(1981)
I am always pleased to be able to return to the scene of my youthful debaucheries—which were of course purely intellectual in nature —especially since it is also the land of my ancestors. My ancestors would have been pleased to return to it as well, I suspect, once they’d found out what Canada was really like, but there had been a slight disagreement over who should rule this country—divinely constituted law and order in the person of George III or a lot of upstart revolutionaries —and my ancestors had departed for the north in search of some place where you could still get a decent cup of tea, thus becoming part of the brain drain; a drain, according to my father, from which the States has never entirely recovered. Canadian-American relations were a frequent topic of conversation in my grandmother’s house. There were the Canadian relations and then there were the American relations, who lived mostly in Boston. That’s what makes Canadian-American relations somewhat touchy at times: they are relatives. There’s nothing that rankles more than a cousin, especially one with a Rolls-Royce.
I’ll preface this speech by saying that if you really feel you have to bring me all the way down from the frozen north to tell you how all of us are going to make it through the next ten years, you’re in deep trouble. The fact is that nobody knows, least of all me. What you are about to hear is merely the fruit of idle speculation.
I have two things to say in defence of idle speculation. First, it’s what universities are for. Where else could one devote three months of one’s life to an investigation of whether John Keats did or did not have syphilis? Second, I’m a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one’s life trying to pretend that nonexistent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent. However, when you invite a novelist to speak to you, what you get is a novelization.
I’ll warn you right at the beginning that although this is a slightly mean speech, I do know the difference between an individual and a foreign policy. Americans as individuals can be enthusiastic, generous and optimistic in ways undreamt of by your average Canadian. How could I think otherwise when the Americans so consistently give me better reviews than do my begrudging, dour; and suspicious fellow countrymen? Americans worship success; Canadians find it in slightly bad taste. In fact, Canadians find Canadians in slightly bad taste, which is probably why Texas is currently cornering the market on Canadian studies. This does not startle the Canadians: they always knew Texans had bad taste. (They’ll collect anything).
No Canadian ever made a speech in the United States without beginning with an apology, and that was mine. Having now fulfilled the obligations which politeness and protocol demand, I’ll proceed to the speech proper, which is supposed to be about Canadian-American relations, and what the future holds for them.
Canadian-American relations sounds like a dull subject, and it is, unless you’ve ever tried explaining them to an American. What you get in return is usually a version of “You’re so cute when you’re mad, honey.” Americans don’t usually have to think about Canadian-American relations, or, as they would put it, American-Canadian relations. Why think about something which you believe affects you so little? We, on the other hand, have to think about you whether we like it or not.
Last month, during a poetry reading I was giving, I tried out a short prose poem called “How To Like Men.” It began by suggesting that one might profitably start with the feet and work up, the toes being an innocuous enough part of the body, one would think. Unfortunately the question of jackboots soon arose, and things went on from there. After the reading I had a conversation with a distressed young man who thought I was being unfair to men. He wanted men to be liked, not just from the soles to the knees, but totally, and not just as individuals but as a group. He found it negative and inegalitarian of me to have alluded to war and rape. In vain did I point out to him that as far as any of us knew these were two activities not widely engaged in by women, the first perhaps from lack of opportunity, the second for what we might delicately call lack of interest. He was still upset. “But we’re both in this together,” he protested. I had to admit that this was so; but could he, maybe, see that our relative positions might be a little different?
This is the kind of roadblock one runs into with Americans, when one has been unable to prevent the dinner-table conversation from veering around to Canadian-American relations. Americans are quite happy to claim that we’re both in this together when it comes to a discussion of continental energy resources; in fact, they sometimes talk as if they’d be more than willing to share the benefits of the American system with us, by having us join them. A Texan once put this proposition to Pierre Berton, one of our larger writers. Berton retorted that he thought this would be a dandy idea. The Americans could get back the Queen, whom they’ve always coveted, and revert to constitutional monarchy, and do away with the FBI and receive the much more colourful Royal Canadian Mounted Police in return, and change to a three-party system and become officially bilingual. Well, that wasn’t exactly what the Texan had in mind.
