The Human Presence: U.S. Cultural Imperialism In Canada

Writing of China's uneasiness with the ring of U.S. bases, alliances, and troops in closely adjacent areas, Mosher says perhaps what he believes but what many would see as outright, embarrassing propaganda for the U.S. He writes: "the U.S. did not seek its preeminent position, but in many respects had its international role thrust upon it following World War 11 'reinforced by its sudden victory in the Cold War'." (p.8)

To those who don't know the U.S. has been manipulating and jockeying for more than a hundred years to achieve "its preeminent position" that claim of innocence might be believed. At the height of British power, an English historian wrote the charming statement that Britain gained its empire "in a fit of absence of mind". It isn't considered nice to want an empire, and so both Britons and U.S. people lie to themselves and others constantly. Others who believe them are the victims of cultural imperialism.

There is another category of U.S. cultural imperialist -- perhaps the most painful of all. That is the immigrant who comes to Canada all bright eyes and enthusiasm, brimming with good cheer, wishing good for all the world, and -- say -- taking a position in teaching or managing or whatever, and "knowing", without even thinking, that he or she comes from a culture superior to Canada's and his or her job is to tell Canadians about ideas and thoughts and works and events that are important to the superior culture: the U.S.A. The reverse side of that coin is that such people only find out about Canadians who fit in with U.S thought -- and ignore other Canadians.

Those are general thoughts that lead into the following review of three books published to celebrate two U.S. immigrants in Canada:

Charles Watts and Edward Byrne (eds.), The Recovery of the Public World, Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser>/i>, Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1999, 464 pages.

Ian Angus (ed.), Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory. In Honour of Jerry Zaslove, Vancouver, Talonbooks, 2001, 384 pages.

Miriam Nichols (ed.), Even on Sunday, Essays, Readings, and Archival Material on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser, Orono, Maine, U.S.A., The National Poetry Foundation, 2002, 396 pages.

"The imperial raison d'etre is to erase the other".

(anonymous)

The three books named are produced as celebrations for two U.S. immigrants to British Columbia, Robin Blaser and Jerry Zaslove. The men are friends who worked in the same SFU English Department; they are stamped with the same imperiocentricity, and each has contributed to the celebration volume of the other. They belong, one might say, to the band of U.S. immigrants whose work -- whatever they may wish - consciously or unconsciously demeans Canadian legitimacy, denigrates Canadian uniqueness and potential, and recruits young Canadians into anti-Canadian attitudes -- and tends to the erasure of Canadian culture and history.

Those effects are a natural outcome of imperiocentricity which is, in short, the seeing all of life as ultimately important in the terms of ideas, thought, values, and behaviour of the imperial centre. Imperiocentricity by its very nature neglects Canadian culture, ideas, values, and traditional identity.

Why are the two U.S. immigrants here? What brought them? What establishes them as motivation for the production of three quite large books -- with, apparently, more to come. In the 1960s the Canadian university and college system was expanding. Money was available to hire new faculty. Many Canadians were demanding more attention to and respect for Canadian institutions, achievements, historical complexity, and population. That drive was connected to the spreading effect of the 1952 Massey Report on the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, and to the push by people like cabinet minister Walter Gordon, from the late 1950s on, to have the colonized Canadian economy returned to Canadian ownership and control.

Against those demands the forces of colonialism, of denigration, were pushing strongly. Our historic internationalism was being re-read by many as inevitable and desirable subservience to the U.S.A. If the Massey Commissioners wanted to limit U.S. influence, liberal continentalists like Frank Underhill shouted that Canada couldn't get enough of it. When the drive came to hire Canadians for cultural positions, Frank Underhill -- then not far from his grave -- publicly scoffed at the idea, as did the host of his liberal continentalist allies. U.S. government, as always, pushed for North American integration. To my surprise, I became a household name in the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. Friends who went there for cocktails found themselves led into conversation about Mathews, Steele, and the drive to give Canadians of all races, creeds, and convictions fair place in the educational and cultural institutions of the country. Our friends were informed in no uncertain terms that U.S. government disapproved of the "extreme", the "narrow" nationalism of Mathews and Steele. The Blasers and Zasloves in Canada spoke (and speak) with the same voice.

