This year’s race to the Oval Office has seen infinite spectacles, slogans, and soundbites which could be collected and made into modern art.
From the supposed vantage point of Canada—a view from above the storm as opposed to one from its chaotic inside—it’s easy to tune in to Republican candidate Donald Trump projectile-vomiting insults at other Americans without an underlying feeling of guilt about his political success. After all, Canada is not the United States, and we can’t vote in their elections.
With the infamous insult generator running on overtime in recent weeks, however, American news has overshadowed Canadian news.
There hasn’t been a lot of talk on medical pot now able to be legally grown at home, nor on Canada pulling out its jets from Iraq. More talk, it seems, has been about whether Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders could destroy Trump in a hypothetical winner-take-all debate.
But underneath this amnesia, we’re generally proud of our country. So what gives?
For one, America is the wealthiest and most militarily powerful country in the world and Canada has a stake in its affairs, so let’s not forget the amount of cultural influence it exerts on us.
More uniquely, forgetting Canada and paying attention to the U.S. is as easy as ignoring the know-it-all in your third grade class and watching the class clown/bully/genius/heartthrob act in a talent show. It’s dramatic, high-stakes, and imaginative.
America has an incredibly original history—a country founded on ideas of human freedom that enslaved millions of African people eventually emancipated through a bloody civil war before becoming the wealthiest economy and attracting millions of new immigrants from every part of the world.
It’s a country full of sharp contradictions and visions being contested for—individualism versus egalitarianism, the collective Black experience versus the white one, and one where nativist and reactionary leaders like Trump can compete on a national stage with the socialism of Sanders.
It’s easy to find inspiration in this chaotic mix of just about everything.
There’s also the sobering fact that a one-hour drive from Windsor, Ont. can take you to one of America’s poorest cities where its terribly inept state government allowed for its water system to be poisoned.
As good humans, we care. We care even more when we passionately believe, like most Canadians, a benevolent state can address society’s ills.
But our common hypnosis for America over Canada can leave our population ill-informed, risking the often unsung tenets to our identity we cherish—universal healthcare, the flexibility of our political system, and tolerance.
And as pointed out in the feature published in The Charlatan last week, anchoring our experiences to the American comparative can quiet the histories and experiences indigenous to where we live.
By examining the reasons why Canadians are so fixated on events south of the border we must acknowledge that paradox is central to the question of contemporary Canadian identity—that America has influenced how we see ourselves, but also hasn’t.
Symbols such as the moose, Tim Horton’s coffee, and hockey allow us to differentiate ourselves from the United States.
But it could also be that our identity is so contradictory, relative, and uninspiring that Trump is who we turn to to forget about it.
