Posted on 10/15/2003 8:18:04 AM PDT by quidnunc
Anti-Americanism is a fact of daily life for Americans living in Toronto. The slurs aren't always directed at U.S. foreign policy, but at Americans in general, as in, "That's so American." Like most prejudice, this one is coded: "American" has come to mean pushy, self-promoting, and arrogant. Oh yes, and fat.
It's getting worse. Every encounter, every banal elevator conversation, every talk show, carries the risk of a barb, a stereotype.
Americans, I heard at a party just last week are "individualistic" (translation: greedy, out for yourself) and imperialistic — they want to conquer the world. Isn't it amazing that we're not supposed to mind?
At meetings of Democrats Abroad, a group affiliated with the U.S. Democratic party, which tries to help register U.S. Democrats to vote absentee, I have seen people fuming at this basso continuo of insult and prejudice.
"I get it day in and day out — and it's so ignorant," says Denise, a Toronto teacher. Anti-Americanism, she continues, is encouraged here. "It shows you're a loyal Canadian, that you're smart." Sadly, she says, it often infects her friendships with Canadians. "You might feel you have a lot in common with someone, and then they say something insulting. Without apology."
Peter, a writer, imagined Canada as a tolerant, compassionate society. Then he started living here.
"If the same kind of expressions were directed at people from other parts of the world, it would be considered racism," he says. Canadians, he points out, complain that their country scarcely registers on the U.S. radar screen. "But there's a lack of appreciation in Canada for the diversity and complexity in America. Stereotyping denies people a basic human right, which is to be considered a person, not a cartoon."
Fat? Has anyone been to Manhattan — or San Francisco or Los Angeles or umpteen other U.S. cities?
Of course, at Democrats Abroad get-togethers, the venting is mostly about other things: the Bush administration, its frightening first-strike foreign policy, its "deja voodoo" economics. Yet these gripes carry anguish, betrayal, indignation; Canadians are content to gloat.
Where does this infantile anti-Americanism come from? Is it a by-product of the Canadian inferiority complex — English Canadian, that is, for none of this is a problem in French Canada, among francophones or anglophones.
Is the put down of Americans, the main route to Canadian identity? It's hard to understand this toxic brew of shaky sanctimony spiked with envy and resentment. Some Americans have given up trying — they're planning to go back to the U.S.A.
Others, whose families and careers have taken root here, have come to feel more American after years of not thinking much about it. This has a lot to do with the defining event of our young century: the attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. If anyone doubted that Americans were different from Canadians, that day seared the message into our collective skin. Americans were attacked — because they were Americans.
In the sombre aftermath of those events, we sought other Americans, for only they could understand. That feeling remains, no matter how sickeningly President George Bush has exploited the events of 9/11.
Bush, the man Democrats call the Resident of the White House, used Sept. 11 to push his indefensible attack on Iraq. And, guess what, we were against it.
But that didn't make us any more acceptable to Canadians.
What about all those Canadians who spoke out against the frenzy of hate towards the U.S. during the buildup to the attack on Iraq?
Let's be clear — the attitude of those people reflected support for the war against Iraq. Cheered on by the likes of Ralph Klein and Ernie Eves, they were part of a small but vociferous pro-war pep rally. They were no allies of mine, or of the Democrats I knew.
But I felt equally out of place at the anti-war rallies in Toronto.
There was that knee-jerk anti-Americanism, the kind that closes its eyes to the existence of passionate, articulate critics of the war who live south of the border, of dissenting magazines, newspaper columnists, public radio and TV outlets that are small compared to Fox but that reach millions, along with lively Internet sites like Truthout.org .
Even the current slate of contenders for the Democratic candidate for president has a front runner, Howard Dean, who owes his success to his attacks on current U.S. policies.
But acknowledging such snowballing dissent in the U.S. makes many Canadian critics uncomfortable. It deprives them of the gratification of simple-minded, feel-good superiority.
With the U.S. as the multi-use scapegoat, they don't have to face their own problems, from pollution to ports, from too little affordable housing to too few people owning the media.
As an American, I can, and do, criticize U.S. policies and leaders. But I cannot de-Americanize myself.
Yet coming from America condemns you no matter what your political views are. Sure, if you say you never want to see the U.S. again, you express that kind of fatuous gratitude about living in Canada, you'll be welcomed here with exuberant, U.S.-bashing arms.
But to renounce your birth country is to lose your original sense of place; where you grew up, how it looked and smelled, the holidays. All that is part of you. It is your roots.
Every other immigrant in Canada has a right to his or her roots. Why not Americans?
Jacqueline Swartz is vice-chair of Democrats Abroad Canada.
The Lake of the Woods straddles the border, and parts of it are in both countries.
The Ontario game wardens arrest Americans fishing on the Canadian side if they are not staying at Canadian resorts even though they have valid Ontario fishing licenses.
That's the kind of people Cannadians are.
And a daily life for those at who side with the DNC.
So, what else is new? How's your family?
LOL. Hey Canada! Welcome to the club!
Yeh. America doesn't like the elitist democrats either. LOL. It sounds like the Canadian and American liberal elite are having a cat fight. Meeeeoooowwww. Hissssss.
One portion of this is simply a group-think phenomenon - an opinion or a set of opinions put on like a uniform in order to validate one's group membership. This happens a great deal on university campuses. And some of it is self-validating as well, as in "all the smart people I admire think this, hence I'll think this, hence I'm smart and admirable."
The sad part is that persons espousing this set of beliefs for this reason simultaneously cast their own self-image as independent-thinking and non-conformist. Largely, one supposes, because all the smart people do so...
Paul Johnson, the British historian, makes a good point about anti-Americanism in the new American Spectator print edition.
I'll post it on this thread but it'll take a while for me to type it out.
And, since they are already anti-American leftists, they blame the disparity, not on their own failings, but on something, anything, American. The American leftist disagrees, not because he hates America any less, but because even he knows the power of hard work and individual motivation. French Cabadians and Western Canadians are nowhere near as bad (or as anti-American) as the lefties in Ontario.
"A new factor intervened in the 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the demise of international Communism as an active force left the United States as the sole superpower and free enterprise, symbolized by the U.S. as the only ideology. Anti-Americanism, popular among the European left throughout the Cold War, together with its own self-hating version within the U.S., now entered a new and virulent phase powered by a sense of absolute despair. The Left now had no faith, no belief in a Utopian future, no allies to admire, no heroes and no causes to promote. In this negative mood, anti-Americanism, irrational, wholly destructive, violently emotional and protean in that it could easily be made to fit the circumstances of the movement, was the perfect formula to fill the Left’s vacuum of thought." – (Paul Johnson, “Street Fighting Men”, The American Spectator, October 2003)
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