A Canadian flees suicidal Canada for … suicidal America

A former Canadian, now an American, bemoans that the U.S. is becoming like the Canada he fled:

You write that “We’re not a country any more” (“Defending Hanukah in the White House”). Elsewhere you cite Bush:

“We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world.

“Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey … and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende.”

Now compare this with what the Canadian Prime Minister said just a few days ago:

“During a series of interviews with Chinese media organizations, Mr. Martin attempted to explain to the interviewer how important the Chinese Canadian community is to the country. In fact, he announced that Canada has geographically moved its borders to be closer to them. ‘What we really are saying is we’re a major Asian country,’ Mr. Martin told Omni TV.”

Why is it that both leaders of North America have the very same attitude towards the makeup of their countries?

Originally I’m a Canadian who came to the U.S. twelve years ago. One of the things that irked me about Canada was that it had come to be redefined as a country in the following terms. Canada was to become a mirror image of the United Nations—a universal container of diverse peoples, cultures and values. There was not any longer a core, historical definition of “Canada” as a nation. Instead it was to become a geographic shell which in a protean fashion would be an open space for the world’s complexion and mixtures. This would be in accord with the liberal human “experiment” in which any and all races, cultures and religions could co-exist in a physical space thus “proving” that human diversity could abide with each other within an abstract political framework. In short Canada would be a paean to a universal “space” transcending political conflict. In essence a Canadian becomes fully Canadian by being non-Canadian. The traditional, historic Canadian identity is submerged in favor of a plurality of nationalisms.

So I come to the U.S. and what do I see? The same damned thing! Self-denial. Being American has become an abstract universalism to accommodate all peoples, languages and cultures. And this ideology is to be exported under the guise of democratization (e.g. Iraq) through the universalization of abstractions such as “freedom.”

Now what has shocked me is to what extent the American media has bought into this phenomenon. At first it may appear that there is a conflict between Bush and the media. But on closer inspection, take a look at the state of advertising on television today. Almost every single ad shows a gathering of different races and languages. As if this reflected the racial and cultural divisions and proportions of the U.S. numerically (which is a statistical misrepresentation). There is never an ad showing two white children playing, it always has to be a white child, a black child, and an oriental one. These days when shoppers are interviewed in stores for ads, one hears markedly Latino accents (or an Indian one, a Caribbean one). This never happened in the ‘50s. What has changed? On the surface this seems innocent enough implying that the U.S. is composed of “many types of people.” But in reality this is a concerted effort by the media to acclimatize viewers to the idea that the USA is a universal “shell,” a global “container” in a certain physical space. The implication is that where we are physically is less important than who is here culturally and how these cultures inter-relate. To the extent that it is now very popular to show interracially married couples in TV commercials (bio-diversity at work here?).

In some respects this is the liberal experiment to demonstrate that under certain political conditions and within a civic framework, the nations of this world can be made to co-exist racially, culturally, linguistically—the U.S. and Canada as living proofs of this thesis. However in order to achieve this effect, the historic and traditional particularity of these two nations has to be submerged. In this respect the neoconservative plays a role when he elevates abstract universal principles as the defining characteristics and attributes of a nation.

Now when “universalism” becomes the guiding social and political fact, then “inclusiveness” has to exclude any particularity or majoritarian stance. Equals are equals in spite of numbers. Universalism signifies that all races, cultures, languages and sexes have to be elevated to the same standard of inclusion. Frankly as a Canadian (now an American) living in the south, I have been shocked at how easily businesses and organizations have climbed aboard the affirmative action bandwagon. Not only to accommodate the elevation of races, but the inclusion of the gay culture. Almost every major corporation that I have encountered here in the U.S. heavily promotes affirmative action on a daily basis through their human resource departments and holds classes for new employees about sexual toleration and openness towards those of dissimilar sexual preferences. And what is the basis of this—a cultural and psychological mindset that emphasizes “universality”—the “in-gathering” of all things.

Growing up in Canada, we as students had it drummed into us that the United Nations was to be the confluence towards which all nations flowed and that Canada internally should reflect what the UN represented on a global scale. Imagine my shock at seeing first-hand the U.S. falling into line with this type of thinking—not only in the liberal Democrat camp (which was to be expected) but in the Republican party and major business corporations. It is as if this “universalist” mindset has “universally” prevailed and is flowing “spirit-like” through all western institutions. And so George Bush and Paul Martin, while seemingly different in political persuasion, wind up making the very same statements in public! Yikes!!!!! There is a monolithic psyche at work here…

Sorry for my long-windedness, but as a Canadian-born living in the U.S. now as an American, needed to vent my feelings to an American who could understand the situation. Thanks for listening.

Regards (and Merry Christmas—should that be in very, very small lettering?),

Doug Traverse
Atlanta, GA

My reply:

This is very good. In particular, your account of how Canada transformed itself is very telling. I’ve never heard it put this way, that the Canadians literally made the UN their national ideal and model, and said, “We’re going to make Canada like the UN.”

However, all the things you’re now noticing to your shock about America were already happening in the ‘90s and ‘80s. True, they have kept intensifying since then, so they’re more noticeable now.

I think the reason you didn’t see them earlier was that, in the process of becoming an American, you very naturally needed not to see the things about America that would bother you and get in the way of your adopting this new nationality, so you blocked them out of your consciousness. But with the passage of time, they’ve become more apparent to you.

I underwent a similar thing when I became a Christian. I knew vaguely that there were all sorts of the things about the Episcopal Church that I didn’t like, and that if I focused on them, they would hang me up. But as I said at the time, a door had opened for me, and I was going to walk through that door. So I deliberately put aside my usual critical attitudes and withheld my attention from the bad things about the Episcopal Church that would get in the way of my becoming a Christian. Also, the church where I was baptized and became a parishioner was very different from the Episcopal Church as a whole, remaining clear of the usual liberal politics, homosexualism, and so on. But, sadly, over time, these things became more manifest in my parish, even as the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church USA went from being evil (as I put it to myself even at the beginning) to, with the approval of the ordination of an openly practicing homosexual as a bishop in 2004, outright non-Christian.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 10, 2005 12:47 PM | Send