Trying to Explain our Vexation with America

I was browsing around Substack when I came across an article by Paul Wells. Paul was a student in my grade 9 geography class, sometime around the mid-seventies. This was in Sarnia, which is cheek by jowl with Port Huron, Michigan. He mentions Sarnia in the post and how close we were to Port Huron and, indeed, ro the USA, in those days. We'd pay a mere quarter to drive over the bridge for ice cream, gas, tennis balls, a Whopper, or what have you.

Paul went on to become a well-known Canadian political columnist. Many years ago, I contacted him after reading one of his columns and found that he best remembered me for giving him lines to write for a minor misdemeanour committed from his seat in the back of the fifth row. But I won't comment directly to him now because on Substack that privilege is only available to paid subscribers, and one could become poor by paying for myriad subscriptions, no matter how deserving they might be.

His post, O Beautiful, attempts to explain to non-Canadians why we are so thoroughly vexed by Trump's America. He posted it here on Substack, but except for omitting one early paragraph, I have copied the column verbatim, below. It was not behind a paywall, so I am trusting that he wouldn’t mind. I have also emphasized (bolded) a couple of points: my emphasis, not Paul's.

And Paul, if you do happen to see this from some sort of feedback mechanism, I can tell you that you are able to subscribe directly to Britbox without involving Amazon Prime.

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O beautiful

I've never known how to be Canadian without being partly American. This year has felt like an amputation.

Last month a European ambassador stationed in Ottawa invited some Canadians over for lunch, so we could try to explain this elbows-up business to visiting colleagues from her country’s government. Why are Canadians so worked up about Donald Trump?, the visitors wanted to know. Why the ragtag boycott of American imports? Why the sudden drop in visits to the United States? What are you afraid of? What do you hope for?

All good questions. The unspoken subtext was, You Canadians really are being a bit silly. There are worse outrages in the world than Donald Trump’s Truth Social page. There are Americans who agree with you about Trump! Why can’t you just be neighbours? And I thought I heard a second layer of bewilderment below the first layer. You Canadians are always so pragmatic. Boring, even. And certainly not prone to mass hysteria. What’s got you all stirred up, all of a sudden?

I surprised myself, and I think I surprised my hosts, by getting emotional as I tried to explain it. On the eve of what promises to be an eventful weekend, I thought I’d revisit some of those thoughts.

. . . 

I grew up in Sarnia, five minutes’ drive from the bridge to Port Huron, Michigan. I used to shop at Full Moon Records in Port Huron because the selection of albums there was better than at home. Other friends liked to cross the bridge to eat something called “Chicken in the Rough,” whose pleasures I never sampled. One car in thousands might be stopped at the border for a thorough search, but for most of us, most of the time, the border barely existed.

My high school’s football coach recruited a star player from the Michigan side, who moved to Sarnia, or claimed to, for his last couple of years. We all called this kid “The Ringer.” He was tall and broad-shouldered and spoke English with a Michigan accent, which was unspeakably exotic, given that he’d grown up closer to me than I lived to Toronto.

Those of us who loved music or sports learned early that there was plenty of both on offer in Toronto and Detroit, but that given a choice, we’d have a better time in Detroit, because Detroit audiences would make themselves part of the show.

I guess I’m saying that for me, in those early years, the difference between Canada and the United States was sometimes hard even to perceive. Yet throughout this period my father preferred not to travel into the United States because he was furious about the U.S. war in Vietnam, long after it ended. I didn’t even notice this personal boycott was going on until years after it ended. He’d always take me to Detroit when I felt the need to go. The ways a father finds to express his love.

Most Canadians grow up juggling these contrasting impulses, the fascination and revulsion in the face of a neighbour that does everything to excess. Heroism, cruelty, creation, greed. Robin Williams said Canada is like a really nice apartment over a meth lab. Sure, but it’s as true to say our apartment is upstairs from the Algonquin Round Table or the Selma March or the 1995 Chicago Bulls or Emmett Till’s open casket. You can’t sum a place like that up without resorting to caricature. It’s too big. You just thread your way through it all, weaving some parts into your own sense of yourself, recoiling from others.

There’s a current of rote, simplistic anti-Americanism running through Canadian culture, but to me it’s never felt dominant. Most Canadians I know don’t define themselves in opposition to Americans. The relationship is far more intimate and ever-changing. I’ve never known how to be Canadian without being partly American. My first visits to the Village Vanguard and Carnegie Hall, Bourbon Street and Cape Canaveral, helped make me me. American books and movies influenced the way I talk and write.

I haven’t been to the United States since January and I don’t know when I’ll be back. I cancelled some US subscriptions. I won’t have anything delivered by Amazon. We kept Amazon Prime so my in-laws can keep watching Britbox. Who among us is pure.

It’s a shocking loss to me to write the United States off my list of travel destinations. It feels like an amputation. I’ve been to something like 40 states. I woke up in Edmonton on the morning of September 11, 2001; my first instinct was to rent a car, drive into Montana, and figure it out from there. I just wanted to be with Americans. When some visiting Europeans ask, politely but with a note of scorn, whether this elbows-up stuff is a rational response to the rantings of an addled U.S. President, I have to answer: Of course it isn’t rational. What are the chances of the United States annexing Canada? Zero. How sweeping and effective can a rag-tag, improvised, cultural boycott be? Not very. Whom does it hurt? Disproportionately, creatives who voted for Harris and will march against Trump this weekend. What’s the end game? Haven’t got one, sorry.

I told the visiting diplomats: When Donald Trump was re-elected, Canadians were surprised and concerned, more or less like people in a lot of other places. There was no particular reason for the Canadian reaction to go further than that. Even if he had simply imposed his stupid tariffs on Canada the same as on other places, it would have been a mechanical application of bad policy and not worth any emotional response.

But when the twice-elected President of the United States of America spends months on end telling anyone who’ll listen that my country doesn’t deserve to exist, and that message is amplified in the White House Briefing Room and on the border by the lipsticked Junior Brownshirt who adorns his surreal cabinet, my pretty strong response is: Let me help you out with your homeland security. I’ll stay home, thanks. You go ahead and stew in your own juices.

There’s not just anger in the response, or wounds to a national pride I haven’t always known I had in me. There’s something tragic in there too. Americans do tragedy in excess like they do everything else. We’re talking about a country that fought a civil war because a critical mass of people would rather fight a war than lose their slaves. Even as it was becoming a powerful force for good in the world, America has also always been a venue for horror. Both at the same time. Now its federal government is led by a man who says it’s “divisive” to study that contrast and learn from it.

This weekend, once again, the factions in the American drama will face off in American streets. I wish I could help the good guys. Most Canadians I know put their whole heart into the way they feel about the United States. We’re a little afraid of it, but mostly we’re worried for it.