Business As Usual in the Imperium Americanum

How to Apply the "Harris Formula":

Famed Irish actor and raconteur Richard Harris loved to tell a story that illustrates how (as he put it) "the British take the best" out of those who hail from their imperial fringes and "throw the rest away".

Harris had appeared on the British stage and screen for over a decade when he won an award at the 1964 Cannes festival for his role in This Sporting Life. The British press announced the good news with the headline, "British Actor Wins Cannes Award". When, a few days later, Harris got into a bar fight, the same press announced, "Irish Actor Involved in Brawl". He tells the story here, from 2:12 to 3:15 (watch the rest of the clip if you want to hear Harris tell one of his famous tales involving Peter O'Toole, yet another Irish actor whom the British claimed as one of their own when it suited them).

I was reminded of Harris' wry observation when I read the Yahoo headline about this year's Razzie Awards on Sunday. The Razzies, a parodic anti-Oscars designed to "celebrate" the worst cinematic performances of the year, awarded Worst Picture to The Love Guru, ill-starring Mike Myers. By all accounts, the award was richly deserved. I was struck, though, by the Yahoo headline: bizarrely, it stated, "Canadian Movie Voted The Worst". A day later, Yahoo removed the story, leaving an "error" page in its wake.

Now Mike Myers, though Canadian-born, has lived and worked in America for over fifteen years and is about as Canadian as Peter Jennings. That is why the American press fastidiously avoided describing Myers' huge box-office hits like Wayne's World, Austin Powers or Shrek as "Canadian movies", just as it has never mistaken James Cameron's movies for "Canadian" products, just as it would never describe massively popular TV phenomena like 24 or Battlestar Galactica as "Canadian", even though both feature largely Canadian casts and though the latter show is filmed almost entirely in Canada.

Apparently, Hollywood productions featuring Canadian ex-pats are "American" when they are excellent and gross millions of dollars and are "Canadian" when they suck and lose millions of dollars. The Harris Formula, then, still applies: the empire takes the best out of us, and throws the rest away. It's a formula that has endless applications. To wit:

1) Canadian-made General Motors vehicles shall be considered "American" if they provide years of safe, reliable service and "Canadian" if they need frequent, significant or expensive repairs;

2) Joint U.S.-Canada NATO operations in Afghanistan shall be considered "American" if they succeed and "Canadian" if they fail;

3) American-made firearms smuggled into Canada shall be considered "Canadian" when used in the commission of criminal offences and "American" when used by little old ladies to fend off burglars and purse-snatchers;

4) North American weather patterns shall be considered "American" when they provide clement conditions and "Canadian" when they cause storms, tidal waves, hurricanes and other climatic nuisances.

Mind you, the Harris Formula can operate in reverse, as America seems all too ready to take our worst. Unbelievably, in an act either of selfless courage or of suicidal recklessness, they were willing to take custody even of Rachel Marsden. The application of that particular cultural laxative may be worth, alone, every bit of imperial insolence we take from them.


"Benz? Shmenz!":

Why do the media insist on reporting Barack Obama's stated belief that Americans invented the automobile as a "gaffe"? Sure, Benz and Daimler patented and produced German cars decades before an American equivalent appeared, but pointing that meaningless factoid out is precisely the kind of petty, pedantic, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that emboldens the terrorists and puts the West in serious jeopardy.

Clearly, too many over-educated, élitist journalists still don't get it: "reality" does not mean "stuff that actually happened, is happening or will happen"; it means "stuff that Americans make up in order to feel messianic, omnipotent and omniscient". If Americans had rooted their culture in a respect for facts and reason, they'd still be a Sabbath-honouring populist republic with a small citizen militia, an ethic of Puritan moderation and a loathing for unearned wealth, privilege and military interventionism--in other words, semi-socialist losers.

Obama's delusional grandstanding is moved by precisely the kind of Nietzschean self-glorification and ass-in, knees-up, balls-out fanaticism that has made America great. Facts are needed only by people who don't have the guts to believe in lies, which is why Obama's countrymen feel that Canadians and their history deserve each other.


Bonus American Superhumanity!:

On Tuesday, Bobby Jindal, thirty-seven-year-old governor of Louisiana, delivered the Republican response to Obama's address to the nation. This opportunity to rehabilitate the battle-scarred GOP with a young face and fresh voice turned into a poisoned chalice for Jindal, as he disgorged what even friendly critics have described as one of the worst speeches ever delivered by a major American political figure. Jindal's self-authored fiasco appears to have dealt blunt-force trauma to what were realistic chances of competing in the GOP's 2012 primaries and then strangled them with a length of piano wire for good measure.

That's a shame, because the speech is comic gold. The son of immigrants, Jindal relates how his parents were filled with the "immigrant's wonder at the greatness of America". He told his audience how his Indian father had seen "extreme poverty" and how the old man was awe-struck when he saw the "endless variety on [grocery store] shelves" without mentioning that his parents came to America as graduate students enrolled at Louisiana State University--rather than as illiterate peasants with but two dollars in their pockets between them--and that Baton Rouge could have shown his father plenty of poverty and hordes of people unable to afford the grocery-store cornucopia he so admired if he had dared to ever wander far enough beyond the safe, middle-class enclave he settled in.

