By GRAEME C.A. WOOD

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

It would be too easy to write off Canada as just another country jealous of the United States. Tempting, though, isn’t it? The distant northern land has tended—by necessity—to follow suit when the U.S. takes a stance on foreign affairs. Economically it acknowledges its near-total dependence on US markets. And in a famous survey a few years ago, residents chose Pamela Anderson as their country’s most distinguished citizen. None of these bodes well for Canadians’ sense of self-determination, not to mention their self-esteem.

The most compelling case for Canada’s little-man complex, however, is its tendency to produce, on occasion, a public intellectual intent on gleefully pointing out the most obvious and shopworn defects of America’s politics and people. The newest excoriation comes from James Laxer, a Canadian political scientist and social commentator who teaches at York University. Laxer was a leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party in the 1970s and in recent years has been a staunch critic of economic globalism. His most recent book, Discovering America—published in Canada as Stalking the Elephant, in reference to Pierre Trudeau’s famous description of Canada’s relation to its behemoth neighbor—fails at every turn to offer new and insightful criticism. The 14 essays, all the result of the author’s own “travels in the land of guns, god, and corporate gurus,” are not so much petty as just old. The points are made more eloquently elsewhere (usually by Americans), and in the context of Laxer’s Canadian background, they sound particularly dull and whiny.

Perhaps because of its quiet role in world affairs, Canadians have conducted their politics modestly and prudently, with a liberalism noticeably more humane than its American counterpart. By maintaining no global aspirations, Canada focused its energies on social concerns at home, with a transparent and ecumenical immigration policy, widespread embracing of multiculturalism and socialized medical care. Whatever the ultimate effects of these policies, it must be said that they were created with ambitious compassion. Canadian prime ministers have never intoned “Greed is good,” nor have they been so sanctimonious in their stewardship of national culture. Meanwhile the U.S. has bombed, sanctioned and bullied its way to worldwide scorn, and domestically has failed to attempt a social program of anywhere near the scope of Canada’s. When former President George Bush announced his goal of leading a “kinder, gentler nation,” his neighbors to the north wondered whether he was planning to invade.

None of these Canadian virtues, however, excuse Laxer for the dud of a critique he has written about the U.S. He visits the Michigan Militia, Republican political rallies, an abortion clinic and the execution of Texas’s prettiest psychopath, Karla Faye Tucker. He is typically Canadian in his incredulity at the American right wing, particularly at its overt courtship of fundamentalist Christians. He mocks the diminutive Christian zealot Gary Bauer, who ran for president in 2000. Executions are rejected as illogical and bloodthirsty; the militia leader is simply psychotic. And he points out a few nonpolitical neuroses: the American compulsion, for example, to eat fatty foods, grow monstrously obese and lust after material goods. “Of the people I know well,” he writes, “it is Americans who are most fixated on stuff.”

And of course Laxer is right to observe that executions are savage, that some militia members are paranoid menaces and that many burger-munchers are metamorphosing into disgusting human gastropods. But pointing out these follies is a bit like hunting cows with an assault rifle. No one, including most educated Americans, thinks serious gun-nuts are more than a negligible fringe, and in 2001, it’s an awful waste of breath to treat them as if the sanity of their position were an open question. Isn’t this just stating the obvious? Yanks tend to be very fat, and they like to blow things up.

What might have saved this volume from its horrible insipidness would be the ability not just to gawk, but to explain, not to report, but to interpret, and interpret wisely. Laxer does not explain to the non-American world what logic goes into these depraved activities—and not because things like love of guns, desire for blood and a hankering for Big Macs are wholly irrational.

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.

And of course Laxer is right to observe that executions are savage, that some militia members are paranoid menaces and that many burger-munchers are metamorphosing into disgusting human gastropods. But pointing out these follies is a bit like hunting cows with an assault rifle. No one, including most educated Americans, thinks serious gun-nuts are more than a negligible fringe and in 2001, it’s an awful waste of breath to treat them as if the sanity of their position were an open question. Isn’t this just stating the obvious? Yanks tend to be very fat, and they like to blow things up.

What might have saved this volume from its horrible insipidness would be the ability not just to gawk, but to explain, not to report, but to interpret, and interpret wisely. Laxer does not explain to the non-American world what logic goes into these depraved activities—and not because things like love of guns, desire for blood and a hankering for Big Macs are wholly irrational.

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