One Cdn columnist's view on the Cda/US relationship.
PK
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...Columnists/Idx
Planet America has become a new place as a nation adapts itself to sudden vulnerability
By ROY MacGREGOR
Wednesday, April 2, 2003 - Page A2
'What planet are you from?"
Like a great many Canadians these days, gentle e-mailer, I'm not exactly sure.
However, I do know -- and have the receipts to prove it -- that I have spent the past few weeks on Planet America, and it is a profoundly changed place.
"This is not the United States that any Canadian drove through en route to Florida or Arizona," writes an American who lives in California but has Canadian parents and knows Canada intimately.
"What the Canadian media has failed to recognize following 9/11," he says, "is the fundamental -- repeat, fundamental -- change in the American mind into perpetual vulnerability."
You can sense that vulnerability everywhere.
But I also must add that in driving through New England and then through Texas, I also found Americans as Canadians have always known them: courteous, open, helpful, kind and very talkative.
They do not, however, talk about Canada unless asked, which suggests Canada is simply not on the American mind. Better to turn to e-mail, where any Canadian newspaper remark or observation on the U.S.-led war is instantly fired back on with an opinion -- leading one to conclude, since you don't pick up Canadian newspapers at the local gas station, that there is some Internet organization out there.
If you write about antiwar Americans, your e-mail box fills up instantly with the pro-war response.
If you write about pro-war Americans, your e-mail box fills up instantly with the antiwar response.
"You are really frightening," says one.
"As I was yawning my way through your column," writes another.
Canada gets called "France-lite" and "Cuba North."
"A nation that willfully, deliberately chooses to let another defend it, and you are," writes one e-mailer, "is a parasite and a hypocritical one at that. You hate our soldiers, and it is a disgrace."
A North Carolina man asks, seriously, if I think he will be physically safe if he still keeps to his annual camping and fishing trip up north. A woman from Michigan writes to say that she, for one, will not be coming back.
"I decided long ago," she says, "to never visit your country ever again after reading and hearing all those insults. I live in Michigan and I no longer feel welcome.
"I tell my co-workers, friends and relatives, too, because they don't read your papers to see how much Canadians hate us."
The most virulent reaction, however, comes from a column on the preponderance of right-wing radio talk shows -- a development that is to AM radio what CNN and Fox all-news broadcasting has been to television.
My fascination with this phenomenon is shared by another Canadian, who recently drove across the United States and found "state after state, virtually every station, all day, filled with talk-radio content that makes the Canadian Alliance seem like Quakers.
The style was always the same -- violent words, loud, shrill voices, and insults accepted as the supreme form of debate.
My wife's line was, 'I used to think America exported the worst of their culture to Canada. Now I realize we get the best of their culture.' "
Many wrote to say that talk radio exists as a cheap and effective alternative to the liberal domination of mainstream media, and a few wrote to say that there are a few lonely liberal voices on American radio, in places like San Francisco and Seattle, and on the small Pacifica Radio network.
The biggest debate raged over the National Public Radio (NPR) system, which one antiwar writer calls "National Pentagon Radio" but which dozens of pro-war writers dismissed as the lost left that speaks to no one any longer.
"Accept public radio for what it is," one man writes, "an aural Jurassic Park where socialist dinosaurs may roam freely in their natural habitat."
What becomes increasingly apparent is that political discourse has changed dramatically in the United States. One man calls this the era of "Smackdown Politics" -- the political equivalent of World Wrestling Entertainment. "If you're on the other side of an issue, they will scream, spit, throw chairs and sucker punch you -- just like in the WWE."
Others, somewhat more scholarly, are saying America has entered a new era of polarization, some seeking to tie it to the embittered 2000 presidential election results, some saying it is the new demographics of what they term the 20 U.S. "Cities of Ideas" versus everyone else who has been left behind.
Whatever, it is all baffling to a Canadian who has only his fingers and a radio dial to try to tune in a country fast changing -- and a Canadian who is grateful for any show that the great American sense of humour remains intact.
"The liberals ought to thank conservatives for talk radio," writes a man from somewhere in the States.
"The biggest killer in America is the driver who falls asleep at the wheel.
"A liberal driver would be more likely to have a heart attack than fall asleep.
"Talk radio is like 20 cups of coffee to the liberal driver."
rmacgregor@globeandmail.ca
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