Such unconscious imperialism is not confined to Texas. During an early 70s feminist “international” conference being held in Toronto, the Canadian sisters ended up locking themselves in the John because they felt that the American sisters were being culturally imperialistic. They claimed to be speaking for Woman, capital W, universal, but as far as the Canadian sisters could tell they thought Woman, capital W, was not only white and middle-class but American as well. Then there’s the history of the Canadian labour movement, which was annexed to the American labour movement in the thirties in the name of the United Front. Then, too, Canadians succumbed to that most seductive of slogans, “We’re all in this together,” and they’ve been finding ever since that their fellow workers have been quite happy to collect their dues but not all that interested in hearing about such boring items as wage parity and the alarming tendency of American companies to close down their Canadian branch plants whenever there’s a slump in trade. The discussion has a tendency to break down into a version of afternoon soap-opera, those scenes in which the puzzled man says “What are you trying to tell me?” and the woman, wringing her hands, says, “You haven’t been listening! You don’t understand!” One could sum up the respective stances by saying that the typical American one is unthinkingly and breezily aggressive and the Canadian one peevishly and hesitantly defensive, and there’s even some accuracy in such a generalization, but that doesn’t help us much if we want to know why.
Why and how are often closely related, and how in this case is historical. I won’t go back to the war of 1812 and the Fenian raids, as it is bad manners to remind one’s hosts of their failure to invade and conquer one’s country by military means. (“We won’t do that again,” an American once said to a friend of mine. “We don’t need to, we own it anyway.”) I’ll skip the two World Wars as well, merely pointing out in passing that if Americans thought Canadians were sitting back and sucking their thumbs and watching it all on television during the Vietnam years, meanwhile benefitting from arms manufacture, it was a mere nothing to what happened between 1939 and Pearl Harbour. I’ll go to the postwar years, when I began to have a memory, and trace for you my own progress from wild colonial girl to the person who gives these kinds of speeches, because I think that progress is typical of my generation, the generation of 1960’s literary nationalism.
I was born in 1939, which means that I was ten in 1949 and twenty in 1959. I spent a large part of my childhood in northern Quebec, surrounded by many trees and few people. My attitude towards Americans was formed by this environment. Alas, the Americans we encountered were usually pictures of ineptitude. We once met two of them dragging a heaving metal boat, plus the motor, across a portage from one lake to another because they did not want to paddle. Typically American, we thought, as they ricocheted off yet another tree. Americans hooked other people when they tried to cast, got lost in the woods and didn’t burn their garbage. Of course, many Canadians behaved this way too; but somehow not as many. And there were some Americans, friends of my father, who could shoot a rapids without splintering their canoe and who could chop down a tree without taking off a foot in the process. But these were not classed as Americans, not real Americans. They were from Upper Michigan State or Maine or places like that, and were classed, I blush to admit, not as Americans but as honourary Canadians. I recognize that particular cross-filing system, that particular way of approving of people you as a rule don’t approve of, every time a man tells me I think like a man; a sentence I’ve always felt had an invisible comma after the word think. I’ve since recognized that it’s no compliment to be told you are not who you are, but as children we generalized, cheerfully and shamelessly. The truth, from our limited experience, was clear: Americans were wimps who had a lot of money but did not know what they were doing.
That was the rural part of my experience. The urban part was somewhat different. In the city I went to school, and in the early years at any rate the schools I went to were still bastions of the British Empire. In school we learned the Kings of England and how to draw the Union Jack and sing Rule Britannia, and poems with refrains like, “Little Indian, Sioux or Cree, Don’t you wish that you were me?” Our imaginations were still haunted by the war, a war that we pictured as having been fought between us, that is, the British, and the Germans. There wasn’t much room in our minds for the Americans and the Japanese. Winston Churchill was a familiar figure to us; Theodore Roosevelt was not.
In public school we did not learn much about Americans, or Canadians either, for that matter. Canadian history was the explorers and was mostly brown and green, for all those trees. British history was kings and queens, and much more exciting, since you could use the silver and gold coloured pencils for it.
