The Daily Meme: Mapo

     Nigga, queer and perv are examples of reclaimed slurs:  words considered to be traditionally offensive that have been adopted as empowering sobriquets.  I get very offended by the idea of getting offended by language.  The morality of poetry is absurdly subjective, and besides, the sticks and stones are what are truly disabling.

     "Mapo" has never been a common insult for Uncle Sam's generally more sensible neighbor to the North.  I offer this vulgarization of Canada's national arboreal emblem as a symbol of pride before it ever gets adopted as an insult.  

     Canada is more likely to emerge as a budding world superpower in this millennium than other usual suspects.  China, Russia and India are all potemkin villages in their own ways, intra-cultural powder kegs barely tamped and stilled by the eventually toxic faux-asbestos of their national and local authority structures.  Quebecois to the contrary, Canada's national identity is, overall, genuine and logical and its philosophical and economic self-sufficiency are at least as apocalypse-friendly as any more blustery hegemon's.  They have land, fuel and expanding waterways which will only benefit them in case of severe global warming.  Most importantly, they tend to enjoy making sense.  Magical thinking is not a national pandemic there.

     Mapo Power could be our most effective progressive model in the third millennium after Golgotha.  Wear it on a T-shirt before a future President Tancredo or a Homeland Security chief Joe the Plumber shuts down the Ambassador Bridge in a fit of nativist hubris.