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rfmcdonaldOnce, in some compendium of Canadian short stories in English, I came across a short story written by Bharati Mukherhjee about the bombing of Air-India Flight 182. It was a tragic story as one would expect, told in the first person by a woman who lost her husband and her son on the flight, who found absolutely no succor for her anguish from her uncomfortable friends or from a government that cloyingly tries to satiate the families of the dead with money and grief counsellors. Mukherjee, originally from India, once resided in Canada with her husband, short story writer Clark Blaise; she later left for the United States, rejecting what she identified as the nativist tendencies of Canadian multiculturalism for the United States' non-racial citizenship. She cited, as an example of Canadian multiculturalist nativism, the immediate extension of Canada's sympathies by then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to then-Prime Minister of India Rajiv Ghandi, even though the overwhelming majority ofr Flight 182's passengers were Canadian citizens.
Flight 182 has proven, to my satisfactiion, that Canada entered the big leagues of hyperterrorism long before 9/11. Long before the 9/11 hijackers were carousing at strip clubs, Canada hadn its own disaffected members of a respectable immigrant population conspire to commit aviation-related acts of mass murder. Best of all, as the recent failure of the prosecution's weak case demonstrates, the people responsible for the 331 dead have managed to escape from the Canadian justice system just as surely as those directly responsible for 9/11 have avoided arrest by the United States. We Canadians should be proud.
What's next? I can hardly wait.
Flight 182 has proven, to my satisfactiion, that Canada entered the big leagues of hyperterrorism long before 9/11. Long before the 9/11 hijackers were carousing at strip clubs, Canada hadn its own disaffected members of a respectable immigrant population conspire to commit aviation-related acts of mass murder. Best of all, as the recent failure of the prosecution's weak case demonstrates, the people responsible for the 331 dead have managed to escape from the Canadian justice system just as surely as those directly responsible for 9/11 have avoided arrest by the United States. We Canadians should be proud.
What's next? I can hardly wait.