That era of Canadian colonialism was rapidly disappearing, however. One explanation for the reason it practically vanished during the postwar decade —1946 to 1957, say, the year I graduated from high school —is an economic one. The Canadians, so the theory goes, over-extended themselves so severely through the war effort that they created a capital vacuum in Canada. Nature and entrepreneurs hate a vacuum, so money flowed up from the United States to fill it, and when Canadians woke up in the sixties and started to take stock, they discovered they’d sold their birthright for a mess. This revelation was an even greater shock for me; not only was my country owned, but it was owned by the kind of people who carried tin boats across portages and didn’t burn their garbage. One doubted their competence.
Looking back on this decade, I can see that the change-over from British cultural colony to American cultural colony was symbolized by what happened after school as opposed to in it. I know it’s hard to believe in view of my youthful appearance, but when I was a child there was no television. There were, however, comic books, and these were monolithically American. We didn’t much notice, except when we got to the ads at the back, where Popsicle Pete reigned supreme. Popsicle Pete would give you the earth in exchange for a few sticky wrappers, but his promises always had a little asterisk attached: “Offer good only in the United States.” International world cynics may be forgiven for thinking that the same little asterisk is present invisibly in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, not to mention the public statements of prominent Americans on such subjects as democracy, human dignity and freedom, and civil liberties. Maybe it all goes back to Popsicle Pete. We may all be in this together, but some of us are asterisked.
Such thoughts did not trouble our heads a great deal. When you were finished with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse (and Walt Disney was, by the way, a closet Canadian), you could always go on to Superman (whose creator was also one of ours). After that it would be time for Sunday night radio, with Jack Benny and Our Miss Brooks. We knew they talked funny, but we didn’t mind. Then of course there were movies, none of which were Canadian, but we didn’t mind that either. Everyone knew that was what the world was like. Nobody knew there had once been a Canadian film industry.
After that I went to high school, where people listened to American pop music after school instead of reading comic books. During school hours we studied, among other things, history and literature. Literature was still the British tradition: Shakespeare, Eliot, Austen, Thomas Hardy, Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron; not experiences anyone should miss, but it did tend to give the impression that all literature was written by dead Englishmen, and—this is important—by dead Englishwomen. By this time I wanted to be a writer, and you can see it would be a dilemma: being female was no hindrance, but how could one be a writer and somehow manage to avoid having to become British and dead? The generation before mine compromised; they settled for the British part and emigrated to England, taking their chances on the death. My generation, in ways I’ll come to in a minute, took another road.
In history it was much the same story. We started with Ancient Egypt and worked our way through Greece, Rome and mediaeval Europe, then the Renaissance and the birth of the modern era, the invention of the steam engine, the American revolution, the French revolution, the Civil War and other stirring events, every single one of which had taken place outside Canada.
Finally, in the very last year, by which time many future citizens had dropped out anyway, we got a blue book called Canada In The World Today. It was about who grew the wheat, how happy the French were, how well the parliamentary system worked for everybody and how nice it was that the Indians had given us all their land in exchange for the amenities of civilization. The country we lived in was presented to us in our schools as colourless, dull and without much historical conflict to speak of, except for a few massacres, and nobody did that any more. Even the British war of conquest was a dud, since both of the generals died. It was like a hockey game in which both teams lost.
As for Canada in the World Today, its role, we were assured, was an important one. It was the upper northwest corner of a triangle consisting of Canada, the United States and Britain, and its position was not one to be sneezed at: Canada, having somehow become an expert at compromise, was the mediator. It was not to be parochial and inward-looking any more but was to be international in outlook. Although in retrospect the role of mediator may shrink somewhat—one cannot quite dispel the image of Canada trotting back and forth across the Atlantic with sealed envelopes, like a glorified errand boy —there’s a little truth to be squeezed from this lemon. Canadians, oddly enough, are more international in outlook than Americans are; not through any virtue on their part but because they’ve had to be. If you’re a Canadian travelling in the United States, one of the first things you notice is the relative absence of international news coverage. In Canada, one of the most popular news programmes ever devised has two radio commentators phoning up just about anyone they can get on the line, anywhere in the world. Canadians live in a small house, which may be why they have their noses so firmly pressed to the windows, looking out.
