Mayor Dave Bronconnier is mildly worried, I gather, about the prospect that foreign journalists won't find enough to write about at the G-8 summit in Kananaskis.
These idle hands might occupy themselves by composing travel stories about our dear city, which they will compare unfavourably with the great capitals of the world.
Picture the ink-stained wretches: bored, irritated by the hundred vexations of travel, driven to justify their expenses, they will write satirical screeds about the absurd pretensions of everything we have, and the scandalous absence of everything we lack.
To all this, of course, the suitable answer would be a chorus of "Yeah, so?"
Parachute journalists are nothing new to us. They descended almost weekly in the 1970s, when the energy crisis began to make Calgary not merely prosperous, but nationally significant.
Prosperity and importance anywhere on the Prairies were a grave affront to the natural Canadian order of things. We were appropriately punished by journalists whose day-long researches led to a unanimous finding: customs beastly, manners none.
It didn't matter. We continued to prosper and grew more confident. I hope we never become immune to well-considered advice from strangers, but I hope we've learned to shrug off the emissions of random blatherers.
(Having said that, I reserve the right to denounce any particularly juicy idiocies from visiting G-8 journalists. I have especially high hopes of the British press corps.)
Some of our journalistic visitors who pride themselves on their sophistication are strangely thick-headed about what they find here. They notice only that it's Not Like Home. It's not Piquant. It's not Amusing.
It's not Ancient or Hallowed.
No, it's not. Calgary is first of all a working city, built and still growing for practical reasons. It's not a Disneyland for grown-ups, nor is it the carefully embalmed remains of a defunct empire. Make your own list of the world's great cities, and note how many are past their prime.
Calgary's prime is still ahead, as you'd expect from a city whose motto is, "Onward."
If our prime seems to recede even as we approach, that's fine: better to have it ahead than behind.
The future is one of the key elements in Calgary's myth -- and by "myth," I mean the story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves. The city's not finished, says our myth; it's a work in progress. We wouldn't want to finish it, even if we knew how.
This young town has doubled its population in the past 30 years. Hundreds of thousands of people chose to come here and stay, strange as it must seem to observers from places far more delightful though perhaps not as dynamic.
Many of our newcomers are here for economic reasons, and that's fine. There are worse fates than working for a living, and far worse places to do it.
Calgary obviously is inclined more toward action than contemplation. Maybe we lean this way because of our rapid growth, maybe we grow quickly because of our action-now attitude.
The growth and the accompanying attitude have had some unfortunate consequences, well-noticed by uncharitable visitors. About half the city's houses, for instance, date from one brief architectural period, not a brilliant one, and we can only hope that the fledgling trees eventually obscure the peach-coloured stucco.
Sophisticates call us an overgrown Wild West town. We reply "Proud of it," and make it part of our myth. To this day, our cowboy beginnings are the buffalo chips on our shoulders.
Actually, Calgary was founded in 1875 by a police force sent to shut down the Wild West before it got going here.
The first Calgary Stampede parade in 1912 made its way along streetcar tracks downtown. Even then, the Stampede was a salute to an era that was vanishing as farms took over the open range.
Never mind. The "Yahoo, howdy pardner" stuff gets a bit thick, I agree, but it's a tribute to something real -- the cowboys' independence, endurance, easy-going democratic spirit, and love of hard fun when the hard work was finished. It's not enough by itself to build a city on, but it sure helps.
Allan Connery is a Calgary freelance columnist. His column will appear Monday on the Comment Page.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. NoNonsense English offers this material non-commercially for research and educational purposes. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, i.e. the media service or newspaper which first published the article online and which is indicated at the top of the article unless otherwise specified.