U.S. Cultural Imperialism: It's Persistence In Canada

In Canada the collaborators are seemingly people touched only by the dazzle, the variety, the abundance, and the vigour of U.S. culture. But that is a superficial and narrowly partial reading. For by its definition cultural imperialism is an active force of the invading culture to seduce, to win over, to enroll as collaborators people in the culture being invaded.

Cultural imperialism, in addition, is an inevitable companion of political, economic, and -- sometimes -- military imperialism. It is, in a sense, the "fifth column" or the propaganda arm of imperial invasion.

It offers to the collaborator an association with imperial power, a sharing of its apparent luster, and -- as with the women who collaborated with the Nazis -- real material benefits and comforts. Collaboration pays... or promises to pay.

In Canada the corporate and capitalist classes have judged that collaboration pays, and so the most sympathetic agents of U.S. cultural takeover of Canada are usually among the ranks of those classes. They can buy and sell "intellectuals" to front "independently" for their sellout of Canadian culture.

Increasingly, as a result of corporate concentration in the press and media, the dictates of the owners are intended to aid the erasure of Canadian culture and its replacement with U.S. culture. I have pointed out elsewhere that Leonard Asper, head of the huge, monopolistic Canwest media conglomeration, preaches the merging of Canadian and U.S. journalistic forces: the opening up of Canada to U.S. communication interests. That would mean, in short, the erasure of Canadian journalism, entertainment, and communication activity that is independent of U.S. cultural values and predispositions. Asper, apparently, looks forward to that condition.

A particular fact of cultural imperialism is its tireless attack upon key characteristics of the culture being invaded. In Canada that is undertaken by U.S. operatives -- for instance, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada. It is also undertaken by a large group of Canadian fellow-travellers among the "research institutes", the intelligentsia, people in the media, the universities, and in the government structure.

One of the key characteristics constantly under attack in Canada is Canadian nationalism or the feeling of respect Canadians have for their own community and traditions. Another is so-called "anti-Americanism" or the desire NOT to merge with the U.S.A. Still another is the Canadian sense of solidarity, community, and shared responsibility for social values. Over against a deeply ingrained Canadian cultural sense are placed U.S. individualism and anarchism, offered as incarnated in the dynamically attractive, free-wheeling, self-developing liberty-seeker, tied to no bonds of decorum, community, or traditional behaviour.

Those who incarnate key U.S. values in the Canadian worlds of art and communication are raised to eminence, encouraged, set up as models of behaviour. They are usually almost invisible as anything but uncontaminated commentators or critics. They proliferate, in the columns of political and economic comment -- but that is not our interest here. Here we are dealing with "culture" in relation to the arts and literature.

As good an example as any we might find in that sphere is the position in Canadian culture of a man who is given a major occasional column, "At Large", in the Canwest monopoly Vancouver Sun (doubtless reproduced in some of the other 13 papers of the Canwest operation across Canada).

Douglas (George) Fetherling is a U.S. immigrant. He came to Canada at the time of the flood of Draft Dodgers and before long was making his way into cultural society. Very soon after his arrival a colleague of mine in charge of literary guests at Carleton University came into my office. He had in his hand a letter upon which Douglas (George) Fetherling's name was printed in blue (as I remember it) and raised in relief from the page. The letter asked if Carleton was looking for Canadian poets to read, and, if so, Fetherling offered himself as one. Had I heard of this "Canadian" poet?

That little incident was the beginning of a march through Canadian culture. Fetherling has done editing work for several Canadian magazines, was a literary editor for the Kingston Whig Standard and a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen. He has been appointed Writer in Residence frequently. He has written books of poetry, social history, autobiography, and biography as well as articles on film, travel, and art. He has taught. And more. He is still at work...

Surely he is a Canadian writer, for his work deals persistently with Canada. But...

Before the "But" we need to record he is a Canadian writer. But one of a special kind. Douglas (George) Fetherling is (broadly) an anarchist individualist, the fundamental U.S. type. His work deals persistently with Canada, it?s true, but almost always from the point of view of the anarchist individualist seeking his own being and his own definition of liberty, his own ideas of pluralism, eccentricity, and independence. With all of that, moreover, he is never "political" in the sense that he takes the measure of the structure of politics in Canada, identifies with a Canadian political philosophy, and takes position for the good and against the bad as seen by that philosophy.

"Okay", you say. "There are lots of writers who stay away from politics and who are concerned mostly with their own responses as a measure of general human response." True. But a common characteristic of U.S-style anarchist individualists in Canada is that -- apparently not political -- they fiercely attack the writers and artists who side with fundamental Canadian values that set Canada apart from the U.S.A.

A few years ago Fetherling left Eastern Canada and came to Vancouver where he immediately was adopted as a serious cultural commentator for the Vancouver Sun. Obviously, it would seem, he has qualities that lift him above literary British Columbians of deep knowledge and long experience.

