You have to be Canadian to understand...

Federal Heritage Minister James Moore said Sunday that "there should have been more French" during the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony Friday.

"I thought the opening ceremonies were brilliant, beautiful, spectacular on television — but there should have been more French, period, full stop," he told CBC News.

Now the federal government is pushing the organizers to ensure there will be more French during the closing ceremony, he said.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest had complained about the lack of French, saying the opening failed to respect and reflect Canada's francophone community.

Moore agreed.

"We were led to believe there would be more," he said.

He said there should have been "more content" on the creative side and mentioned the official speeches as lacking enough French.

As for the closing ceremony, "we're continuing to make it known" that the federal government expects more French, Moore said.

"We were disappointed with the opening ceremonies and we hope that the closing ceremonies will have a better reflection" of Canada's two languages.

Francophones, as French-speaking Canadians are referred to in Canada, simply refuse to see their language go into the abyss of irrelevant cultural artifacts, or do they? You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone under 50, whose maternal language was French, that doesn't speak passable to excellent English. Moreover, if we are being honest, there French really isn't all that good in the first place. Most Canadian Francophones lack a native French vocabulary for even the most basic technical subjects. English proper nouns riddle the language even as the Quebec government has impotently forbidden their use and has institutionalized the business of finding true French equivalents (which as far as I can tell, no one uses...).

In the final analysis, there is really nothing that can be done--French is destined to be a boutique language, like Dutch or Finnish--beloved and spoken by the natives, but irrelevant on the world stage.

When seen from the perspective, I find the paranoia about Spanish here in the American Southwest more than a little ridiculous. Spanish isn't going to drive English from the public sphere anytime soon, and even if it somehow managed to accomplish that astonishing feat, what would be the problem? We'll blog in Spanish and continue our lives as if nothing had happened.

So if you're in Vancouver, enjoying the Olympics--throw the francophones a bone and utter the following once a day--J'ai envie d'un Pepsi et May West, est-ce qu'il y a un depanneur dans le coin? You'll be doing your part to preserve French-Canadian culture.

Je vous remercie...

MARK GRUMPs:

Less than 1/6th of Canadians self-identify as ethnically French, but they have successfully conducted a parasitic racket against the rest of the country for several decades with the connivance of the political and media classes. The same parasitism is used by Francophones in Belgium and the EU, but the scale of Quebec's achievement is most impressive. I tend to agree with De Gaulle, 'Vive le Québec libre!', that is let Quebec secede. Of course it doesn't because that would end the lucrative racket as well as all the bullshit of involuntary bi-lingualism.

On the point about Spanish, sure let Spanish be freely used everywhere in America (and Urdu in London) except where funded by taxes, ie all government. If the ATM forces me to press a button to transact in English, that's fine as long as I have a choice to change to a bank that wants my business more. Let there be a free market for language.

In fact English is the language of freedom. It's the most expressive, most unruly, most adaptable, most omnivorous, most mongrel of languages with the untouchable advantage of Shakespeare. For the most part we think and dream the thoughts to which our languages pre-dispose us and English itself may be why we are still free (sort of). The threat isn't Spanish or Mandarin but Newspeak and the corruption of language and thought by terms such as 'diversity' or 'abuse' or 'appropriate' or 'tolerance' or 'hatespeech'. Therapyspeak is one gateway drug for Newspeak, but there are plenty. The weapons of freedom in this crucial war are English and the Internet. Keep English sharp and the Internet unruly.

A link to "Politics and the English Language" is called for.

If you aren't Canadian, you can't even begin to imagine what the Vancouver Winter Games mean to the country. A nation not yet 150 years old, with less than forty as something other than a relic of the British empire, Canada has struggled hard to create a sense of nationality among its citizens. A tough job all by itself, but complicated by the devil of two national languages, strong regional cultures and the most powerful nation in history lying just across its southern border.

The Canadian strategy has been to promote national institutions (hockey, beer) and create some from whole cloth (the CBC, uniform port-of-entry design and 'corporate' signage), and vigorously resist American imperialism by rejecting notions like 'free speech', property rights and being able to choose your own doctor.

The majority of this either isn't working, or working in a frighteningly 'gulag' kind of way. The hockey and beer is a real winner though. Consensus from sea-to-sea.

Its easy to see why Canadians had big expectations of the Olympics. If you not Canadian, the name Nancy Greene won't mean a thing to you. If you are, its a no-brainer. In Canada, Nancy is an institution, currently serving as a Senator in the Canadian version of the House of Lords. What's the big deal about Nancy Greene?

She won gold and silver medals at the 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble. Canadians have been basking in that glory for 40 years! No doubt that seems odd to Americans who forget about their Olympic athletes within weeks of the closing ceremony, and have to be reminded every four years of who they are. OK--we are starting to see some exceptions--Apolo Ohno and Shaun White seemed to have crossed over into legitimate American celebrity status.

So you might be able to understand how deeply embarrassing all the screw-ups at the Vancouver games have been.

Seven years to prepare, so much on the line for Canada as a nation, an open check book and the Winter Olympics looks like Microsoft's Vista operating system. Its not that they didn't want to succeed, its just a damn tough job to bring off such a complex enterprise.

Maybe now you can get a glimmer about why Mitt Romney is so overwhelming popular in the Intermountain West. Its not the Mormon thing, its the Olympic thing.

Romney came into a demoralizing and nearly impossible situation. Olympic sponsors were jumping ship on a daily basis as SLOC organizers lawyered up to defend against charges of bribery. He had about two years to pull it all together or Salt Lake City, which had been lobbying for the games for over thirty years, would join Denver on the permanent blacklist of cities that would never, ever get the Winter Olympics.

The result was, as IOC officials described it, the smoothest Olympics ever held, and Vancouver is unfortunately being compared to it rather unfavorably. Sadly perhaps, the comparison is going to be used to make a case for a Salt Lake City 2022 Winter Olympics.

Did I say that Romney turned over a check for $100,000,000.00 when the SLC 2002 Olympics were over and done with? Yeah--the guy made a proft.

Its a big mess over there in Washington D.C., and Romney has kind of a good resume when it comes to cleaning up big messes. Sarah Palin is a doll, and you can vote for her if you want to, but I think its pretty clear whose skill set we really need.

Don't worry about the Canadians--if they win Hockey gold, it will all be good...

2 years ago I wrote a post about the official logo for the 2012 London Olympics - "the horror, the horror". Now the official Olympic mascots have been unveiled and I can't improve on Stephen Bayley's verdict:

What is it about these Games which seems to drive the organisers into the embrace of this kind of patronising, cretinous infantilism? Why can’t we have something that makes us sing with pride, instead of these appalling computerised Smurfs for the iPhone generation?