A NOTE OF THANKS FROM CANADA

Not that we deserve a note of thanks … considering the Fox News smugly sarcastic "new clear" bomb that offended our neighbors, sullied our reputation, and reinforced our Ugly American image in the eyes of the world.

But sometimes our voices do carry. Voices like our esteemed Captain Fogg and your peevish Octopus who have spoken out against our number one national export - Yankee dumbness. Today, I received this heartwarming note of thanks from friends in Canada who read our blog:

Give [ ... ] a big Canadian hug from us. We (our country) have been in this war going on seven years and maintain peacekeeping missions in long-forgotten places of conflict for decades without any fanfare. That is the Canadian way and why we are known as the ‘gentle and caring nation' by most countries. All of my American friends were outraged by the Fox news-comedy hour segment and fully know that our brave soldiers and their families are doing their all to help the good people of Afghanistan take-out the insurgents while working side by side with our US allies.

Not all Yankees fully comprehend the depth of hurt caused by Fox News. It seems our country is too preoccupied with itself to see how the rest of the world sees us.  Today's Sunday editorial from the OTTAWA CITIZEN explains far better than I possibly can (reproduced in full):

Talking aboot our American cousins

by JANICE KENNEDY

Excruciating, wasn’t it? That Fox News program clip we all watched last week with the guffawing buffoons parading their ignorance? That clip about Canada, the “ridiculous” country with the effete, inactive military and the policemen in red jackets riding horses?

Not that I generally watch Fox News, understand. (Why would I? I don’t consider myself a) a redneck, b) a right-wing fanatic, or c) dumb.) But, like the rest of Canada, I did see this morsel of televised moronism. And all I could think was, yikes, how embarrassing. Do they have any clue how dim-witted they sound?

Judging by their knowledge vacuum, you might conclude that the Fox characters (who also dismissed Mexico as the land of the siesta) were merely simpletons who had crawled out of some backcountry swamp. But that’s the terrible thing. Extreme and tacky, they were nonetheless not unique. In fact, they summed up a chunk of the prevailing American mindset.

Profound American ignorance about Canada is neither new (“I don’t even know what street Canada is on,” said Al Capone) nor confined to Fox. Nor is it the exclusive purview of the right wing or the uneducated. It’s simply an absence in the culture, an empty space where knowledge should be.  And not only about Canada.

When American commentators or comics need a punchline, no matter what their political orientation, they dig into their big bag of international clichés and come up with ready tags for everyone from the Mexicans (siestas), to the French (baguettes and retreating armies), to Canadians — frozen yokels who say “aboot” and are borrrrring. (Unless the bag of clichés belongs to Rush Limbaugh and company. Then we’re Soviet Canuckistan, buncha socialists.)

Besides the recent Fox embarrassment, we’ve also been treated lately to conservative Matthew Vadum’s American Spectator blog, which says Natasha Richardson may have been killed by Canada’s “socialist, government-run healthcare system — similar to the kind that President Obama wants to ram down the throats of Americans.”

At the time of the Iraq invasion, Conan O’Brien noted that “the prime minister of Canada said he’d like to help, but he’s pretty sure that last time he checked, Canada had no army.” Jon Stewart, having been to Canada, has “always gotten the impression that I could take the country over in about two days.” See? It comes from all sides. Nor should we overlook the touching earnestness of Britney Spears, who gushed that one of the coolest things about being famous was the travelling. “I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.”

On TV last week, there was a curiously telling line on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which includes the running gag of a character with a Canadian past (i.e., endless comic fodder involving hickness, maple syrup, Mounties and snow). When one of her reminiscences makes even sex up here seem boring, another character wails, “Canada … Why? Why do we let you be a country?”

Interesting choice of words, right? Not to get all Freudian or anything, but the joke does reveal something about the American soul — its Americentric worldview, its Manifest Destiny belief that the U.S. is the sun around which all other nations orbit. Or are permitted to orbit.

Only a fool would deny that our superpowerful American cousins are anything other than mighty and crucial to the future of the planet. But the sun? Americans too often are blinded by their own rays, and that’s where the problem lies.

When you can’t see beyond yourselves, you assume there’s not much out there worth seeing anyway. You rely for your knowledge on hoary and absurd stereotypes, recklessly uninformed opinion and gut prejudices based on nothing more substantial than wisps of misunderstood information.

That is ignorance. And that, my American friends, is the core constituent of your collective worldview.

(All you Americans who actually know things about both Canada and the rest of the world? Yes, I know you exist. But you’re a minuscule minority, and your perspective is not what gets airtime, at home or abroad.)

To those of us who live reasonably decent lives without the benefit of citizenship that is starred, striped and stamped with bald eagles, it’s all a bit alarming. Here we have the gigantor of nations, an incredible global hulk capable of alarming rampages, and it doesn’t seem to care what’s out there, and what might get trampled.

I can’t speak for other nations, but I can speak as a Canadian reduced to Made-inAmerica stereotype. Would it help to point out to Americans that a lot of us hate winter? That real socialists would laugh themselves silly at the notion that Canada is socialist? That most Canadians don’t buy real maple syrup because it’s too darned expensive? That health care here may be flawed but does actually work? That many Canadians don’t give a hoot about hockey? That we actually have a fairly lively culture up here in the hinterland? That not one 9/11 hijacker crossed over from Canada? Oh, and that 116 Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan?

It would not. That’s because Americans, hubristically, just don’t want to know.

Introducing a segment on the public-radio program This American Life, writer-broadcaster Sarah Vowell once observed, “Like most Americans, I don’t particularly care about Canada.”  Or any place else, apparently. That’s the American tragic flaw in a nutshell.

One final word from 8pus:  Ahh hope mahh fella Ahhmerikans finally get the point.