Carey Price therefore said that he knew what Poly was (contrary to what the Canadian had implied). Regardless, I read hundreds of comments on social media from fans who were ready to excuse him, on the pretext that the events at Polytechnique had taken place when the goalkeeper was 2 years old. That, basically, what happened before we were born doesn’t count.
Friday, on TV, the director Xavier Dolan, 33, discouraged and perplexed, spoke of his young collaborators in the cultural community who arrogantly ignored who the actress Julie Le Breton was. “It does not concern our generation, this actress”… Two stories, two cases of “after me the deluge”, or rather: “before me, the tidal wave”. What does this impasse tell us about the past and about the collective transmission that is currently being played out?
This attitude is not the majority, fortunately, but we see it, we hear it, it is gaining ground. Not always with the aplomb that I have just mentioned, but it ranges from the comfortable ignorance of “we weren’t even born”, to the sustained annoyance in the face of the past: “It’s old business, tire us not with that”.
It’s about transmission. There has always been a gap, a natural distrust, even sometimes ruptures between the generations, but the one that our time knows is unprecedented.
With the advent of globalized culture and the intermediary of digital platforms, the issue is of a different order. Local cultures, national heritages are no longer matched by global cultural empires. The transition to new generations becomes very complicated. There really is a BEFORE and an AFTER.
It’s about history. The account of what preceded us now has bad press. The story is colonial, patriarchal. We defy it, we avoid it like the plague. No, history is not neutral, it is the vision of the victors, it is hard, but you still have to accept that it exists in order to qualify it, broaden its spectrum, move forward with arguments, not repeat mistakes.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, PRESS ARCHIVES
The Saint-Gérard-Majella church, shortly before its demolition in 2015
It’s about heritage, which is falling apart, burning or being demolished before our weary eyes. We feel a passing sadness, but afterwards, well… It’s expensive to maintain, and after all, who does it speak to, old stones? What difference does one less convent make, a Charlevoix barn that is silently collapsing, a 19th century housee century shaved? Built heritage is appreciated when it is flexible and malleable. Thus, the shoe box Montrealers make such pretty architect-designed houses!
This nonchalant break with the past also leads to ageism. Laziness or ideology? Ageism is spreading, sneakily, in society.
It’s being wary of aging people, it’s the detestable argument of the OK Boomer, which basically says: “Shut up, go to bed, we don’t give a damn about your opinion and your baggage of knowledge. “Not long ago, just a few generations, the link with the elderly was natural, the transmission worked. What happened to cause walls to rise? Those who ignore the old are not born by spontaneous generation… This rupture ultimately leads to aberrations such as mistreatment in general indifference, to the CHSLD crisis during the pandemic, and to the generally accepted idea in Quebec that It is advisable to park in ghettos outside society when you reach retirement.
There is something paradoxical in this open rejection of the past and of what was before us. At the moment, the zeitgeist is for recycling and vintage, in the fashion of more and more recent times. An acceptable past is both decorative and ideological. It is used to reinforce our tastes and our positions, it is a malleable material. We choose the presentable aesthetic and the acceptable past.
What leads us to this idea that the past, history are cumbersome, that the story begins with us and our generation? That we are without roots, nomads of history in weightlessness delivered from the job of transmission? Towards the planned obsolescence of generations, always faster, more replaceable because without a strong collective memory, and therefore malleable. Towards a tyrannical presentism.
The break with the meaning of history, with memory does not benefit us, either individually or collectively. It is a chimera to believe that we have no roots, hyper nomads foraging in a great globalized whole and without ties or past. I don’t know where the solutions will come from, but I’m counting more on Xavier Dolan, who, lucid, sees the problem, than on the Canadian…