Throughout his speech, Jindal's refrain was, literally, "Americans can do anything". Yes, perhaps the man is just a Jim Morrison enthusiast. More likely, though, he was carried away by that peculiarly American fashion of being a Christian--namely, by refusing to rely on faith in the (allegedly) All-Mighty and, cutting out the middle-man, acting as their own miracle-maker--their own God.

Hey, as long as that bloody "Buy American" clause doesn't prevent Canadian firms from bidding on the inevitable Tower of Babel and Golden Calf construction procurements, it's all good!

Lookin' For Some New Values*

* With apologies to Iggy Pop.


So, a House of Representatives committee report indicates that anti-Americanism is at "record levels". Apparently, the committee members agree that this lamentable situation flows primarily from global horror over the Iraq war and "Washington's perceived hypocrisy". I wonder how much money American taxpayers had to fork over to hear their legislators propound a fact easily deducible from even a cursory reading of the news.

Fortunately, we hear, the committee believes that the world still admires American "values", although the committee fails to elaborate upon what those values are. I suppose we're supposed to just know.

Elsewhere, we read that a Marine was caught on video hurling a dog off a cliff while his mates egg him on and chuckle, that the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (currently presiding over an obscenity case) has been caught posting hard-core pornography (including scenes of bestiality) on his family's Website, and that a California high-school has done Thomas Paine proud by banning its newspaper indefinitely after its editors ran a photo of a burning American flag.

Values? What "values"?

"Pass the Fries and Praise the Ammunition": A Short Primer on Chauvinism

A commenter on a friend's blog recently expressed his incredulity at the notion, beloved of our Canada-bashing elites, that "Canadian anti-Americanism is always petty and smug and parochial and morally superior"--that it victimises a blameless people who have earned a higher esteem. Another commenter chimed in to defend this elite view, arguing that Canadian "anti-Americans" always experience their consumption of American stereotypes as "fact rather than... [as] prejudice".

As is usual whenever this topic is broached, the terms of the discussion were hopelessly opaque. Canadian chauvinism is rarely defined properly, as, being so rare, very few samples of it have been available for detailed analysis. Nevertheless, a few assertions may be made with a fair deal of certainty.

First, very few Canadian chauvinists, anti-American or otherwise, exist. They are not allowed to exist. Our civic soil has been salted against the growth of something as elementary as civic consciousness and is utterly incapable of nurturing anything as grand as civic pride or as passionate as its extremity, chauvinism.

Our schools teach that Canada was accidentally confected as a bland stew of disparate regionally and ethnically differentiated ciphers whose greatest achievement has been to agree to disagree. Two of our loudest and most influential provinces (as well as the nation's richest, craftiest, and most ideologically-driven political party) long ago adopted an official "Canada-Sucks" approach to federalism that has had an enormously deflationary impact on our national morale. Virtually every post-war Canadian nationalist who has attempted a public career has been destroyed. Diefenbaker, Gordon, and Orchard are the triumvirs of a tradition that has faced nothing but relentless ridicule, sneering odium and total, ignominious, unmitigated defeat. What is de rigueur for all political hopefuls in the Great American Republic--stentorian, chest-beating, monomaniacal, triumphalist xenophobia--is poison here. An avowed Canadian nationalist who premises his campaign on any kind of xenophobia would have a better chance of winning public office if he produced glossy posters of himself performing a lewd and lascivious act upon the decaying corpse of an infant Emperor penguin and hand-delivered them to the editors-in-chief of each of our major dailies.

Now, many Canadians are indifferent to America; many others see the U.S. as rather odd, funny, or exotic, but such dispositions can hardly be considered actively malign except by those of our continentalist compatriots who share America's glass-jaw ego. I've certainly never met a Swede who is tempted to interpret broad Canadian indifference to Sweden as "anti-Swedishness", and I've yet to see a Nigerian grumble about our crude "anti-Nigerianism". To Americans and their useful idiots in our Vichy milice (who volunteer to help keep us uppity Canucks in our place), all that is not rabid pro-American fealty is seen as sullen belligerence.

True anti-American chauvinism would require a philosophical grounding or a point of analytical departure from which to critique the United States as such, in respect of its foundational rationale, its mission, and the execution of that mission. My own chauvinism (for it is a chauvinism, admittedly) is such a creature. I think America is otiose per se--a noisome latrine filled to overflowing by the worst case of cultural dysentery ever to afflict Western civilisation. It would be idle to accuse me of being anti-American; one might as well "accuse" me of being right-handed. I accept the term as a fairly non-controversial description. Any normal Canadian would flinch at the epithet and attempt to escape it. I do not and will not. In fact, I proudly insist on the appellation: I've earned it in ways that most others who've been saddled with the tag have not and would not try to (actually, I prefer "un-American", but "anti-American", which is always readier to hand to the obstreperous Canada-bashing hecklers who are prone to fling it, will do).

