America the Beautiful

The current state of the nation recalls Sarah Winchester, heiress to the considerable Winchester firearms fortune. The “rifle that won the West” left her with $20 million (US), but she believed that she was cursed by all the people who had been killed by it. She thought the only way to keep those spirits at bay was to build additions to her house. In 1884 she hired crews to work around the clock, seven days a week, for the next thirty-eight years. When Sarah died in 1922, the house had 160 rooms and forty staircases, many of which didn’t go anywhere, designed to throw her ghosts off the trail. It is an apt metaphor, ceaseless expansion as a way to avoid looking at domestic sins. In his 1964 novel, Herzog, Saul Bellow wrote of the America “[w]hich spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities.” Diverting attention and resources toward foreign goals has allowed the country to mask essential truths and internal contradictions, to live in a state that resembles adolescence.

The day after Katrina struck, Bush turned his rhetorical attention back to the war on terrorism. He has fuelled the concept of Manifest Destiny with biblical rhetoric and with patriotism, and at times they are indistinguishable. Patriotism may be attached to noble principles, but in practice it is often visceral and simplistic; that’s why it is so dangerous. In defining patriotism, Adlai Stevenson noted that it was often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

Going across the border now, there isn’t the envy I felt as a child. Buffalo, where Torontonians went to swing thirty years ago, is half the size it was then, a beleaguered city that looks like a border outpost being abandoned by a retreating army. Detroit remains blighted, its golden suburbs the result of endless flight. Even some of those perfect Rockwell towns have suffered. In Quebec I went from the lush, well-tended town of Sutton, to Richford, Vermont, an impoverished place that still has its great white houses, but the paint is peeled, and the flags are faded in the yards. The patriotism that I admired as a child seems a tainted commodity now.

Most of my first year was spent on the mit campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while my father was finishing graduate school. My pregnant mother had given birth to me in Fort Frances, Ontario, my father’s hometown, where she had the assistance of my grandmothers and I had the sanctity of Canadian citizenship. I lived in Fort Frances, nominally my hometown, for four months before returning to Boston.

After my father graduated, we moved to Winnipeg. In the summers, we returned to Fort Frances to visit my paternal grandparents and swim in Rainy Lake. The town is on the American border and has a twin city—International Falls, Minnesota, home of Tammy Faye Bakker, the lapsed evangelist and celebrated makeup artist. At the time, you could walk across a footbridge into the United States and buy firecrackers and Hershey’s bars and attract no real interest from the customs officials on either side. That great boast—the longest unguarded border in the world—is largely gone now. It will soon require a passport to cross, shutting Canada off to the nearly 80 percent of Americans who don’t hold passports, and closing the United States to the 62 percent of Canadians who don’t carry one.

Our special relationship is in jeopardy. The remarkable trade numbers that we point to to prove our fraternity—the almost $1 billion that changes hands every day—are now overshadowed by Chinese trade. In July China became the largest exporter to the United States. As America works to seduce that vast market, Canada becomes the practical first wife, China the perfect lover. Not just an alluring trade partner, China can stand in as an ideological and military threat, another reason to keep that military economy humming. America thrives when it is in opposition to something. Alone, it begins to drift.

The relationship between Canada and the United States, which has ebbed and flowed over the years—moments of ideological harmony (the slightly maudlin duo of Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan) interspersed among friction (Kennedy called Diefenbaker a “prick”; Dief thought Kennedy was a “boastful sonofabitch”)—is again at a low ebb. Polls indicate that Canada is wary of Bush’s self-described “wartime presidency,” his flirtation with a twelfth-century Crusade, and the oddly Maoist energy of the Patriot Act that, among other protective measures, claims the government’s right to examine the books that individuals buy and borrow.

When the nations were bickering, politicians sometimes chuckled that we are like an old married couple. As the nervous war bride, we went to bed with a republic and woke up beside an empire.

There is much talk of empire these days, arguments in favour of or against, but with the tacit assumption that America has become one. Gore Vidal has argued that the American empire isn’t a recent thing, that 1947 was the year when the country rejected the limitations of a republic and embraced the seductions of empire. It was Harry Truman, a former Missouri haberdasher and perhaps the unlikeliest president in what has become a strong field, who passed the National Security Act in 1947, effectively creating a national security state and militarizing the economy. Since then, Vidal noted, America has never been without a war. Some were hot (Korea, Vietnam), some cooler (Iran, Chile, Angola, Grenada), one cold (the Soviet Union). There have been wars on drugs, on terrorism, and, during election years, on itself.

It was also Truman who created the cia, which quickly evolved into America’s id. Through its various incursions—Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1965—and with its support for various South American dictators during the 1970s, and through the assassination plans and coup attempts, the cia was the way to maintain distance between official policy and covert action. The cia fought the dirty wars, which were ongoing, and tended to involve the spectre of communism, and tended to deal in the “moral evil and good” that William Wordsworth wrote of.