L.

By all accounts, it’s just easier to film in & around Vancouver than anywhere south of the border. So if you’re not a co-conspirator, you’re at least an enabler. (grin)

Dave

d

Because of the size of its population, the economics of TV and movie production work for the US and thus allow it to export a lot of its culture through entertainment media. The US networks rarely buy outside programming finding it too foreign. So, we Canadians know more about US politics than they do ours.

As an aside, X Men was shot in Vancouver. Our church had some goofy things in it for a week or two while it was being used as a location for the X Men movies. A Canadian city standing in for the US so the US can export their culture to the world. Hmm.

L.

I hope this discovery is not new to you… the most common subject of American action movies (and sometimes other genres too) is how America single-handedly saves the world from all kinds of disasters. I thought ‘The Day after Tomorrow’ was fresh, in the sense that it depicted, for once, how America screwed us all, and the third world was the place where they escaped to :P

I think nowadays the US IS the center of the (Western) world, and that this was achieved precisely by convincing the rest of the world that it is. You hear it in so many movies, in so many speeches, you read it in so many books, for so many decades… you end up believing it. Especially when, besides culture (in the strict sense of the world) you find their electronics at the supermarket (they are made in China, but nobody cares), and their chain restaurants are cleaner and more efficient than ours.

“The heathens are outbreeding the Christians.”

This has been the case for about a decade now. Europe had very modern population control campaigns. As a result, they stopped having kids. Europe is now a continent of old people. At the same time, they had massive immigration, especially from the north of Africa, because of the hard social conditions there. These people DID reproduce, and in big numbers. Some countries, such as France, are having major cultural clashes within, because Islamic population is growing to almost the same amount as… whatever the French are (I don’t think they’re Catholic anymore). Some other countries, such as Belgium (as far as I know) have started incentive programs for people to have more babies ("if you breed, we’ll pay for your diapers", and things like that).

Maybe is the Catholic residue in me… but I’m glad attempts to implement the same birth control programs in Latin America are not as effective. I don’t want a country full of practical old people.

Mee.-

I suspect “the most pathetic shows on TV” translates readily to “most cheaply obtainable shows for TV.” (Does AFN have paid advertising? I can’t think of much they’d advertise. I imagine your shopping choices are more constrained there.)

Your point about American-centric thinking has been on my mind for a long time. I’m not sure what drives it, unless it’s because Americans don’t think about other countries because they don’t have to. (And when forced into it, they don’t want to.) I’ve tried to teach my kids that there’s much more to the world than what we see, and that not everybody thinks or does things the way we do. But without concrete examples to show them it’s hard to get the point to stick.

I’m regularly reminded how much attention people in other countries pay to our politics. I’ve had people from Ireland and England ask me questions about people and events that I had no clue about until I looked them up. It’s a little bit embarrassing, frankly.

I’ve also been lectured by a Brit about how our method of electing a president separately from the legislature is ridiculous, because if they’re from different parties they’ll never cooperate. My defense at the time was that Britain’s unemployment rate was something like 12%, so “how’s that Prime Minister thing working out for you?”

Dave