Presidents

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are appearing in Toronto today in an event billed as “A Conversation with Presidents.” Tickets aren’t cheap (though the word is that the economy is hindering sales and prices have been dropping). Can you imagine the equivalent occurring in the States—“A Conversation with Prime Ministers”? A double bill of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien--we’d have to pay to get Americans to come, or offer them free maple syrup, or an autographed photo of Pamela Anderson wearing a mountie uniform. Of course, this begs the question of why Canadians go to such “conversations” in the first place. The business class, it seems, are the ones most interested; perhaps they’re intrigued by these ultimate CEOs and Deciders who have a Rolodex (yes, I know I’m dating myself here) of the well-heeled and well-connected. In contrast, the Canadian Prime Minister rules over a northern country with a GDP of no more than the state of California, and who in their right mind would want to hear the Governor of California? (Ooops, scratch that.) The President of the day is the holder of the one political position—more so than the Prime Minister of Canada—that most influences the success of Canadian enterprises. But ex-Presidents? Paying big bucks to see ex-Presidents? I’m tempted to say, “Canada, get a life.” But I won’t.

Two Canadian Moments

Last night one of my sons, myself and a friend were walking on the sidewalk along a tree-lined street when we came to a 4-way stop at precisely the same time as a car pulled up. We waited for the car to go through the intersection before crossing. The car didn’t move. We didn’t notice at first but, when we did, we waved to him to go, as we were in no hurry; he waved to us to cross, as he was probably in no hurry as well. We smiled and then waved to him to go; he waved to us to cross. We waved to him to go; he waved to us to cross. I don’t know for how long this went on. It was as if we were caught in a “Who’s More Polite?” contest, and damn if we were going to lose! We waved to him to go; he waited and finally drove through the intersection (probably cursing us under his breath). We then strolled across the intersection thinking nothing of it…

Then today I had to cross a street and, not wanting to go where the crosswalks were, which would have been out of my way, I decided to jay-walk. I started across just as a taxi on my side of the street started doing a U turn. The cab completed its turn and ended up facing the opposite direction just as I arrived in the middle of the road and was set to cross in front of him. I waved to him to continue; he waved to me to cross, I waved for him to continue, he waved….Are you detecting a pattern here?

I also don’t know how long this episode lasted either, but when it finally resolved itself, I started laughing outloud. Without any conversations happening, here's what the conversations sounded like:

You go,
No, you go.
Please, I insist, you go.
No no, I'm fine, you go. Please.
Thank you, but please, go ahead.
Thank you, thank you, but you must know by now that I’m Canadian and I am going to stand here forever until the glaciers melt and the seas rise and the sun burns out while I wait for you to go.
Yes, yes, that’s all well and good kind sir, but unfortunately I’m Canadian too, and as you arrived at this intersection before me it’s obvious that you must precede ahead of me and I will wait until the universe expires and all matter returns back into the great void from whence it came.

I have no qualifications for saying how much time Canadians spend being polite with each other, but whatever it is—trust me—it’s too much. Could you imagine how kick-ass this country could be if it’d just stop waiting to let the other guy go? Waiting can’t do much good for the Gross Domestic Product. I don’t know if waiting is tabulated into the measurement by Stats Canada, but it ought to be. GDP? Up here it stands for Great Deeds of Politeness, one after another, after another, after...Mostly I love it, but sometimes you gotta wonder…

Mosiac or Melting Pot

As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.

Eugene McCarthy

Lately there’s been a fair amount of talk up here about the duelling metaphors we apply to the issue of immigration: the melting pot or the mosaic. Each is, in its own way, shorthand for all sorts of complex policy issues—from language ability to job skills to the politics of one’s homeland. The argument is getting air time because the current Minister of Immigration wants a greater focus on integration: more melting pot, less mosaic. But since metaphor is far more interesting than the dull prose of policy, let me use the metaphors to suggest that Canada is destined for the mosaic.

A melting pot assumes we lose ourselves, our particular identities, into the larger whole that becomes our new identity. We leave an old self for a newer and shinier edition that many others have also chosen to own and that we will, in theory, come to cherish and honour. My great-grandfather got off the boat speaking only his foreign tongue, his son came of age and “Americanized” the family name and then his son, my father, learned only English and became like any other native-born boy. The goal was to be seen as fully American, to bleed red, white and blue. And that’s what we did. The echoes of the old country were cut from the family tree like a rotten branch.

Canada’s history, however, starts from a different place(see the April 16th blog) than the traditional American hunger for assimilation. Canada talks about the three founding nations of the country. The United States has no such equivalent. It “united” against an enemy—the old country from which it came (and to which Canada remained loyal). While Canada has “the recognition of difference” in its DNA, the United States has unity in its. I can still hear Obama saying--at the first speech where he received national attention--how there aren’t Red States and Blue States but rather the UNITED States. Every day, as a kid in my small elementary school, I recited the Pledge of Allegiance: “…one nation, under God, indivisible.” It’s indoctrination, reminder, and a diagnosis all at once.

