Ivory Tower at Its Most Irrelevant

My favorite icebreaker (and I hate all icebreakers, but this one is my favorite) is to have each person answer the question "next to what word or phrase in the dictionary would we find your picture?" (I guess the assumption that there is something exceptional about everyone that would make them the paradigmatic example of a dictionary entry might be viewed as some by misguided, but I like it.)

Tonight (and for these things I need a camera phone) I saw the following headline on a number of bulletin boards at Hebrew U.:

Is Canadian Literature Post-national?

The question, of course, is the title of what promises to be an inane academic lecture, and this headline belongs next to the dictionary entry for "ivory tower irrelevancy."

I mean no offense to my Canadian friends (Dr. Dre, DMG, Uncle Mordy, and the legends of the late '90s צוות אגם at CRW [and Dana Mahone]), but the question either assumes (as most Americans have been claiming for years) that Canada has no national identity of its own (and, therefore, can have a national post-national literature) or that the identity is such a meaningless hodgepodge of other identities that it practically has no national identity of its own to begin with.

I'll take the American dream, a vision into which hundreds of ethnicities can filter their prior identities and experiences, only to see a richer, deeper, more compelling, but inherently American product emerge.