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The urban mythology has dominated, and says, "Why are you living in the country? The country is for cross-country skiing, at most." But on the other hand, I think that it's worth taking an extra step back from that idea of the American mythology and to stress that the American mythology is not really American at all. It's actually European.
The fundamental problem is that it's much more complex than believing we are the inferior party on this continent and that we only came into existence because we didn't want to be American. This is one of the garbage arguments that people like Donald Creighton are responsible for, which is totally untrue when you look at what Canadians were saying in the 1830s, '40s and '50s. People imagined the country. LaFontaine and Baldwin had very clear ideas about what they were doing. The movement was a positive movement, not a negative movement, and it wasn't a British imperial movement either. We weren't doing this for the Queen. We had an idea of what we could do here, and it was very different from what the British might have imagined.
You need to step back from this idea that we exist as a negative reflection of the United States and always did—the idea that they are the real American experiment and that's why their mythology dominates this continent. The United States isn't American at all. The United States is the perfect child of Europe. It's the European nation state as dreamt of in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: monolithic, the notion of manifest destiny, the drive to conquer anybody who gets in your way, sacred borders, the whole structure of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. All of this is the North American adaptation of ideas that came from Rousseau and Locke.
This is Europe, applied as the Europeans were never able to do it. Why? Because from the eighteenth century on, every time the French army crossed the French border into Germany or wherever, they didn't get very far, or they got there for ten years and then had to come back. Finally, by 1945 they'd killed enough of each other that they gave up on the idea of a monolithic Europe.
Europe gave up on the idea of Europe in 1945 and leapt backward to a mediaeval idea of Europe. This is the idea that there's a continent in which there are various groups living side-by-side with different characteristics. Europe isn't Europe at all anymore.
Canada—if you examine what we've done here, because of the poverty, because of the North, because of 70,000 Loyalists arriving and finding 70,000 Francophones and hundreds of thousands of natives —held no possibility of subsuming one mythology. Because of that, right from the beginning, the positive side of the Canadian experiment was coming to terms with Place, with the role of the unconquered place, with several groups living together in that place.
Actually, we're not being penetrated by American mythology. We're being penetrated by eighteenth and nineteenth century European mythology. The United States is Europe. We say we're more European. Europeans have already given up on that idea of Europe. They've gone to this mediaeval idea, which is the closest thing they have to the Canadian idea. Canadians, because we've had to come to terms with where we are, are really a profoundly American nation. We're much more American than the United States. A temperate nation doesn't need to have a great relationship to place because it conquers the place and reconstructs it to its own model. We can't reconstruct this place in our own image.
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Specifically, I'd like to know if there any Canadian-American traditions (language, gastronomy, sports) and what the long-standing Canadian-American culture is, if there is one. If there isn't one, why is this? Or do they all sort of fit in/shy away from celebrating their common heritage with other Canadians, like Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and so many comedians and actors?
I realize this may be a very ignorant question but it fascinates me. Thank you for any help in this matter.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:25 PM on May 27, 2004