I remember Canada In The World Today with modified loathing—“Canada comes of age,” it trumpeted, not bothering to mention that what happened to you when you came of age was that you got pimples or a job or both—and still not a year passes without some politician announcing that Canada has finally grown up. Still, the title is significant. Canada sees itself as part of the world; a small sinking Titanic squashed between two icebergs, perhaps, but still inevitably a part. The States, on the other hand, has always had a little trouble with games like chess. Situational strategy is difficult if all you can see is your own borders, and beyond that some wispy brownish fuzz that is barely worth considering. The Canadian experience was a circumference with no centre, the American one a centre which was mistaken for the whole thing.
A few years ago I was in India and had occasion to visit both the Canadian and American enclaves in New Delhi. The Canadian there lived in a house decorated with Indian things and served us a meal of Indian food and told us all about India. One reason for going into the foreign service, in Canada anyway, is to get out of Canada, and Canadians are good at fitting in, partly because they can’t afford to do otherwise. They could not afford, for instance, to have the kind of walled compound the Americans had. We were let in to do some shopping at the supermarket there, and once the gate had closed you were in Syracuse, N.Y. Hot dogs, hamburgers, cokes and rock music surrounded you. Americans enter the outside world the way they landed on the moon, with their own oxygen tanks of American air strapped to their backs and their protective spacesuits firmly in place. If they can’t stay in America they take it with them. Not for them the fish-in-the-water techniques of the modern urban guerilla. Those draft dodgers of the sixties who made it as far as Canada nearly died of culture shock: they thought it was going to be like home.
It’s not their fault, though. It’s merely that they’ve been oddly educated. Canadians and Americans may look alike, but the contents of their heads are quite different. Americans experience themselves, individually, as small toads in the biggest and most powerful puddle in the world. Their sense of power comes from identifying with the puddle. Canadians as individuals may have more power within the puddle, since there are fewer toads in it; it’s the puddle that’s seen as powerless. One of our politicians recently gave a speech entitled, “In the Footsteps of the Giant.” The United States of course was the giant and Canada was in its footsteps, though some joker wondered whether Canada was in the footstep just before or just after the foot had descended. One of Canada’s problems is that it’s always comparing itself to the wrong thing. If you stand beside a giant, of course you tend to feel a little stunted. When we stand beside Australia, say, or the ex-British West Indies, we feel more normal. I had lunch recently with two publishers from Poland. “Do Canadians realize,” they said, “that they live in one of the most peaceful, happy and prosperous countries on earth?” “No,” I said.
Back to my life story. We’ve reached 1960. I was at University, in the City of Toronto—which had not yet become the Paris of the Northeast, the place where people from Buffalo go for the weekend, clean, safe, glitzy, filled with restaurants of high quality, and up to its eyeballs in narcissism. Instead it was known as Hogtown; it was a synonym for essence of boredom, and the usual joke about it was, “I spent a week in Toronto last night.” Very funny if you didn’t want to be a writer, but what if you did? Some of us did, and there we were, living in a city in which there was one theatre, no ballet, one art gallery and no literature that a serious person would take seriously, or so we thought. Being young snobs, we declined to know much about it. Although we wanted to become writers, we certainly didn’t want to become Canadian writers. It was the period of late existentialism, and we wore long black stockings (those of us who were female) and no makeup (male and female alike) and read Sartre and Beckett. Canadian writers were associated in our minds with the damp unromantic vestibules of United Churches in March, smelling of damp wool. “Canadian writer” for us was an oxymoron.
And no wonder. For statistics fans, here’s a batch: all the novels and books of poetry by Canadians, published in Canada, in the year 1961, could be and were reviewed in part of one issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly. I think there were about five novels and under twenty books of poetry, but that included the mimeo jobs and the flatbed press numbers which were not yet dignified by being called “little press books.” Poets of my generation published their own work because nobody else would. It was not an activity born of heroism or the desire to appear artistic. Our publishing activities, tiny and futile as they were, were motivated by one thing: desperation. Even the “established” writers were doing well if they sold 200 copies of a book of poetry, country-wide. A novel that sold a thousand was a raving best-seller. Needless to say, you could hardly expect us to make a living at it, and anything resembling the American notion of literary success was out of the question. Canadian books were routinely not taught in schools and universities. I myself have never taken a course on Canadian literature.