No. Most Canadians who seem anti-American are merely reacting to specific American acts of cupidity, arrogance and fecklessness. It is not "petty and smug and parochial and morally superior" to complain of another nation's stupidity or venality. Otherwise, it would be "petty and smug and parochial and morally superior" of Americans to express concern over Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions. Are Americans uncomfortable because they smugly believe that, while safe in the hands of God-fearing Anglo-Saxons like themselves, nuclear technology is sure to bring the planet to grief if it lands in the hands of a tribe of swarthy, savage, idol-worshipping rag-heads? Well, yes, actually, they are, but that is precisely the point: I do not think Americans hate Iranians per se (though some do, I'm sure); they hate what they are doing. Likewise, most Canadians do not hate Americans per se; but many Canadians hate many things that Americans do.

Thus, the distinction is key: chauvinism is unconditional hatred of other nations on principle, even when they are at their best, while circumstantial critiques of another nation's collective gestures are not only legitimate in all cases but are inevitable and probably necessary when the offending nation is at its worst. Two cases may help to illustrate how to apply the rule governing this distinction.

In the first, we will rend the veil of charity that has been drawn around this fiasco, and recall that, in retaliation for France's refusal to become part of the "Coalition of the Willing" (aka "The Rag-Tag Gaggle of Ex-Warsaw Pact Kleptocracies"), French fries were re-named "Freedom Fries" by Congressional fiat in an act hitherto unequalled for sheer, pettifogging parochialism.

Let us assimilate, slowly, the full meaning of this event. On the day this childish tantrum occurred, the most powerful nation on Earth felt so aggrieved and threatened by France's supremely commendable act, that its House of Representatives pushed aside trivial national concerns such as poverty, crime and health care in order to wash the stain of "France" from the nation's psychic undergarments through a Stalinist re-christening of some of its junk food. This is how the legislative body of the world's sole superpower spent part of its day. Rest assured that this folly was not limited to the nation's elites; in a stirring example of the can-do spirit of enterprise that distinguishes America's grass-roots, restaurants throughout the nation had already begun to use the Francophobic phrase for the fries. Many have kept the name to this day.

Now, think of what triggered this self-abasing idiocy: the French government had merely respected the will of the overwhelming majority of the people at whose pleasure it serves; France's polite and legitimate refusal to wage a fraudulent war of choice was the fruit of its adherence to democratic principles. France is not averse to military interventions (witness its recent operations in Cote D'Ivoire and elsewhere), but this was a restrained, cautious France--France at its best, and, as such, it was demonised by American chauvinists (who, naturally, would still have reflexively vituperated the French as effete surrender-monkeys even if they had joined the pro-war mob). Ultimately, this vulgar comedy needs to be seen as a nation at its worst heaping scorn upon a nation at its best; this is chauvinism, and it forms part of the circumstantial unease that many Canadians felt towards post-9/11 America.

The second example hits closer to home. We will recall that, within hours of the WTC disaster, American media began to report a Canadian connection to the hijackers. To my knowledge, the origin of this urban legend has never been identified (I doubt if anyone has even looked for it--strangely, as I find the question fascinating), but its consequence was that, within a week, millions of Americans were convinced that the hijackers had infiltrated the U.S. from Canada. Despite John Ashcroft's later assurances to the contrary, this myth proved enormously resilient, propagated as it was by squalid right-wing talk-radio hacks and Canada-hating Republicans. As late as 2005, Newt Gingrich was still keeping it alive.

As not a shred of evidence was ever produced in support of the myth, it is hard not to assume that its noxious spores were spread by a visceral American fear and hatred of the "Other", and of a particular "Other"--that "commie-loving", secular, collectivist Siberia where all colours and creeds are allowed to mix promiscuously in an ungodly, insalubrious mélange adultère de tout ungraced by the discipline of the American Way of Life. The myth was a Scarlet Letter threaded upon an eccentric misfit by ignorant and frightened townsfolk.

The rationalisations came later, after Washington was forced to admit the obvious. The hijacking might not be our can to carry, but Canada had a "porous border", we were told. Our immigration policies were too lax; we let too many people in, many of them probably undesirable, some of them probably even "anti-American". We were told to clean up our act and tighten the tap on our newcomers (this from a nation that admits to having around twelve million illegal aliens).

Thus we were resented, not for doing anything actually dangerous, but for having a liberal immigration policy, the kind of policy Americans think they have--the one expressed by the kitsch mawkishness of the Statue of Liberty ("give us your non-Muslims, your huddled Caucasians yearning to breathe free") and gauzy, nostalgic visions of Ellis Island. Americans, at their vindictive, parochial worst, resented Canada for a liberality fully within the tradition that America was once a part of (and affected to lead), and some of us (Carolyn Parrish, for one) reacted with a vehemence born of understandable exasperation, not at America as such, but at its pettiness. This, too, illustrates the difference between rank chauvinism and contextual critique.

Chauvinism is an art. It's the one art Americans take seriously, and, thus, they excel at it. Someday, we may be competitive, but I doubt it. We're far too nice...to others, that is; we hate each other.