For those Canadians who are attracted to the idea of a melting pot, now would be an appropriate time to pause and consider the lessons of the past. The visit last week by the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations to Rome to meet the Pope is the result of a misguided attempt by Canada to push for the melting pot. Young Aboriginal Canadians were removed from their families, starting in the mid 19th century, and sent to Residential Schools run by the Church under the auspices of the Department of Indian Affairs. A legacy of abuse began, under a policy known as “aggressive assimilation,” that eventually led to both a formal apology to aboriginal Canadians by the government last year as well as the recent visit to the Pope. The goal of the policy was to teach the Indians English, convert them to Catholicism, all in the hopes of what has been called “killing the Indian in the child.”

Canada is still paying for that tragic wounding it inflicted on its native citizens. You cannot create a melting pot out of founding nations. Nations—be they Inuit, Quebecois or Cree—do not yearn to lose their heritage to become part of something new and improved. They do not need to become something other than who they already are.

Canada’s historical mosaic gives it a kind of strength to allow others to enter through its doors and slowly create their Canadian selves. The ability to both sustain one’s heritage and become genuinely Canadian is an immigrant journey that is rare and precious; Europe would give its right hand to figure out what happens here each year. When the 2nd generation goes to school, mixes with others, picks up on the cues in the environment, “Canadian” seeps into their pores of its own accord; most marvellous of all, they understand that their native cultures—Lebanese, Somali, Ukranian—don’t have to seep out. What doesn’t happen of its own accord, however, is the capacity for cultures to appreciate one another and to welcome difference without fear. These things Canada has had to learn, more than most, simply to stay intact. It is a wisdom and a way of being not to be lightly tinkered with.

Virus as Teacher

Yesterday there must have been some kind of planetary alignment:

--The Pope expressed solidarity with Aboriginal Canadians;
--Obama celebrated 100 days in office;
--Israel celebrated its independence;
--The pandemic alert went to Level 5.

So the Christians apologize to the Indians, the Jews are happy to have a homeland, a black man is thriving in the White House and a virus infects us all equally.

What’s the lesson? Difference is a problem for us. The virus? It could care less. If we can’t get it through our heads we are one people of many hues, maybe the indiscriminate cruelty of a virus will clarify the matter.

Blame Canada

Okay, am I paranoid…or is there a pattern emerging in the past few months?

--Janet Napolitano, head of U.S. homeland security, says that some of the 9/11 Hijackers came from Canada. Canada tries to straighten out the matter, then John McCain reinforces the myth.
--Natasha Richardson dies in a tragic skiing accident in Quebec and some U.S. pundits blame “socialized medicine.”
--Worst of all, a month ago Fox News featured a late night show—Red Eye— slagging the Canadian military. I didn’t think it worth commenting about at the time, as it seemed like a mindless, media wingnut spouting inanities at the wee hours of the evening…

But now it extends up to the Secretary of Homeland Security and she’s a member of the new President’s team and, and, well, he loves us…doesn’t he? So what gives?

Taken all together, I think the truth is clear. It’s been staring me in the face all these years and I haven’t noticed. As much as I hate to say this, Canada is a land of vile terrorists, gutless soldiers and incompetent doctors. There, I’ve said it. I’ve broken through my denial. Thank you America for showing me the light. I once was blind, but now I see. I’m moving back ASAP…

Iconography North and South

A painting by one of the Group of Seven is going up for sale later this month. If you don’t know who the Group of Seven are, you’re likely not Canadian.

The Group of Seven are the hero-painters of Canadian art. They paint, some would say, the Canadian soul, with an emphasis on "Canadian." One friend of mine even claims that only Canadians really “get” the Group of Seven. It’s an intriguing hypothesis. If others don’t “get” their art and Canadians do, how do we “get” it?

My friend who makes this claim has paddled rivers and lakes for many years, from the lakes of Algonquin Park to the rivers of the high arctic. He’s done a fair bit of mountain climbing too. Perhaps he is tailor-made to “get” the Group of Seven, painters who took their canvas and brushes into the Canadian wilderness and painted what they saw. But since few Canadians have my friend’s wilderness resume and yet also “get” the Group of Seven, it must be something else beside one’s backcountry bona fides. I submit that the "something else" is the myth Canadians have of Canada and themselves.

Look at this classic Group of Seven painting, September Gale by Arthur Lismer: a tree in the foreground, standing resolutely in the midst of wilderness, not a soul around, only the water, the wind, the emptiness. The colours are muted, the sky not particularly inviting. The wind has raised the water into whitecaps. It is not a day I would want to go skinny-dipping in the lake or even, for that matter, to try paddling across it. THIS is Canada, cries the myth. Believe it. Canada looks like this; the rest is just, shhhh, Pretend.