The reason for this deplorable state of affairs was not that Canadians didn’t read books. They just didn’t read Canadian books. Colonies breed something called “the colonial mentality,” and if you have the colonial mentality you believe that the great good place is always somewhere else. In those days you could walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, and find it (not surprisingly) full of books; but they would all be imported books. Down at the back there would be a shelf labelled Canadiana, and there would be the Canadian novels, along with the Canadian cookbooks and the coffee-table books entitled Our Magnificent North. No self-respecting young writer wanted to end up as Canadiana.
So some of us went to England, which was where I was headed, intending to work as a waitress and write great literature in garrets in my spare time. I was intercepted however by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, back in the days when there were any, and found myself at Harvard.
One of the exciting things that happened to me at Harvard was that I helped to corner a lurking sexual pervert upon the roof of the graduate women’s dormitory. The other exciting thing, some might say entirely unrelated, was that I was requested at the beginning of my first year by the graduate advisor to fill in my gaps. As it turned out, I had only one gap, the others having been adequately filled in by the University of Toronto. My gap was American literature, and so, to my bemusement, I found myself reading my way through excerpts from Puritan sermons, political treatises of the time of the American revolution, and anguished essays of the early nineteenth century, bemoaning the inferiority not only of American literary offerings but of American dress design, and wondering when the great American genius would come along. It sounded familiar. Nobody pretended that any of this was superb literature. All they pretended was that it was necessary for an understanding of the United States of America, and it was. As we huddled in the front parlour of Founders’ House on the Appian Way, in the fall of ’62, just after President Kennedy had announced the Cuban Missile crisis, drinking tea and wondering whether the human condition was about to become rapidly obsolete, it was possible to look back through three hundred years of boring documents and see the road that had led us to this nasty impasse. The founding Puritans had wanted their society to be a theocratic Utopia, a city upon a hill, to be a model and a shining example to all nations. The split between the dream and the reality is an old one and it has not gone away.
Canada suffers from no such split, since it was founded not by idealists but by people who’d been kicked out of other places. Canada was not a city upon a hill, it was what you had to put up with. Americans think anything can be changed, torn down and re-built, re-written. Canadians tend to think nothing can. Both are wrong, of course. Americans get discouraged when they can’t get instant results; they vacillate between romantic idealism and black humour, its opposite. Canadians on the other hand think any change will probably be for the worse. Consequently they are less easily stampeded, less extreme in their trends. Americans have riots; Canadians have panel discussions on riots. Which may be why they won’t invest in things like the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was one of ours, once.
But I digress. There I was, at one of the greatest universities in the world, studying third-rate poems and dreary journals and the diaries of Cotton Mather, and why? Not because they were great world literature, but because they could tell me something about the society that produced them. Believe it or not, this was an amazing and dangerous insight. If old American laundry lists were of interest at Harvard, why should not old Canadian laundry lists be of interest in Toronto, where they so blatantly weren’t? Everyone who was anyone in Toronto dismissed Canadian literature as second-rate and therefore not worth studying; but here before my very eyes were reams and reams of second-rate, and I had to write exams on it in order to fill my gap.
It was at Harvard then that I first began to think seriously about Canada. Even the idea of thinking seriously about Canada had something shocking about it: seriousness and Canada just didn’t seem to go together. It was almost revolutionary. Unknown to me, other members of my generation were beginning to do the same thing. Then, as a generation, we did something very odd: instead of staying where we were and becoming part of the brain drain, we went back to Canada. Then we did something even odder. Instead of trying to publish in New York or London, or Paris (for this movement back to the indigenous was occurring at an even greater speed in the province of Quebec) we started thinking in terms of Canadian publication for a Canadian audience. Because the few established publishers were reluctant to publish work that was too experimental or too nationalist—the two were, strangely enough, sometimes equated—writers became involved in setting up their own publishing companies. Nobody expected the results. The growth of both audience and industry between 1965 and 1970 was phenomenal. To our surprise, people, even Canadian people, wanted to read what we wanted to write. Most of us were apolitical art-for-art’s-sakers when we set out, but the lesson was clear. American branch plants and our own conservatives wouldn’t publish us. If we wanted to be heard, we had to create the means of production and maintain control over it.
