Americans: Hate 'em or hate 'em

HEATHER MALLICK

Saturday, September 11, 1999

The news that Onex's "Canadian solution" to our airline crash will deliver a merged Air Canada and Canadian Airlines to American Airlines on a tray is just the latest humiliation this country is expected to absorb without complaint.

As The Globe and Mail's Eric Reguly pointed out in a masterful summing-up last week, Americans are chomping at our most successful corporations at a stunning rate: Bell Canada, MacMillan Bloedel, Newcourt Credit, even little Club Monaco. And owning our employers is the least of what they have planned for us.

Americans are so viral. They come at us in so many ways, via their culture (let's be honest and start calling it "peasant" instead of "pop"), their vicious corporate style that has turned their own citizens into serfs, and their faked Republicrat democracy. Even the smallest attempt to fight them off -- with Canadian content quotas, for instance -- brings out their Jack Valenti thugs. We wish to retain our marketing boards and they run whining to the World Trade Organization.

Whatever defence we come up with, the Americans mutate and crawl back. The upmarket explanation for this is "globalization." Why not call it what it is, a dressed-up excuse for Americans having the world their way. The American way isn't even good for Americans any more, but it's tragic for us.

I am not anti-American, I used to say hotly when people accused me of exactly that. But, of course, I am now, the older I get and the more I see of them. The only people I know who aren't anti-American are (a) very polite, (b) rich or gonna be rich if it kills them, or (c) not yet laid off.

Americans show themselves to the world mainly through their television, and yet they wonder why foreigners detest them. Everyone has a personal last straw, and mine was one of those relentlessly optimistic home-improvement shows on a wonderful new product: the "maintenance-free white picket fence." You guessed it: By maintenance-free, they meant plastic. It snapped together. What astonished me was that they were still calling it a fence. And somehow you just knew that next summer, when it sagged and yellowed, they wouldn't see it, and when a light breeze carried it away, they'd be really surprised.

Americans! Even their fencing is ersatz, like their president. Their literature hasn't counted since the 1930s, their newspapers are so soft you could lick them out of a cone, their movies are geared to infants, and you wouldn't watch their network news if they read it naked. Their relentless jargon injections have turned the English language into a corpse. Their law enforcement is so pathetic, they even have serial mass murderers -- they get to do it twice. They love guns so much that the begging of their combined police chiefs still can't stop the legal sale of guns with special handles that obscure fingerprints.

How low can a once-great nation sink?

Americans have even made themselves physically ridiculous. When you walk around Paris, the memory you bring home with you is not of the Seine or that embarrassing dog problem, it's les fesses enormes,the huge buttocks of the American tourists. They go one way, their owners go another. These people look like they're being stalked by something horrible, and to what purpose? It's not as if they enjoyed the process.

If you ever want evidence that Americans are the most ineducable people on Earth, read the amazon.com Web site that purports to sell books and offers "reviews" written by actual readers. It's terrifying. Most of them are complaints that they were forced to read this damn book by some hated authority figure like a teacher, or Oprah, and it doesn't have a plot they can follow, so watch out.

I just don't get the ending, one wrote angrily, and I wanted to cry. He was talking about The Great Gatsby. "Gradually, I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world."

I think of the bounty Americans had, an Edenic landscape clogged with visionaries, some with a notion that the freedom of slaves was worth a fight to the death.

And then I think how the U.S. Postal Service just issued a Barbie stamp.

Americans themselves call it dumbing down, but I think it's more a matter of catering to Southerners. My theory is that the United States was ruined by air conditioning. That's what made possible the industrial rise of the South and finally allowed what was basically a swamp populated by yokels to be taken semi-seriously.

American reporter David Drehle, in the course of a very depressed book on Florida's death row, has a simpler explanation. He says America occasionally gives itself a shake and the scum settles to the bottom. My impression is that tiny bubbles rise, too, isolated outbreaks of intelligence that thrive in the colder climates of the Eastern Seaboard, Seattle, and parts of the Midwest. This explains Harper's Magazine, some fine, subversive rock 'n' roll, and a Web site known as The Onion.

The Onion is a parody of a newspaper. What it does is offer fictional reporting of American life but just sufficiently off centre to be the national ravings of a crazed people. Serial killers recall their dead neighbours fondly as "quiet people who kept to themselves." Bright attractive graphics map out homelessness by income.

The genius of The Onion is that it is a parody of something that is already a parody. Much of the misery that Americans are so eager to export to the rest of the world is the result of an ideological confusion that is self-destructive to the point of madness.

Profit isn't everything. As the world's funniest travel writer, Bill Bryson, has pointed out, most worthwhile things don't even begin to pay their own way. Like traffic lights. Schools. Drains. Old people.

It's a wonder America has any.