“How far to the coast?” I ask Merilyn.
She looks at the map and counts. “About sixty kilometres,” she says.
“Kilometres?” I ask.
“All right, miles,” she says, as though the difference isn’t worth quibbling over.
Finally a road appears on our left, rising away from the river, and I turn abruptly onto it. The truck roars by behind a wall of water, sounding disappointed, like a tomcat whose catnip mouse has fallen down a furnace vent. I turn the car around, and we sit at the intersection for a while looking out across the valley. The rain is still coming down hard and a strong wind is bending some fairly substantial trees above our heads. Before us, far below, we can make out the edge of the river on the Washington side, a fishing village, perhaps, or a farm. Maybe a winery. It looks calm down there.
“There’s a nice-looking hotel in Astoria,” Merilyn says. She spent much of last night surfing the Internet for likely lodgings. “Maybe we should stay there tonight.”
“Sounds good,” I say half-heartedly. We are vagabonds in America, dogged by rain. But Astoria seems too close to Seattle. Shouldn’t we try to make it farther down the coast?
“We have lots of time,” Merilyn says, as if reading my mind. “We’re on holiday.”
PERHAPS IT was our close encounter with the transport truck, or my post-border jitters, but I am still nervous about our trip. I have always had rather ambivalent feelings about America or, at least, America as seen from afar. It speaks a version of our language, but with its own idiosyncratic touches: chinos, sneakers, zee. Maybe that’s why America makes me uneasy: it’s eerily familiar, like a song I don’t remember hearing yet somehow know the words to. Being in America is like walking around in someone else’s dream.
Here is what I have come to believe about America, based, I admit, largely on circumstantial and even hearsay evidence: America is an annoying and dangerous mixture of arrogance and ignorance. Its citizens barge around foreign countries looking for hamburgers and pizza and fried chicken, unaware of, or unconcerned about, or impatient with the possibility that the country they are in might have its own cuisine, customs, economy, political system, and religion with which it is quite happy, thank you very much. It holds that “different” is a synonym for “inferior.” In an Irish pub in Buenos Aires I met an American who told me his hotel was better than mine because his was closer to a Wendy’s.
The dream we’re walking around in is “the American Dream,” which seems to involve having a chicken in every pot, a new Detroit car in every garage, 2.86 television sets in every home, and broadband Internet access on every street. It’s the dream of fame and fortune, of success measured in material wealth. This is a newish version; the original American Dream, as defined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America, had more substance. It was of “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity to each according to his ability or achievement.” Nothing would be handed to you on a silver platter: you had to earn it: “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” This is a dream I could live in.
But the dream has changed. In What Is America? Canadian writer Ronald Wright charts how far the American Dream has sunk: “Here are the ingredients of the American Dream: love of the new and dismissal of the old; invaders presented as ‘pilgrims’; hard work both rewarded and required; and selfishness as natural law.”
There is an appalling arrogance and a pitiable naïveté in America, which assumes that the winner of four out of seven baseball games between teams from, let us say, St. Louis and Detroit is by definition the best team in the world. The same attitude caused Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in 1860, to declare Boston “the thinking center of the continent, and therefore of the planet,” and causes a place like Utah to advertise itself as having “the best snow in the world.”
“America shapes the way non-Americans live and think,” wrote Ian Jack, then editor of Granta, in his introduction to a 2002 issue entitled “What We Think of America.” “What do we think of when we think of America?” Jack asked. “Fear, resentment, envy, anger, wonder, hope?”
All of those things, I would say, and almost in that order. I am in the “fear” stage at the moment, moving into “resentment.” The very thought of Homeland Security rattles me: it’s as if the whole country were a border. It makes the United States a nation of 300 million border guards.
These thoughts are not unique to me: according to recent polls, 37 per cent of Canadians dislike the United States. In fact, it is almost a national pastime, identifying ourselves by what we are not: that is, American.
Nor are the sentiments new. The word “anti-American” appeared in Noah Webster’s first dictionary in 1828 and was defined pretty much as it is today: “Opposed to America, or to the true interests or government of the United States.” It’s hard to imagine being opposed to an entire nation, but consider the remark of an earlier prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in the House of Commons in 1903: “We are living beside a great neighbour who . . . are very grasping in their national acts, and who are determined upon every occasion to get the best in any agreement which they make.” Pierre Trudeau said something similar when addressing the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in 1969: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or even-tempered the beast . . . one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” People are always saying things like that about Americans, which may be why only 26 per cent of them think they are liked by other countries, and much fewer than that give a damn. But most Canadians agreed with Trudeau when he said, “We are a different people from you and a different people partly because of you.”
When asked to think about America, some Granta contributors thought of things that had arrived in their countries from the United States. The Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh, for example, remembered a gift sent by a cousin who had immigrated to the United States to study aeronautical engineering—a red satin pillow with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, “a good-hearted woman wearing a crown on her head and holding a lamp, a torch.” It is a torch, but I like Franz Kafka’s version better. In his novel Amerika, published in 1927, his hero, Karl Rossmann, looks at the Statue of Liberty as his ship edges into the New York harbour: as Kafka describes it, the woman is “holding aloft a sword,” one of those Freudian slips that no one seems to have caught. But of course it’s a sword—how appropriate! With what else would the United States bring democracy and freedom to, for example, the Middle East? A lamp?
Having grown up sharing a river with America, it is difficult for me to pinpoint any one thing that came to me from across the border. Everything did. In few other places on the continent do Canadian cheeks live in such close proximity to American jowls. Almost everything in the room, including the air, would have been from the States. The dance music my father played, the books my mother read voraciously, all American. The Pablum I ate, although invented in Canada, was produced and marketed in Chicago. During the day, my father worked at Chrysler’s and my mother shopped at Woolworth’s. At school, we played baseball—hardball, not softball, and not hockey. When we got our first television set, I watched Soupy Sales and Bugs Bunny and Popeye, all of whom I thought lived in Detroit. It never occurred to us to be anti-American; it would have been like being against life itself, and not even the good life, just life. Canada was a long way from Windsor; America was just down the street.
That was in the mid-1950s, when the American Dream was already beginning to morph into the American Disturbed Sleep Pattern. I was too young to know about McCarthyism and was blind to racism, but they were as present in our home as Frank Sinatra and Roy Rogers. They “came with,” as the waitresses in Woolworth’s would say to my mother about the Jell-O. My father joined