Pax Canadiana and the tragedy of the 4th of July

With the same calm sense we display on Canada Day, we turn to reflect on the neighbor’s Fourth of July. Typically, our comments are admiring, with only a wry reference to their exuberance and our civility. We note contemporary shortcomings in both federations and generally leave the past alone. But there’s a restless spirit in the land: imagine how better things would be if British North America, rather than the United States of America, led the world.

Here’s Conrad Black, the dream’s most popular voice, in his clearest English:

“If the Americans had just remained within the British Empire, they would have been running it in one long lifetime, would have ruled the world less than a century after Yorktown, would have made short work of any Confederate insurrection, and would have avoided the World Wars. (Not even Germany’s hyperactive Kaiser would have gone to war simultaneously against Britain, France, Russia, and the U.S.) The Declaration of Independence, 239 years ago, defamed poor old George III and even accused him of trying to impose French civil law on Americans.”

Of course. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and all the other defamers of British rule would have (1) left notions of popular liberty to mature within the vast machinery of Britain’s empire and its Parliament or (2) they would have been hung.

Set aside all that the defamers inspired (supremacy of a citizen’s bill of rights, constitutional separation of powers, democratic federalism, a transcontinental political and economic union, the Atlantic Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Abraham Lincoln and Jazz, for starters) that, presumably, for lack of space, Black had to set aside.

Let’s go along with the proposition that the Europeans in the four original Canadian and the 13 original American colonies carried on as loyal British subjects.

Let’s grant that the less vehement and less arrogant voices on the two sides of the Atlantic had held the old heart and the young heart of the 18th-century British Empire intact.

Let Black savor the consequences of choosing “peace, order and good government” rather than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the management vision for, at least, an economic and security commonwealth of the British colonies.

Imagine the old souls of the Westminster Parliamentary model keeping their grip on the machinery of government from the North Atlantic right down to Bermuda’s cane fields.

But that’s as far as Black’s British North America has the right to rearrange modern history on this continent.

Black suggests that in one “long lifetime” the English-speaking empire would peacefully move its head office and then lead a global talk-shop commonwealth—without, of course, the “gridlock” of America’s decentralized system of popular government. I should live so long.

The assumption that Tory loyalists would have promptly accommodated America’s ruthless, unruly mass immigration and their expansion west or would have promptly paid off their slave-holding aristocrats defies how they played the US Civil War and how they micro-managed the settlement of Western Canada.

Furthermore, would those British loyalists have actually received an offer from Napoleon to purchase the vast Louisiana territories? Without Motor City and the resources, industries and uncouth human capital from there to LA, would the loyal colonies of 1776 have stopped the Germans twice and won a global cold war on behalf of all sides of Westminster’s Parliament?

The implied narrative that the British Empire would, on its own, become less imperial defies precedent, including Britain’s own behavior in India and Africa. It didn’t even surrender unconditional independence to its loyal white dominions until well after WWI.

Great Britain lost the leadership of the English-speaking world before it decided to concentrate on being more civilized and a better listener than America.

There’s nothing wrong with being lucky, if you don’t confuse luck with virtue. The English Channel and the liberal American union, in fact, have helped mightily keep their island free and their liberal influence global.

Rather than "what ifs" to slag each other, it’s time we transcended the trivial insults of the 18th century and congratulate ourselves on the many smart ways both sides of the Atlantic have taken advantage of their dumb luck.

Be hopeful for the New Year

Optimism doesn’t get an easy ride in politics these days, and nor should it. Wishful thinking and trendy platitudes have cost us dearly — at home in power generation, for instance, and abroad in civil wars. However, the opposite point of view can also do great harm and deserves equal scorn. Defeatism about our politics is a luxurious pose.

For years, I thought that the following dialogue in Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road was totally cool:

“…when [Frank Wheeler] said something about 'the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country,' [John Givings] came to a stop on the grass and looked thunderstruck.

“'Wow,' he said. 'Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said "hopeless," though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can.'”

Finally, I get Yates’s joke.

