Rudyard Griffiths's Dominion Institute has another of those polls out documenting Canadians' ignorance of Canadian history. This time it's the amazing number of Canadians who think of Douglas MacArthur as a Canadian war hero. "Well, he's called Doug, isn't he?" people must have been saying. "Doug sounds kinda Canadian."
I'm a fan of Rudyard and the Dominion Institute's brilliant work, but I have the feeling that if their pollsters asked Canadians what month the October Crisis happened in, half of them would say, "I don't know, we don't get enough Canadian history in our schools." It's programmed, it's what we're supposed to say. I'm always impressed by how many Canadians have a pretty savvy appreciation of what matters to them about history, no matter how they might do on the factcheck test.
Go to Dominion Institute for its Memory Project, a remarkable collection of testimonies to war and those who had to fight them. The Institute is also running an online poll promoting a state funeral for the last World War I veteran when he dies. It's a chancy thing... hold the funeral and beyond a doubt one more surviving vet will be discovered, and then one more. But the idea has merit.
Find the poll and all the Dominion Institute's Remembrance Day material at www.dominion.ca.
And wear the poppy. It ain't to support the war. It ain't to support some veterans' organizations. It's to remember the dead.