I suggest his U.S.-style anarchist individualism is perfectly suited to the general tone Canwest wishes to manifest towards serious Canadian culture. The U.S.-style anarchist individualist can display eccentricity, vivacity, apparent independence, inquisitiveness, and opinionated expression without ever challenging corporate power, without ever approaching statement that might make Canwest managers feel the slightest unease. And he can, quite naturally, discount and demean Canadian achievement. Those things could not be said, usually, of literary British Columbians of deep knowledge and long experience who are not anarchist individualists.

There is another value in having Douglas (George) Fetherling as cultural commentator. He need mask nothing, pretend nothing. As an anarchist individualist with strong U.S. sensitivities, he needs merely to be set loose to do what Canwest wants done to Canadian culture.

Fetherling has a full page of the Vancouver Sun on August 21 in which he discusses novelist Frederick Philip Grove in the shadow of one of his wives who became Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a Greenwich Village phenomenon and a friend or acquaintance of a number of leading figures in the (especially) U.S. literary and art movements of the time. She died in 1927, Grove in 1948. He left her in 1911 and made his way to Canada. That choice shaped his life and his work thereafter and made him a major Canadian writer.

Fetherling attacks Grove in a completely predictable fashion.

Why does he do so? Because Frederick Philip Grove, like other Canadian writers - Susanna Moodie, John Richardson, and Hugh MacLennan, for instance - was (as I describe the qualities above) a nationalist, an anti-American, and a believer in the Canadian sense of solidarity, community, and shared responsibility for social values. Canadians of that kind are attacked tirelessly by U.S. cultural imperialists (and by U.S.-style anarchist individualists) in Canada.

In the last fifty years those and other major Canadians have been viciously attacked by anarchist individualists trying to remove them from significance in Canadian literature. Mordecai Richler wrote venomously about Frederick Philip Grove. Richler (as I have said elsewhere) is the first Canadian writer to adopt the U.S. anarchist individualist as protagonist of his novels. Robert Kroetsch, another anarchist individualist, attacks Susanna Moodie with a vehemence hard to believe. Those are only a few examples.

As we might predict, Fetherling elevates Grove?s wife, Elsa, to a high level of importance (without in any way discussing her literary achievement, for she had little). U.S. writers are beginning to accord her a "glamorous" place, and so she is celebrated by Fetherling. For Grove, a major writer as well as a major Canadian writer, Fetherling has nothing but open contempt. Grove's work, according to Fetherling is "abysmally monotonous", "achingly inept"; one of his fascinating works - "ludicrous as it seems to us now, won the Governor General's award".

No innocent reader would suspect that Frederick Philip Grove had a fascinating life story in which he genuinely chose Canada over the U.S. because of the values he treasured in this country. Nor would they come anywhere near believing Grove is a serious, important, significant, and interesting writer. Fetherling's article is an act of cultural imperialism: an attempt to destroy Grove and to replace his central values with those of the U.S.A. by attacking his achievement and placing it beside the glitter and glitterati of U.S. figures Elsa moved among.

In the 1970's, when Grove's life story was unearthed by Douglas Spettigue of Queen's University, a symposium was held on Grove and his works. Deeply influenced by U.S. cultural imperialism (as are many so-called scholars in the universities), the two critics who had written on Grove -- Margaret Stobie and Douglas Spettigue -- did everything they could at the conference to demean his achievement and to belittle his person. At the end of the conference there was a wind-up panel discussion participated in by those two and by poet/teacher Louis Dudek and novelist Rudy Wiebe.

I put a single question to all the panelists: is Grove a great writer? Stobie and Spettigue choked at the very idea. Louis Dudek and Rudy Wiebe could not show enough enthusiasm or conviction that Grove is, indeed, a great writer. Those opinions mirror the on-going battle around cultural imperialism in Canada. Literary and artistic judgements are not being made "objectively" and "rationally" in Canada, but very often they are made by cultural imperialists bent upon destroying the central terms of Canadian cultural existence and replacing them with the terms of U.S. cultural imperialism.

Douglas (George) Fetherling is clearly on the side of U.S. cultural imperialism. His remarks about Frederick Philip Grove are not the remarks of a serious literary commentator but of a combatant fighting on the side of U.S. imperialism, pushing for its ultimate victory. And so he is fittingly placed as a writer for the Canwest media monopoly.

Canadians picking up papers or magazines or tuning into radio or television shows in Canada are often totally unaware that what is being presented to them as "expert" information or commentary about aspects of Canadian culture are really calculated battles in the war between the U.S. cultural imperialists and the "nativists" in Canada. If the shows are expensive or are full page features like the Fetherling article on Frederick Philip Grove and his "cutting edge" wife, Canadians can be pretty sure they are being treated to propaganda on behalf of U.S. imperialism. U.S. cultural imperialism in Canada is unendingly persistent, and it is given full play by so-called Canadian press and media -- more and more devoted to the erasure of what is best and most solid in our cultural identity.