Weird John Givings couldn’t sit still or bear teaching high school mathematics in California in the '50s. He’d just survived 37 electrical shock treatments in the “fun-farm.” So he probably knew what the words empty and hopeless meant. But, bored young careerist Frank Wheeler didn’t; he was faking it. Wheeler was betraying untested literary ambitions, but wasn’t at the end of the line. He hated to be alone and, so, asked America to feel miserable as well.

Thanks to a handful of wonderful American writers, we accept that the '50s were “empty.” We pass, however, on labeling those years as “hopeless” for all sorts of good reasons — including big ones like stabilizing the Cold War, entrenching today’s middle class expectations, and recognizing science and higher education the top investments for future progress.

Today, however, Pew pollsters tell us that North Americans worry about the future, as they did in uncertain times before — but with surprisingly little enthusiasm about doing much about it.

We read about gridlock and our loss of trust in government and the end of the American Dream. We shake our heads in the midst of an economic recovery that includes a technological revolution and an arts renaissance on each coast. We speak of fundamentals and barely mention the burgeoning global middle class that creates, works, and increasingly sees human society in the ways we do. Our leaders worry especially about the morale of young people — in these, the first days this continent has ever been truly secure militarily and at peace with the whole world.

For 2014, let’s be hard on defeatists and vicious toward words like never, disillusioned, and hopeless. Too much is going on to ever reach for “empty.”

Is the “American Dream” moving on?

You don’t have be mean-spirited or a conservative to accept that the “American Dream”—the belief that our choices are more important than our inheritance, that hard work will secure rising incomes, up-to-date amenities, and greater freedom to experiment and be yourself—doesn’t have the punch it had in our grandfathers' day. The fate of the world’s most powerful liberal one-liner, naturally, concerns liberals even more.

In the National Journal, Amy Sullivan claims the dream has shrunk and is not delivering the same financial and spiritual benefits it did when America was younger. Her essay “The American Dream, Downsized” documents the recent absence of middle-class income growth and explores how the Great Recession has affected expectations and, as important, how winning politicians have learned to trim their appeals for votes.

The subtitle of Sullivan’s essay bemoans: “The middle class now worries more about holding on for dear life than climbing the ladder to riches.” She notes that the Pew Institute found that 85% of Americans prefer “financial stability to moving up the income ladder.” She argues, in fact, that they were consciously invited to make that choice in the last presidential election, with Romney talking wistfully of an “opportunity society” and Obama arguing that collective security was as important.

In American popular culture, however, has anything big actually happened?

The “American Dream,” in fact, was neither as American nor as dreamy as we imagine it was in the past. Nevertheless, what’s left is imposing and is still making history. The question now isn’t whether it’s failing but whether it will remain American or not.

The material elements of the “American Dream”—making one’s way in a more egalitarian society, affording a solid house for a young family, and not having to hide away in poverty in old age—were most widely realized in America in the 20th century. But the dream was not even an American invention.

Every one of its elements was chased—and secured—by millions of healthy white European males who could speak perfect English in England and perfect German in Germany, for instance, and who also attended good Protestant churches—even as thousands and, then, tens of thousands living on the outskirts of those unofficial national dreams were scheming to get to America.

If European dreams had not so often turned into European nightmares there wouldn’t have been much flavor in the American Melting Pot or any special American vision of the future.

Today, the aspirations—if not the exact architecture—of the “American Dream” are being asserted globally. The OECD and other expert observers are telling us that this could be the middle class’s biggest century, expanding from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion by as soon as 2020.

Ironically, the biggest challenge now for America’s middle class may be contending with the potency of the “American Dream” internationally. Barack Obama starkly captured this prospect last week in a graduation address. His audience was black but the message was clearly and accurately aimed at all young Americans who have learned how to make excuses:

“We’ve got no time for excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t,” he said. “It’s not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned.”

The “American Dream” of endlessly rising incomes wherever immigrant families first landed was a caricature. Intelligent Americans of every generation worry about the future—theirs, their kids', and their country’s—as well as want to get ahead.

American risk-takers were invariably careful calculators.

They listened to and recruited scientists, engineers, and the best-trained technicians. They hired on merit because it worked, not because it served an applicant’s dreams.

