http://www.thestar.com/News/article/251351
McGuinty diminishes sentiment by inflating it into slogan
Aug 30, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
It is intriguing that there is a debate over Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's decision to rename part of Highway 401 the Highway of Heroes. Usually, Canadians shrug off such things. There was little controversy in 1965, the last time the 401 was renamed. (Then it was designated the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway to honour two Fathers of Confederation.)
Nor was there widespread angst when Ottawa decided to attach the name of former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson to Toronto's Malton airport. To most drivers, the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway remains the 401. To most air travellers, Toronto's international airport is still Toronto airport.
But the Highway of Heroes decision has struck a nerve. A week after Transportation Minister Donna Cansfield announced the name change, letters to the editor blasting the decision were still appearing in the Star.
Some of this has to do with the widespread sentiment against the Afghan war. Cansfield said the aim of the name change is simply to honour Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, not the war itself. But given that the Ontario announcement was made just as Ottawa launched its own public relations push to promote the war, her timing did strike some as curious.
I suspect, however, that there is a deeper reason for the unease. A good many Canadians, no matter what they think about the Afghan conflict, are instinctively suspicious of jingoism.
Chief of defence staff Gen. Rick Hillier found this out two years ago when he called Canada's Taliban enemies in Afghanistan "scumbags." There's little love lost on the Taliban here in Canada. But "scumbag" was deemed over the top. Critics lambasted Hillier's language as too American, by which they meant too black and white.
In the U.S., President George W. Bush can get away with calling his opponents "the worst of the worst." But in Canada, there seems to be a sneaking suspicion that matters are not always that simple.
In that sense, the Highway of Heroes moniker awakens the same reaction. It seems too extreme, too ideological – too American.
To me, however, McGuinty's decision conjures up not so much the U.S. as the old Soviet Union, with its Hero of Labour medals for workers who exceeded their production quotas.
With their extravagant terminology, the Soviets diminished language. But they also took real human activities (people usually like to do a good job) and, by turning them into propaganda slogans, diminished these, too.
So, too, with the Highway of Heroes. McGuinty has latched onto something real – the spontaneous vigils along Highway 401 to honour dead soldiers being transported from Trenton to Toronto. But by inflating this honest sentiment into a slogan, he has diminished it.
Because the point of the honouring is not that the dead were all heroes. Many didn't have a chance to do anything heroic. It is that we sent them to their deaths.
Journalists and politicians use the word "hero" lightly. But most soldiers will tell you that death in war is rarely heroic and that those who set out to be heroes in battle often end up endangering not just themselves but their comrades.
They will also tell you that there is nothing romantic about being killed by a roadside bomb.
To families and friends, those killed in Afghanistan will probably always be heroes. But that is the nature of families and friends.
If the dead were to miraculously reappear, they would probably blanch with embarrassment. They would say they were just doing their jobs.
They would probably also call the highway between Trenton and Toronto the 401.
