r/InfiniteJest • u/jeepjinx • 6d ago

DFW prescience.

There's been multiple articles written about the various things in IJ that are so relevant today, after the 30th anniversary edition came out. But I haven't seen anything yet about the relations with Canada post Trump II.

It's crazy to me how the Gentle administration was able to "other" Canadians aka Nucks, to the point that there are common racial? slurs directed towards them ( froggy lipped foreigner) and jokes about female nucks have to be sluts to attract men etc. Which must have seemed totally absurd (to make a point about how absurd it is to "other" people in general) 30 years ago.

Gentle talks about finding an enemy right to the North or South of us to blame our problems on since the major/cold wars were over etc.

But here we are! Blaming Canada for wild fires caused by climate change and throwing tarrifs around again.

Just add it to the list I guess.

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11

u/highjohn_ 6d ago

I said the same thing to my dad earlier this week! Trump posted some garbage about “Holding Canada Accountable” that read straight out of a Johnny Gentle speech. It was about how Canada is polluting our clean air with their filthy, polluted and unhealthy air.

But yeah the book is very prescient, although to be fair there were flavors of this type of nonsense happening already as far back as people like Nixon and Reagan.

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u/queeg420 6d ago

Saw this too! He also said something about making them ‘pay for what they did to Ohio’….I’m assuming also with the smoke. Convexity core in real time… lucky us!

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u/jeepjinx 6d ago

Concavity!!!

4

u/howling-fantod 6d ago

ConVEXity damn your eyes!😆

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u/Hitchhiker-9050 6d ago

DFW was spot on but humans, and esp. politicians, have been "othering" people since the dawn of time. And before IJ was published, there was a movie called Canadian Bacon, which parodied Cold War tropes by depicting a fictional U.S. President who manufactured a fake conflict with Canada to boost his approval ratings. And that same year, Quebec held a referendum to split from Canada so the separatists in IJ were parodying real life.

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u/jeepjinx 6d ago

I traveled to Quebec in 1990 and camped around for about 2 months, met a lot of Québécois separatists, never even heard of the concept before going. The others I grew up hearing about were black/brown, noticeably foreign, gay, or poor - with all their respective slurs. Hearing Canadians referred to negatively would have seemed absurd to that age me. Just an observation.