One of the things that quickly became apparent to us was that Canadians were remarkably ignorant about their own history and literature. For the most part they didn’t know they had any, and lots of them were resistant to hearing anything about it. They’d been trained to think of themselves as international, and for them that term meant not national. It did not occur to them that in order to have international relationships you have to have nations first, just as in order to have interpersonal relationships you have to have persons.
About this time it became fashionable to talk about the absence of a Canadian identity. The absence of a Canadian identity has always seemed nonsense to me, and the search for it a case of the dog chasing its own tail. What people usually mean by a national identity is an advertising gimmick. Everything has an identity. A stone has an identity, it just doesn’t have a voice. A man who’s forgotten who he is has an identity, he’s merely suffering from amnesia, which was the case with the Canadians. They’d forgotten. They’d had their ears pressed to the wall for so long, listening in on the neighbours, who were rather loud, that they’d forgotten how to speak and what to say. They’d become addicted to the one-way mirror of the Canadian-American border—we can see you, you can’t see us —and had neglected that other mirror, their own culture. The States is an escape fantasy for Canadians. Their own culture shows them what they really look like, and that’s always a little hard to take.
The cultural nationalism of the early ’70s was not aggressive in nature. It was a simple statement: we exist. Such movements become militant only when the other side replies, in effect, No you don’t. Witness feminism.
In 1972, I wrote and published a book about Canadian Literature. It was called Survival, and was an introductory guide to the subject, for the average reader. One of the reasons I wrote it was that nobody else had. Within it, the revolutionary seed planted at Harvard many years before burst into full flower, producing, in the minds of some, a large crop of thistles. Canadian critics felt it owed much to the noxious influence of Northrop Frye, under whom I’d studied up there, but they overlooked the noxious influence of Harvard’s own Perry Miller, under whom I studied down here. Canadians tend to be touchy about imported noxious influences: they want all noxious influences to be their very own. They feel the same way for instance about acid rain. If we want our lakes killed we’d rather do it ourselves; not that you folks aren’t doing a good job.
As far as I could see, Survival merely belaboured the obvious. Everyone, surely, would agree that the literature produced by a society has some connection with the society. It follows that by reading the literature you can get a bearing on the society. After a quick scan of classic Canadian literature —that is, anything written before 1970—1 concluded that Canadian literature had certain leitmotifs running through it. Victims abound; the philosophy is survivalism, the typical narrative a sequence of dire events which the hero escapes from (if he does escape) not with triumph or honour or riches but merely with his life. I talked about the difference between being a genuine victim and being one by choice. I drew certain conclusions relating to Canada in the World Today, and I prefaced the whole thing with a few reasons why people should read their own literature and not just everybody else’s. Worst of all, I said that Canada was a cultural colony and an economic one as well.
Some people thought these were the most important words set down since Moses went up the mountain. Others thought no such thing. Canadian nationalism is by no means homogeneous in nature or even thickly spread. The ultra left thought I was being petit bourgeois. The merely left thought I hadn’t put in enough about the songs of the people. Another branch of the left (whom I hesitate to call national socialists because it gives entirely the wrong idea) thought I was showing an historical perspective and was being dialectical. In case you’re unsure, that was good. The paranoid ethnic centre thought I was being national socialist. The conservative right thought I had written a book on something that didn’t exist at all, like a mediaeval theologian debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The feminists took the five basic victim positions I’d outlined —something like the five basic positions of ballet—and applied them to women. Critics fast on their feet said the book was an interesting expression of my artistic sensibility. Eighty thousand ordinary Canadians bought the book; a large market penetration, as they say in the trade. The Americans however did not publish it; as my editor in New York said, “Listen sweetie, Canada is death down here.”
