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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 2, 2003
The froth
They are large we are small and they are next door: I find it easier to explain Canadian anti-Americanism than almost any other kind. It has nothing to do with the War of 1812 or any free trade agreement it is more a question of physics the natural order of things. But add if you will the matter of identity. If you are an English Canadian I ask you to search your heart and answer this question truthfully: Whom do you hate more the Americans or the French Canadians? Of course you hate the Americans more. There is after all something pleasantly exotic about people who live and think in French. What makes the Americans unbearable is that they are so damnably easy to understand. It is the one finally unforgiveable thing -- for our hatred of them slides unconsciously into self-hatred and nothing more animates malice than that. Our anti- Americanism most resembles the domestic U.S. kind of liberal moral triumphalism. "I have nothing against the American people my problem is with the Bush Administration and U.S. government policies." (Which the great majority of Americans happen to support.) ... Oh please don't stoop to that it insults my intelligence and will demean yours. Within a minute the sort of person who says that is going on about the mores of Texas and the vulgarity of Hollywood and ... the various other things we share. Indeed it is quite the other way around. We are constantly looking for some American policy that we can show as "typical" -- because it fits with some stereotype we have created of the mass crass U.S. society. They get their news from television and drive SUVs and live in sprawling suburbs and eat junk and are vastly overweight -- just like us. Except it is worse in the case of the Americans because on average they have more money. And there are few moral flaws in another human being as grave as having more money. Now hatred of one's neighbour as a projection of self-hatred is a universal phenomenon. Croats hate Serbs (or vice versa) because they speak the same language (though they both deny it) Pakistanis hate Indians (or vice versa) Welshman hate Englishmen (though not vice versa; the English have never noticed). The Europeans hate the U.S. the more they come to resemble Americans outwardly. It seems the Americans alone are capable of liking themselves just the way they are (another reason to hate them). The Welsh hate the English for themselves but also because their hatred is ignored. They find the English obtusely insensitive to their taunts addressed as it were to the Englishmen's ankles. It was the Irish who discovered the only way to get an Englishman's full attention from that height was to bite him. I do not recommend this policy to my fellow Canadians as a way to get U.S. attention tempting though it may be. One of the great tactical principles in nature is never bite a creature more than ten times your size -- even a fairly good-natured creature. This was for more than a century the foundation of our own wise policy of state. We might grumble continuously about the Americans -- whine like the caricature Welshmen -- but we would never ever bite them. It is this policy that has recently come up for review and even for public debate in Canada. Our natural dislike of the Americans is reaching the point of boiling over. The proximate cause is the prospective war in Iraq. Or rather it has provided a plausible opportunity. The French and Germans having taken the lead we suddenly have cover. These "Old Europeans" (whom we also hate but less than we do the Americans because the Atlantic Ocean is so wide) have started biting the U.S. at the United Nations and wherever else they may be exposed. There is safety in numbers -- all little people think that -- and we instinctively sense the chance to pile on. There are many things to be said against the Irish I'm sure but one thing I have tended to admire is their reckless independent courage. Which is to say they have the habit of lashing out in their own right against a much larger enemy or neighbour without so much as a cursory preparatory trawl for allies. This is genuinely feisty. They are at least according to history and legend a guileless species unable to wait for the crowd to form before pitching the first brick. Whereas we have guile. We are more like the Scots and wait until the French are snapping at the face of our "ancient enemy" before leaping on his back. Hence our prime minister's cautiously-phrased insults to the U.S. in his speech in Chicago the other week and our rather hapless manoeuvre at the Security Council to subvert the American (British and Spanish) diplomatic position from a fresh Canadian angle -- presenting ourselves as "honest brokers" between the Americans and the people who are trying to hurt them. I could criticize the judgement of our governing party but not on grounds of climbing on a limb. In this case I must start by conceding they are acting with fairly broad national support. For even after discounting the loaded questions a glance at the polls and in the pubs reveals that Canadians have got ourselves into a copious anti-American lather and we do expect our government to find a way to express this. Our government responds by following the trend of public opinion reticently but consistently. It does not lead. And this at a time of unprecedented crisis in our Western alliance which depends for its direction as for the bulk of its strength on the United States. The prime ministers Blair in Britain Aznar in Spain Berlusconi in Italy have elected to lead and thus necessarily to resist a tide of cheap anti- Americanism. President Chirac of France and Chancellor Schroeder of Germany have elected to surf that tide to wherever it washes up. Our own prime minister is never so obvious but rides both ways and sideways carried by the tide but pointing his little surfboard in a variety of directions a cork upon the sea. Of all these countries Canada has the most to lose for Canada is by far the most dependant upon the goodwill and accommodation of the United States. Therefore Canada has the government that can least afford to indulge the anti- American froth. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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