November 2005

Having recently been through psychoanalysis myself, I was touched by Wendy Dennis’s examination of its beauties and faults. Dennis made me appreciate how fortunate I was to have found a senior psychiatrist with whom I could relate honestly and openly. Both of these ingredients are the sine qua non of not only successful therapy, but also all intimate relationships. The only thing I would add to Dennis’s piece is that a sense of humour and encouraging non-judgmental friends are significant ingredients in the therapeutic process. There are no quick fixes to the healing of our interior lives.
Jim Streeter
Toronto, Ontario

The Ragged Sail Of Empire
James Laxer contends that the resources underpinning the American drive to spread liberal democracy—and with it a form of free-market economic policy amenable to US interests—are quickly eroding (“The Rising Fall Of The American Empire,” September). This point is certainly commonsensical. Even as it approaches the beachhead of greater international peace, security, and co-operation, the landing craft on which US interests sail (cobbled together from such disparate materials as patriotism, pluck, and paper currency) has begun to take on water. Mr. Bush’s attempts to spare the ruling class their share of the burden of the “imperial” project—a historical first in time of conflict—is as indicative as anything of how shaky the uss Empire has become.

Suppose we adopt Laxer’s rhetorical assumption that the cultivation of American liberal-democratic values abroad will continue to be an inevitable, feasible, and justifiable priority for the United States and the West. His proposed solution to the impending bankruptcy of the US imperial project then contradicts his own assessment of that project’s origins. Laxer ventures that it is a genuine subscription to the doctrine of American exceptionalism—that nation’s earnest belief in the ascendancy of its guiding political, social, and economic models—that drives the United States on the course of empire-building. Yet he submits that the only sustainable means of propagating the American model is to hand the project over to an international institution, the United Nations.

Suppose we further adopt, as Laxer does, the hoary cliché of the United States as Rome. The idea that American exceptionalism can be circumvented by an international body, professing to espouse American ideals, would be akin to Rome allowing the barbarians to run the world, so long as they did so according to the Roman model. The Romans would countenance no obeisance to an idea that the Other had anything like the ability to properly govern themselves.

As demonstrated by foreign policy dictates like the Monroe Doctrine—and more recently by the popular American conception that “Old Europe” objections to the Iraq war were somehow “wrong” —the same sensibility is an integral element of American exceptionalism. Furthermore, when God is so solemnly invoked as the source of American pre-eminence, as Laxer notes, for what reason need the US cede sovereignty to an assemblage of the ostensibly less blessed great unwashed?

Convincing the United States to place the American imperial project in the hands of the United Nations would entail an outright renunciation of the exceptionalist ideology. Belief in the inevitability of the American value system would need to be thrust aside. But therein lies the crux: if the United States does break with notions of the ascendancy of the American way, what rhetorical value will the liberal-democratic model retain for its inheritors to draw on?
Sean Carrie
Toronto, Ontario

James Laxer is wrong to call the current United States an “empire.” The United States is not an empire in the traditional sense since it lacks formal outposts, and it is not one in the currently fashionable sense of an amorphous, decentralized system of rule. We all know where the current centre of global power lies: just beneath Canada on the map.