The truth of the matter is that Canadians live mainly in Pretend--the industrialised, urban centres along the 49th parallel. Canadians don’t pretend to NOT live in Pretend; they know its where their homes are but it’s not, to borrow from the national anthem, their native land; Canada’s native land is out THERE. Where? you ask. Why there, just look at the Group of Seven paintings. There! Ah yes, the Group of Seven paints what Canadians think of as their native land: those empty spaces/places that make Canada Canada. Canadians get the Group of Seven because they paint Canada (perhaps they even invented it), by golly…even if most Canadians haven’t seen it.

I began wondering what, in the visual arts, is the equivalent of the Group of Seven in the U.S. The artists in what’s called the Hudson River School did all sorts of lush, pastoral paintings where wilderness was depicted as gorgeous (rather than wild). In any case, I don’t believe their work has much resonance today. Could it be Pop Art? It has its share of iconic images, but it holds none of the nation’s mythologies. When I turn to individual artists, names like Norman Rockwell, Frederic Remington and photographer Ansel Adams come to mind. One could argue that each claims a certain piece of American mythology.

If I cast them aside, however, it’s clear that what remains is not a school of art but a singular iconic image that stands above all the rest: American Gothic by Grant Wood. I can’t think of another painting that has been more spoofed, imitated, parodied than American Gothic. When I take it seriously rather than as satire, it reeks of good ole American self-reliance. Life isn’t easy, we work hard, we’re decent god-fearing folk. We don’t ask much and know that if we work hard, we'll meet our modest needs. America likes to think this is where it got its DNA. The myth America holds of itself lies in those somber, earnest faces.

Of course it’s a description that seems to bear little, if any, resemblance to America now. The family farm has disappeared, corporations work the land, needs haven’t been particularly modest. It would seem that the iconic imagery of both countries is but faintly connected to the daily lives of its citizens.

However, that might change for American Gothic. How we see any particular work of art changes as our context changes, and America has a new and painful context. American Gothic was painted at the start of the Great Depression, and given what American is now going through, the painting may resonate again in a way that it hasn’t for many years. Suddenly what was once spoofed may become all too familiar. The painting has people at the center, standing straight (I could say as opposed to gay, but that seems too easy, so I won’t), connected to the land as cultivators, but the house—domesticity—is clearly more central than the land. We know the land must be there, but this couple is about the house…as is America. One could say that a-house-for-every-family IS the essence of the American dream. It is also one of the key players in the current economic collapse. The dream of home ownership, implied in American Gothic and acted out in the past fifteen years, has made American Gothic relevant once again

Canada's iconic imagery, in stark contrast, is a world of wilderness, without a human footprint, uninviting. There is nothing domestic about it. The Group of Seven will continue to hold the legend of the Canadian land as a place apart, as the defining inheritance of its citizens. The land hasn’t left, and as long as it remains, those of us living in Pretend will find the Group of Seven as relevant as ever.

Protest in front of Parliament

I'm sitting in a local restaurant waiting for breakfast. An old gentleman, who looks like he must be a regular, comes up to me to say hello. He has mistaken me for someone else. We introduce ourselves anyway and start chatting. He's in his early 80's and, though his memory isn't--by his own admission--particularly great, it's obvious he's thoughtful and still sharp.

Somehow the conversation takes a turn to the protest in front of the Parliament. For over a week now Tamil-Canadians have lined up along Wellington Street to protest against the Canadian government's actions (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) in challenging the Sri Lankan government to stop its military offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeslam, a group Canada has labelled a terrorist organization. The protest includes hunger strikers, some of whom have been taken to hospital. While the protest has been peaceful, it has also created traffic problems for commuters.

The elderly gentleman is quite animated about the protest. "Can you imagine this happening in America?" he asks. "People parked in front of the U.S. Congress for a week or so, tying up traffic and being a nuisance--they wouldn't stand for it; some heads would knock, that's for sure. And Canada, what do we do? Nothing. Not a thing. How come nobody is willing to restore order?"

Somehow that sounds about right. Yeah, in the States I would guess something would happen..and it would reverberate with the potential for violence. Where I differ is in his assessment of Canada. The "nothing" it's doing is precisely the correct something. Ottawa police have been watching the protest regularly and have said it's legal; as long as people are peaceful, the protest can remain. The "something" Canada is doing is simply to allow it to happen--peaceful assembly, citizens engaged in an act of citizenship.

Canada is a nation of hyphenated Canadians (see the blogpost of Feb13th); our caring is dual. When that caring is expressed for our countries of origin, it is neither inappropriate nor unpatriotic towards Canada. Canada seems to understand this about has much as any nation. I would claim that Canada has gone further in accommodating difference than other countries simply because it has had to. Although Canadians often see the never-ending, complicated dance with Quebec as profoundly aggravating, the gift of its founding difference--French and English--is a unique capability as a nation to adapt and accommodate. That Tamil-Canadians have been protesting in front of Parliament for a week and tying up traffic is a sign, not of Canada's weakness, but its strength. It is a much more evolved kind of order than the order my new friend from this morning wanted restored, and Canada can be proud of that.