U.S. academics flooded into Canada's expanding higher education institutions because Canadian intellectual and cultural administrators believed Canadians inferior to others -- especially U.S. people. Secondly, U.S. government wanted excess U.S. graduate school products to be lodged in Canadian universities and colleges. Finally, individual U.S. academics could get (a) better pay (b) better working conditions (c) and wider experience in their first years in Canada than in the U.S.A. In short, most came for economic reasons. Canada was an unknown land to most of them, but a buck is a buck -- anywhere.

Hugh MacLennan, the distinguished novelist, noted that the best minds of a country "think with" all the accumulated cultural furniture that has given them peculiar being, and they don't usually forsake that density to live partial intellectual lives elsewhere. George Orwell said something similar in his 1940 essay, "Inside the Whale". Writing of (U.S.) Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer, set in Paris, Orwell wrote: "Miller is writing about the man in the street, and it is incidentally a pity that it should be a street full of brothels. That is the penalty of leaving your native land. It means transferring your roots into shallower soil."

In that shallower, because impenetrable cultural soil, English speakers who are imperialists in Canada very often think they face no language barrier. They often refuse to grant cultural difference exists, and declare difference in the host people a sign of inferiority. And they work -- often audaciously -- to build a self-defensive and self-perpetuating community of like-minded imperials and subservient local "wanna-be" followers. They live, in short, imperiocentric lives -- lives, that is, that have their being in imperial consciousness, that "think with" the intellectual products of the imperial country, that proselytize for its universal centrality, and -- especially -- that ignore, deprecate, deny, erase the culture and intellectual products of the country which is their host. "The imperial raison d'etre is to erase the other".

In both universities and colleges a long, nasty battle had to be fought to prevent (especially) U.S. academics from using institutional money to bring in, as guests, only people from the U.S.A. Warren Tallman, U.S. citizen immigrant, friend, and contemporary of Blaser and Zaslove, brought to the 1961 B.C. Festival of the Contemporary Arts and to the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, for instance, the following: Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Margaret Avison.

Only the last named, Margaret Avison, was a Canadian. All the rest were from the U.S.A. That pattern was repeated almost as a policy. Subsequently, Blaser was hired at SFU. Miriam Nichols records those things in Even on Sunday, where she quotes Margaret Avison being called an avant garde writer, and she calls George Woodcock a prolific "nationalist" critic. Woodcock was a spirited anti-nationalist anarchist all his life. One need only read Avison's work to know she was a poetically conservative, deeply religious poet.

A few years later, (partly to conserve Canadian grant money) I tried to get UBC to share a few of the Canadian guests I was bringing to the University of Alberta in trade for an equal number from UBC's list of almost exclusively U.S. guests. The UBC English Dept. guest programmer (a U.S. immigrant with whom I was amiably acquainted) was plainly not interested. Helen Zontoff -- Phyllis Webb assured me -- so disliked the Canadian writers I suggested to her in a letter that she didn't even condescend to answer. Zontoff apparently wanted to keep Canadian students from being contaminated by contact with major Canadian writers. Little wonder Vancouver bred a group of young Canadians devoted to U.S. ideas and personalities and contemptuous of Canadian traditions.

When I was proposed in the mid-1980s for a one-year exchange at SFU, English Dept. Chairman was Jerry Zaslove, praised in the book Anarcho-Modernism for deep concern about human rights. He forcefully supported -- if he did not lead -- the completely illegitimate attempt to keep me out of SFU. (Warmly supported, I was told, by Robin Blaser.) The case attracted wide attention, being editorialized in the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun, for instance. It was then Chairman Zaslove wrote to the Globe and Mail to protest. He asserted that I was an "undesirable" and if I would only realize I was "undesirable", I would not be making trouble.

