Whereas Alexis de Tocqueville, the founder of the genre of American political travelogues, revealed peculiarities both of the American nation and of the democratic system and ideals, Laxer does nothing more than rehash its overworked idiosyncrasies. Foreign literary types, humorists and historians have worked their way across America before and have produced clever books, such as Andrei Codrescu’s Road Scholar. The wit, however, emanated from those authors’ ability to penetrate into the truly odd, to show how it was also truly American, and finally explain how the bizarre might make sense in a proper American context.

In his early chapters, Laxer shows every sign of breaking through this ignorance: He takes a firearm safety class in Massachusetts. Rates of private gun ownership in Canada are low enough that even this act might be viewed as radical. He listens patiently to the instructor, and he offers the obligatory commentary on the loopy bunch that signs up for these classes. Anyone who has handled a gun before, or who has seen the thrilled glint in the eye of a liberal appreciating for the first time the heft and power of a loaded nine-millimeter, is now waiting for the description of the intense excitement that comes with one’s first time squeezing rounds from a lethal weapon. But when trigger-time comes, you never get to hear about the gun mystique, because the author actually passes out and ends the chapter without firing a single round.

From this jumble of rehashed prejudices, Americans might learn why much of the rest of the world—not just neo-medievalist Muslims—fear and cluck disapproval at the country’s headstrong populace. The modern Western world believes that the United States is a cultureless, violent, under-educated juggernaut whose two primary activities (both carried out at McDonald’s) are eating hamburgers and shooting people. This rash generalization is one that Laxer’s book bears out and that Americans would do well to understand, whether to mend their habits or to embrace them.

DISCOVERING AMERICA: TRAVELS IN THE LAND OF GUNS, GOD & CORPORATE GUNS

by James Laxer

The New Press

312 pp., $24.95