Having an identity is one thing, having a negative one is another. Some objected to the victim motif; others said that people died all over world literature, not just in Canada. Survivalism, of course, is not the same as tragedy or existential despair or even pessimism about the human condition. It’s being stuck in a blizzard with one match; a kind of minimalism, fine, but if you get that fire lit it’s a triumphant event, considering the odds. Nor is the stance purely negative. In a world where there seems to be increasingly less and less of more and more, it may be a more useful as well as a more ethical attitude towards the world than the American belief that there is always another horizon, a new frontier, that when you’ve used up what’s in sight you only have to keep moving.
Survival was part of the English-Canadian cultural nationalism that peaked in about 1975. Meanwhile, the Liberal economic nationalists under Walter Gordon had been defeated and so had the NDP ones under the Waffle: the government was against nationalism; continentalism was their favoured phrase. The writers and artists, having made certain gains, wandered off to their private cabbage patches or settled down to the dogwork of such organizations as the newly formed Writers’ Union, and newspaper headlines turned their attention elsewhere. One could be forgiven for thinking that fighting the nationalist fight was like rolling a big stone up a hill time after time, only to have it kicked down again by one’s very own government.
On both cultural and economic fronts, regionalism replaced nationalism as something to feel self-righteous about. To the jaundiced viewer, regionalism was merely the thesis of Survival writ small, with Ottawa replacing the States as the overbearing giant and the provinces competing with each other for the position of chief victim. There seemed to be a contest going on as to which one could outwhine the others. “Centralist thinking” became a bad word.
Then, out of the blue, what to our wondering eyes should appear but the National Energy Policy? Canada, it seems, was going to get back its own oil. It would have cost less if they’d done it earlier or never sold it in the first place, but why quibble? “Canada comes of age,” someone predictably announced, and the United States reacted as though someone had just seduced its sister.
Which is where we are now.
The United States does not think of its own nationalism as being anything out of the ordinary, but it has never cherished warm feelings for other peoples’. Reaction to the current Canadian wave has ranged from anger, to squeeze plays of the If-you-don’t-let-us-buy-you, We-won’t-let-you-buy-us variety, to jocular condescension. I give you an example of the latter from the Toronto Star, June 20, 1981. The headline reads, U.S. Patronizes Us With Nelson Eddy Tag, and the copy explains:
George Ball, ex-diplomat and ambassador and now a New York investment banker, said yesterday: “At the moment the current (Ottawa) government is going through one of those spasms of nationalism such as happened in the 1960’s when Walter Gordon was finance minister. I think they’ll get over it. It’s a political issue. It comes and goes.”
That patronizing assessment was nothing compared with a day earlier, when witnesses at a merchant marine committee hearing were slashing Canada for winning away too much seaport business. “I like to think of Canada as a Nelson Eddy,” remarked Democrat Barbara Mikulski, recalling the American actor who played a Mountie in the 1936 movie Rose Marie. “What we need here is a legislative Jeanette Macdonald,” she added; presumably to lure Canada away from its ardent pursuit of trade.
“No, No,” said committee chairman Mario Biaggio, “Canada can be Jeanette Macdonald because in the movies Eddy always gets the girl.”
I guess a little verbal castration is better than getting a bomb dropped on you, but let us remember there has always been more than one way of getting the girl. Are we talking about a proposal of marriage, in which case the States would proclaim, “with all my worldly goods I thee endow” in exchange for Canada’s adopting the missionary position? Are we talking about proposition, in which case Canada is to assume the same position in exchange for a few roses and a box of chocs? It doesn’t sound like a love affair, somehow. There’s a fourth alternative which is not mentioned in polite company —every girl’s got her price, say the cynics, and Canada has always been a cheap lay —and even a fifth, in which Nelson Eddy gets the same thing without having to pay anything at all, justifying his actions by believing that Canada was behaving provocatively and secretly loves it anyway. You’ll notice that in each case Canada gets screwed; we’ve just been haggling a little about the out-of-pocket expenses. What it all goes to show, I suppose, is the danger of metaphors. In any case, it looks as if Canada doesn’t want to play the female lead, not at the moment and maybe not any more. Someone once said that Canada is ruled by men with crystal balls, referring to Mackenzie King’s habit of consulting his mother’s spirit before deciding what not to do. Perhaps the fellows in Ottawa are changing to a more reliable method of decision-making.
