what happens when you grow up with penicillin. You get the idea that you can live forever. Before penicillin, if you scratched yourself you could die. The first person on whom penicillin was tested had scratched himself on a rosebush. When the small quantity of penicillin available ran out he died. Cancer was a death sentence, polio cropped up unexpectedly all over the place.
If you're going to take advantage of this wonderful new opportunity to live forever you have to avoid those nasty extremes, or so we think. All things in moderation.
And if we can't do things in moderation, at least balance them out. If you enjoy the cottage, make getting to it as hellish as possible.
I'm not recommending that one abandon one's life of moderation and temperance completely and devote oneself to either irresponsibility or libertinism. But, like, you could try one or the other occasionally. Better yet, you could consider the possibility that if your life is boring or frustrating maybe there are ways to make it less boring or frustrating, even if they're not approved by Dr. Phil or Oprah or all those corporate products who write the books in the self-improvement section.
You have two-and-a-half weeks.
Holiday Hijinks © John FitzGerald, 2005
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