Kamala Harris made history not just as the first Black, first South Asian, and first non-fictional female veep but also as the first Gen Xer to land the gig. Canadians like to think one of our own coined the term for today’s middle-agers thanks to Douglas Coupland’s seminal debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, but he actually took it from the name of Billy Idol’s first band, who stole it themselves from a book about youth culture in the UK published back in the sixties.
Just as Canadians take credit for inventing basketball because a gym teacher from Ontario had the bright idea to cut the bottom out of a fruit basket while working at a YMCA in Massachusetts more than a century ago, we also tend to milk any connection to major US events and political figures, and the first female president-in-waiting is certainly no exception.
But she not only spent her formative years living in Canada, she also had a formative experience that led to her eventual career path.
The vice president spent her teens in Montreal — the same city that coincidentally launched VICE — after her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a breast-cancer researcher, took a job at the Jewish General Hospital. She and her sister Maya attended Leonard Cohen’s old alma mater, Westmount High School, where she became best friends with a girl named Wanda Kagan, whom she bonded with as one of the few other biracial students in this wealthy enclave of the country’s second-largest city. And she might not have become a prosecutor if she hadn’t.
Harris noticed her friend often seemed depressed and didn’t want to return home after hanging out together, and eventually coaxed out the awful truth the girl was being molested by her stepfather.
“I shared the information with her, which is not always easy to do but, you know, they say ‘tell someone’ and I was really close with her,” Kagan told the CBC four years ago. “She went home and told her mom, and she said ‘well, she has to come to stay with us.’ So I went to stay with them for the latter part of my high school graduating year, and her mom helped navigate me with different things with the system.”
So when Harris said at her big coming out party the other day she knows “Donald Trump’s type” from her days as a criminal prosecutor, she actually first became acquainted with his ilk as a minor. Typical Lyin’ Kamala, amirite?
While her opponent in the upcoming election spent his early Biff Tannen days at a military boarding school in a failed attempt by his father to somehow make a man out of him, Harris spent some of her own adolescence helping a friend get through a situation that sounds like a particularly sad storyline from “Degrassi High.”
The two lost touch after graduation, as we Gen Xers tended to do back in ye olde pre-Internet days, but reconnected in 2005 after Kagan happened to watch Oprah one day and was surprised to see her old friend introduced as “superstar prosecutor Kamala Harris,” the new San Francisco district attorney making a name for herself by locking up sex offenders like Kagan’s shitty stepdad (but not in particular Kagan’s shitty stepdad).
Kagan, who is now an administrator at the same hospital where the late Dr. Gopalan worked, reached out to her through the DA’s office, and Harris called back almost immediately. They’ve remained in touch ever since, and she got her former roommate’s permission before going public with the story.
Harris never got sufficiently proficient with French to ever have a true head-of-state tête-à-tête with Justin Trudeau. Which is something Fox News will probably start hammering her for given they previously pitched a fit she supposedly put on a fake French accent while on a state visit to France.
“Kamala Harris spent several years living in Quebec but was too much of a lazy DEI queen to even bother to master the French language!”
But it’s actually super easy to get by in Montreal without knowing much French because pretty much everyone speaks at least a bit of both. This is part of the fun of living there, which I know firsthand from my university days. I’m confident she’s now joined the ranks of famous American honorary Montrealers such as Jackie Robinson, Gary “The Kid” Carter, Chris Chelios, and even Viggo Mortensen, who never actually resided there but is such a diehard Montreal Canadiens fan he wore their jersey under his armour while playing Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings.
Although the status could be revoked if the Boston Bruins manage to win the Stanley Cup during her presidency and she invites the team to the White House.
[CBC]