Ah, say the futurists. But surely the nation state is obsolete. Even national governments are fast-fading archaisms; it’s really international big business that’s running things, and by the 21st century it’s going to be one world, one way or another. Think of fibre optics and the imminent demise of the postal system; think of satellite transmission, ready and able to beam anything anywhere any time. National borders, those little moats countries build around themselves, their ability to determine what will be seen and heard within and what will stay without, will have become ineffectual in a few decades. Let’s not try to turn back the clock. Open it up and let everything slosh back and forth from brain to brain, and then we won’t have any nasty little pockets of nationalists who want to retain their own language and customs and blow up mailboxes or each other to prove it.
But of course it won’t be a question of back and forth. It will only be forth, an expansion outward of the boundaries of whomever controls the technology for information trans-mission. I hate to say it, but it probably won’t be Canada. The fight over who gets a pay TV licence, going on in Canada right now, is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Control what goes into people’s heads and you control what comes out.
If you think that’s unduly pessimistic, listen to this one. You hear the most amazing things on the Canadian Broad-casting Corporation; just the other day there was a programme on new weapons technology. The neutron bomb is already old-fashioned. The Russians, apparently, are working on something involving ultra-sound. They send a sort of amplified disco overhead in rockets, and it frazzes out the brain cells of everyone who hears it and turns them into smiling docile idiots. It doesn’t damage property or genetic material, just your ability to think and therefore to protest. The ever-present satirist among us commented that it prob-ably wouldn’t make that much difference to the Canadians anyway, as they are already smiling docile idiots, but that was a little unfair. If the neutron bomb is the ultimate capitalist weapon, anti-personnel without being anti-realestate, ultra-sound is the ultimate totalitarian one. The lumpen proletariat will become truly lumpen at last.
I’ve just given you two ways in which nationalism can be transcended. Neither sounds very attractive, but maybe I’m just being a little Luddite about it and docile idiocy of one kind or another is the wave of the future. Both suggest that there may be things to worry about that are more important than who gets to be Nelson Eddy.
There’s a third way to transcend nationalism, and for that I’ll go back for a moment to 1962. Perry Miller, in his lectures on American Romanticism, suggested that there was not one America but two: the America of Thoreau and Lincoln, the articulators of human dignity and human values and true democracy, and the other America which is opposed to them. I suggest that there are not only two Americas but two Canadas as well, and two Englands and two Russias; that, in fact, no country has a monopoly on any human characteristic, good or evil. The most lethal weapon on earth is the human mind; but on the other hand it is only the mind that is capable of envisioning what is humanly desirable and what is not. Totalitarian control of any kind is not. The world is rapidly abandoning the nineteenth-century division into capitalist and socialist. The new camps are those countries that perform or tolerate political repression, torture and mass murder and those that do not. Terrorism of the hijacking and assassination variety is now international; so is the kind practised by governments against their own citizens. The most important field of study at the moment is not Canadian literature or even old American laundry lists, delightful as these may be. It’s the study of human aggression. I seem to recall that a revolution was once fought on the slogan, “No taxation without representation.” For 1981 there’s a more appropriate slogan: “No annihilation without representation.” The only drawback is the lack of any one mad king to rebel against, and I expect the sense of futility felt by many Americans in face of the sick and gargantuan and apparently uncontrollable power struggle that’s going on makes them in a way honourary Canadians. I say apparently uncontrollable because I am, after all, an optimist. Power corrupts, but it has never managed to corrupt everybody.
Americans and Canadians are not the same; they are the products of two very different histories, two very different situations. Put simply, south of you you have Mexico and south of us we have you.
But we are all in this together, not just as citizens of our respective nation states but more importantly as inhabitants of this quickly shrinking and increasingly threatened earth. There are boundaries and borders, spiritual as well as physical, and good fences make good neighbours. But there are values beyond national ones. Nobody owns the air; we all breathe it.