After months of dispute the Canadian Association of University Teachers (Canada's national faculty union) visited SFU for three days of investigation and publicly declared SFU in violation of academic freedom for its Zaslove-fronted attempt to suppress freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas by keeping out a Canadian known for insisting that Canadian culture and ideas be taken seriously in Canadian educational institutions.

What can be said about the three celebratory volumes in praise of Robin Blaser and Jerry Zaslove? Apart from the kind of fundamental errors of fact made by Miriam Nichols -- already mentioned -- the books are, more generally, textually inadequate. None possesses an index. The Recovery of the Public World, moreover, has almost fifty contributors, none of whom is identified for the reader.

Robin Blaser is invariably referred to as a U.S. poet, having been published in The New American Poetry in 1960, being treated as a U.S. poet in such publications since, and figuring as the subject of the 2002 book, Even on Sunday. That last is produced by the U.S. National Poetry Foundation which obviously considers him a U.S. "national" poet. His primary political reality (besides a strong social concern with sexual orientation) is the U.S.A.

It is difficult to find him making reference to any Canadian in a way that uses him or her for "thinking with". He rarely makes reference to Canadian politics. As late as the middle 1990s, fantasizing in conversation, he talks about what is being done to "our political and economic structures"; and then he says, "when I become President". (p. 429, The Recovery of the Public World). Occasionally, he nods at Canada, almost always is if an extension of the U.S.A., rarely, if ever, discussing the culture, the life, the thought of Canada as anything unique or, indeed, as anything at all. Shortly after coming to Canada, he began a periodical called Pacific Nation. The name provides a perfect example of the imperial intellectual merging his host country into the imperial country. His verse work, Image-Nations, is titled, Rachel Blau DuPlessis tells us -- predictably -- as an anti-nationalist pun. People from intensely nationalist imperial countries very often scorn the defensive nationalism they find in countries to which they migrate. "The imperial raison d'etre is to erase the other."

At one point Blaser refused to go to the U.S.A., not because he was offended by its rapacious foreign policy, nor because he disliked its bullying of his adopted country. Perish the thought. He refused to go to a short term teaching job in the U.S. in 1993 because a law restricting homosexuals was going to be passed in Colorado.

The 1995 conference in honour of Blaser in Vancouver was astonishing. Canadian funding poured in a flood to consider various states of U.S. being, and then to publish the transactions. At a time when the community of writers should have held a conference in honour of Dorothy Livesay, an intricate part of social, political, and creative live in Canada for more than 60 years, a poet of irreplaceable importance, and living in Victoria, they didn't do it.

When a conference in honour of Al Purdy, a major poet, a part of British Columbia, a significant figure in the Canadian poetic tradition, living in Sidney, should have been held -- no conference was held. Instead U.S. speakers were flushed into Vancouver and some Canadians were summoned to celebrate the success of U.S. Cultural Imperialism in a conference called "The Recovery of the Public World", a conference in honour of Robin Blaser.

"The imperial raison d'etre is to erase the other.". But nothing will erase the insult delivered to Canadians by the neglect of Dorothy Livesay and Al Purdy in B.C. by the U.S. anarchist imperialists and their Canadian clones.

If homosexuality is a chief political centre for him, a form of U.S. poetic process is Robin Blaser's philosophical and social centre. The Recovery of the Public World huffs and puffs the platitudinously obvious about poetics until the subject becomes a huge, gray dirigible blocking the sun. Language becomes Blaser's God-replacement, and so the act of making poetry is inquired into with tireless, tedious repetition. Blaser's concept of his God-replacement, however, accords perfectly with anarchist liberalism and, interestingly, with U.S. imperialism which reinterprets any truth to suit imperialist intentions even while proclaiming the contingency of truth and language. Miriam Nichols tells us that Blaser's verse utterance "will not satisfy readers who are looking for a specific politics." (The Recovery?p.261).. Once again, Nichols is fabricating terminology. Robin Blaser's verse utterance -- and almost all the discussion around it -- serves (even if unconsciously) as part of the imperial agenda that erases the other , in this case the Canadian poetic tradition and unique Canadian society.