In tricky times, in politics and at work, Americans tend to favor smart over nice.

Rather than thinking up a smaller dreams, Americans are simply being urged to re-assert the more hard-edged and grounded features of their success. They’re prideful dreams are off-putting. Their intolerance for failure, however, should be better appreciated.

Brain candy from the film industry

“The character of a gold-collar worker like Miles is, in its way, as timely as a tech geek like Mark Zuckerberg. More than anything, Miles is a passionate consumer of fine wine. The craving for luxury on the part of those who can only occasionally afford it is the story of our era.”

—In screenwriter and lecturer Norman Snider’s latest book, How to Make Love to a Movie Star: Writing for Film, Exile Editions Ltd, Holstein, Ontario, 2012. Snider is reviewing the shabby character of Miles Raymond, played by Paul Giamatti in Sideways.

Socio-psychologists and "restore America" think tanks in Washington may worry that our dreams about the good life are shrinking. Hollywood isn’t so sure.

  

Men in their prime today may not beat their fathers at the office, but they still want more.

“The American Dream”: the new world’s insolent gift to the old

The Wall Street financier from India Rajat Gupta may soon go to jail. Willie Loman saw that he’d never be “number-one man.” Today, America slips down the Gini Index of national income equality—and its elites connive like aristocrats to support each other and pass on their advantages to their precious children.

Collective and individual misfortune in the American marketplace, critics insist, exposes the falsity and folly of their cocky “American Dream.”

In material terms, it’s obvious that the Dream never was true—as a promise or a social contract. The American economy hasn’t been organized to be especially fair to newcomers and hasn’t invested over-generously in those with unrealized potential. Indeed, the expression American Dream was coined in the depths of the Great Depression, after a decade of unprecedented extravagance and social negligence at the top.

Nevertheless, the American Dream—the intense assertion that ambition isn’t right-sized by circumstances, by upbringing, by career guidance councilors, or by class—is an extraordinary, essentially American addition to the way people think about their possibilities.

Its 20th century ambassadors—jazz and rock musicians, protest poets, GIs, farm boy CEOs, generals, and presidents—didn’t make the world much smarter. But they have made growing up, careers, business, culture, and politics less predictable and more exciting.  

The American Dream, however, is about accepting failure as well as pursuing success in a new society.

Being brought up as optimists—entitled to try—can’t be blamed for Americans being less inclined to support collective action as voters in Canada and Europe. However, it can be blamed for making many people miserable.

Canadian essayist Robert Fulford pursues this line of attack, wondering whether anyone but windy politicians and wordsmiths ever took the phase seriously. Then, he offers the ultimate Anglo-Canadian compliment: “Americans have always been too skeptical to embrace an idea of their future that’s pure rhetoric.”

“The real energy of America, as reflected in its culture, was never given to fantasies. In good times and bad, the best novelists and playwrights have always looked on American life with sharply critical eyes.”

Click on: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/06/23/robert-fulford-once-again-burying-the-american-dream/

Fulford claims that those artists—Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Williams, and Arthur Miller—who captured the American spirit were “anti-dreamers, dream debunkers.”

Fine. Great writing—Russian, American, Canadian, South African, whereever—gets at the truth. However, did Arthur Miller actually write Death of a Salesman simply to warn Americans that Willie Loman’s American Dream was an “empty and self-destructive fantasy, poisonous to the spirit”?

Americans have committed many faux pas in the eyes of their elders in Europe and of their cohabitants on this continent. However, being especially hard on upstarts and dreamers is a new one.

Death of a Salesman didn’t leave its audiences in America and around the globe questioning their over-reaching dreams. It didn’t blunt the renaissance of Babbitt capitalism in the 50s. Also, it didn’t cause anyone to laugh over futile bravado of Willie Loman. And that was significant.

As much as anything, the play is an expression, not a put-down, of the American Dream.

Great tragedies, traditionally, are about the failures of kings, the greats. Arthur Miller insisted, “A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.” Thanks to Miller and the generous center of the American Dream, greater attention is paid to the folly of non-entities.