London Mauling

A few days ago the people of London, Ontario got rather upset over an article published on line.  Wait, "upset" doesn't seem like the right word.  What do you call that feeling when, after years of anonymity, someone says something mildly bad about you, and you're not sure if you are glad about the recognition, or angry at the insult?  There probably isn't a word for it, since it's only experienced by introverts and Canadians.

Anyway, the mildly bad thing was an article titled, "10 Problems Only People From London Ontario Will Understand" at the website WhatCulture (a Buzzfeed wannabe.) Of course, as a resident of nearby, similarly-sized Kitchener-Waterloo, I wanted headed straight for the list as soon as I heard about it.

The main thing that strikes me upon reading it is that it’s not exactly a hard-hitting list. You’d think a genuinely critical shot at London would include its notorious east-west class divide. (We in Kitchener-Waterloo at least have the decency to maintain our archaic two-city setup to make our class divides less obvious.) Most of the items in this list apply to all of Southern Ontario, if not all of Canada.  Really, cross-border shopping is inconvenient?  How about "your newspaper makes Fox News sound neutral"?

The only one that applies specifically to London is the shot at its unoriginal name. I totally agree, but I realize that naming your city after a more famous place is one of those things that makes sense to Canadians, but that I’ll never understand. It’s right up there with the monarchy, Don Cherry, and Hedley. You might think that the London name is just a matter of tradition, but here in Kitchener - where we dodged the same bullet by dumping the name “Berlin” during WWI - there’s still a significant part of the population that wants to go back to the Berlin name, despite London’s teachable example.

I was going to write a list of legitimate bad things about London, but I don't have enough venom. One of the entries was going to be that you couldn’t make a list of top ten tourist attractions without padding it out by including White Oaks Mall. But then I realized that to pad my list out to ten entries, I would have to add something about how hard it is to find your way around White Oaks Mall.

But I do have to take issue with the part about the embarrassment of former mayor Joe Fontana.  For one thing, it was hard for anyone in Canada outside of Toronto to be embarrassed of their mayor over that time period.  But my problem is that the article makes it sound like he was a good mayor who made one perplexing mistake. It even says "he was able to get some things done". Actually, if his term is known for anything other than scandal, it will be for U.S. Congress-style division and paralysis in city council.