When Blaser, moreover, wrote in the 1960s about Vietnam, Andre Kiobucar says he did not provide "intellectually informed judgement" but "dissolution". (The Recovery,p.336). Kiobucar chooses to see that as resistance. It may very well be coded assent or, at best, protective ambiguity -- both very specific kinds of politics.

With Jerry Zaslove, Blaser dwells in an anarcho-modernist world nibbling at Arendtian phantasms of beautiful, consensual society. With Arendt, Zaslove and Blaser are anti-nationalist, "anti-political", and almost totally absorbed as U.S. people in U.S. life and its dictates about Being (imperiocentrism). Like her, they pretend U.S. imperialism is somehow the whole human condition and so something to be lived, not resisted. The U.S.-inspired anarchist position permits the rejection of responsibility to a difficult vision of whole, structured, decent society, and encourages the falling into dream visions. That rejection is easy because the U.S.-inspired anarchist position is profoundly individualistic, and finally solipsistic.

Zaslove is concerned with the politics of culture, with human rights (?), with anarchist dimensions of both those issues. From time to time I examined the offerings of the Institute for the Humanities which he created and headed. I became convinced that in the treatment of Canada and thinkers in Canada the fact was not merely ?tokenism? but insult. The reading lists were ?international?: U.S. writers and writers everywhere who could fit the imperiocentric view of reality.

But no John Clark Murray, Norman Bethune, John Watson, Susanna Moodie, Charles de Koninck, John Richardson, F.-X Garneau, Stanley Ryerson, Agnes Maule Machar, Henri Bourassa, F.P. Grove, Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay, Lionel Groulx, W.L. Morton, Milton Acorn, Hubert Aquin, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Donald Creighton, Hugh Maclennan, Edmond de Nevers, W.D. Lighthall, Jacques Godbout, etc. etc. etc. In short there never seems to have been the slightest attempt to have Canadian students think seriously about and use the works of Canadians to "think with".

What about the Institute for Humanities courses taught in jails and the downtown East Side (at Carnegie Centre)? ("A Dangerous Business: Teaching the Humanities on the Street and in the Gaol", Stephen Duguid and Jane Harris, in Anarcho-Modernism.) The following writers are named: Carl Sagan, the Romantics, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Socrates, Steinbeck, Cervantes, Burgess, Orwell, Thoreau, Marcuse, Conrad, Dostoevesky, Kropotkin, Kierkegaard, Plato, Freud, Skinner, Fromm, E.H. Carr, V. Serge, the Brontes, Kate Millett. They all swirl around -- the authors tell us -- "the overall curricular theme of 'Human Nature and the Human Condition'". (p.190)

Strange. Notice. Not a single Canadian work. Though just outside the windows of Carnegie Centre much of Irene Baird's novel Waste Heritage is set, a novel about unemployment, repressive police, governments that avoid issues, men and women who struggle for solidarity, attempts to organize the destitute, the desperation of the young to gain some meaning and freedom. But why go on. When Harold Innis, writing of the imposition of intellectual control by imperial powers, coined the phrase "monopolies of knowledge?, he might have used as example the offerings of the SFU Institute for the Humanities.

If Canadian texts were used seriously, some important other considerations than the ones in play would be required: the uniqueness of Canadian society and the Canadian grasp of reality, special ways Canadians have looked at social problems, Canadian concepts of society, colonialism, imperial oppression, Canadian relations to the stranger, U.S. brutality exercised in the world?.

All the articles in Anarcho-Modernism might have been published in Boise, Idaho or Weimar, Germany, a fact that probably delights Jerry Zaslove. There are a few pieces on Walter Benjamin, Alduous Huxley, and human rights, which are mildly interesting. The claim that the book moves "Toward a New Critical Theory" is empty. Moveover, nothing in the text opens up or deals in a fresh, informative way with any important aspect of Canadian life, society, history, sociology, belief -- or anything else. Here are, mostly, passengers on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, late at night, picking without appetite from a tray of stale international hors d'oeuvres. Even Alan Whitehorn's article, "From Alienation to Community"-- based, apparently, upon Canadian experience-- is so careful, so correct, so distant, so anaesthetized to U.S.imperial presence in Canada, it could never (as Norman Bethune did) catch septicaemia from getting into real contact with the patient it wishes to treat. If this book provides us with a look at the force of Anarcho-Modernism, we can turn over and go back to sleep.

The peculiar characteristic of -- especially Blaser, but -- almost all of the argument stuffed into the other two books, is its cult-solipsism. From the statements that the poetic line is shaped by the individual(istic)breath, that the "closed" poem is authoritarian and exclusive, that real poetry is paratactic, that beauty and great statement are aristocratic, to the delusion that the open (unpunctuated, un-terminated, un-capitalized, free-flow) statement is "democratic", reader-created, ironic, and pluralist, the writers engage in a kind of cult-solipsistic, anarchist manifesto-making.

George Bowering ("Robin Blaser at Lake Paradox", Even on Sunday) gives us a glimpse of the cult exclusivity. He is a Canadian taken over by U.S. explanations of being. Such a person must imitate, and the imitator always gives away unstated (awkward) assumptions of the imitated. Bowering separates himself and his audience from ordinary people, the others: "the grammar teacher", "the old grammar teacher's definition of a sentence", "regular Canadian literature critics", and Canadian literature critics who like "the untroubled sentences and straight-ahead similies they can purchase in the lyrics of autobiographical Canadian poets". He dismisses (snottily) readers of poetry that is not poetry of the cult group because (he says) "they do not want difficulty, either of allusion or lexical presentation" (p.81). He has to excuse himself for using the word "beautifully": "Then the poem begins so beautifully, as a person without theoretical training would say" (p. 83). And he dismisses poetry that is "simply descriptive of the world or little autobiographical bits of it". (pp.88-89) (As if any utterance that is poetry could be "simply" either of those two things; but Bowering is shutting out the canaille, the non-members. Having done that, he turns to address the other cult members.)

That brings us to art and culture. First: neither Blaser nor Zaslove ever touches the culture which is the living, breathing, shaping, aspiring, being, and creating of Canadians in their community, here, now.

Secondly, almost all the utterance reproduced in the three volumes under the name of "poetry" is disappointing. "All this talk," one says, "all this exclusivity, all this special pleading, all this intricification of the platitudinous, all this labyrinthine theorizing -- about a heap of accumulated mediocrity."

The utterance called poetry reproduced in the three volumes is manifesto-produced utterance. The manifesto -- deeply flawed anyway -- is shot full of U.S. imperialist, fundamentalist thought. And so even when, very, very occasionally the utterance "can sing", it is not far from its contaminating origin. George Bowering is useful here, again.

Assuming the morally querulous position of those who have mastered his creative soul, he gives away in his imitations "unstated" (awkward) assumption of the imitated. In a sense, he may be said to speak for them all (and to sum them up) in a little poem he wrote in 1974, years before the three volumes were even begun:

1944 I loved
the beautiful American army helmet

Naked, shining, drab, olive green
Or painted with wide white stripes, maybe MP
Or covered with netting, maybe leaves stuck all over
Or a star on front for a pistolero general in fatigues
Or dark blue in the battleship gun turret
Or lying alone on the island beach sand in Life magazine

There's no more Life magazine
But the American army helmet lying alone
On the jungle floor is beautiful