The more things change, the more they stay the same. This brilliant and original idea struck me early yesterday morning, as I was sifting through a pile of old books, trying to decide which should be consigned to the laundry room, given shelving limitations in my ivory tower.
The book I picked up was admirably thin: bound in boards, but only 30 pages. It was written by Bruce Hutchison (1901-92), deservedly among the most respected (and therefore feared) Canadian journalists through many decades.
The book, or rather tract, was entitled Canada’s Lonely Neighbour. This refers, of course, to the United States. It was published near the time I was born, which is to say, now, a long time ago.
It was the product of extensive travelling in Europe, and of reflection on Canada’s situation as a kind of middleman between Britain and Europe on the one side, and the U.S. on the other: allies that secretly loathe each other. I will return to this point in a moment.
But meanwhile I cannot resist a comment on the style of the book itself. It is written, as all the Hutchison books I recall, in a very personal way, replete with anecdotes of the sort that today’s “professional journalist” might eschew, for they strip through the false veneer of a mechanical “objectivity.” There is not a page on which some rather astute observation is not made, of the sort that can’t be restricted to politics, in any narrow sense. There is warmth, empathy, drollness, humility; but also there is hard bone. Hutchison was never a coward: he came from that old Canada, in which you did not apologize for independent views.
There is, for instance, a famous anecdote (so famous that it has survived into the age of Internet), from 1952. Hutchison had made remarks in the daily he then edited—the Victoria Times—that so outraged members of the British Columbia legislature, they demanded an apology from his publisher.
Hutchison responded by reprinting the offending editorial on the front page the next day, “in case anyone had missed it.”
One is reminded of him, today, by Canadian journalists such as Ezra Levant, or Mark Steyn, who, though their personalities may vary, nevertheless share that stiff-necked quality. Levant’s new book—Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights—puts everything on the line in the way the best Canadian journalists always did. (I recommend that book without reservation: it delivers exactly what it promises, and every voter needs to know.)
So, in that sense nothing has changed. The nobility, or rather potential nobility, of the journalistic vocation remains.
The only thing that has changed is that today the honest journalist can be hauled before human rights commissions and press councils, and pursued ruinously through the courts with lawsuits so frivolous that they would once have been tossed out on sight. There is no bottom to the cultural and intellectual degradation that “political correctness” can achieve, and no end to the tyranny it heralds.
But all that was an aside. What I instead wished to bring, to my reader’s attention this morning, is Bruce Hutchison’s observations on the phenomenon of anti-Americanism, circa 1954.
From his first page he refers to “the dry rot, something intangible developing within the minds of nameless millions, that is steadily undermining the friendship of the old world and the new, on which the fate of both must hang.”
Plus ça change. What Hutchison goes on to describe—the European perception of Americans as crass, childish, stupid, dangerous; and the reciprocal American perception of Europeans as profoundly ungrateful hypocrites and snobs—is still with us.
Moreover, the “root cause” seems still to be what Hutchison believed. For immediately below the surface he found a remarkable inability to understand each other, masked by the illusion of sharing the same broad culture. Europe draws a wicked caricature of America; America’s cartoon Europe is a preposterous fairy tale.
But deeper still, he found the European hypocrisy a greater obstacle even to its self-understanding than the American resentment of it. For here was an entire continent that had become, through terrible wars, morally confused and dysfunctional, even while it contained great numbers of vigorous, able and, indeed, very civilized people.
Hutchison said things were getting worse, and might require a miracle to reverse; but that the cure “will not be found in the present attempt to hush up the unpleasant truth by diplomatic postures, after-dinner oratory and transatlantic cargoes of soft soap.” These remain the cures proposed, and on view once again this last week at the G20 summit.
The current popularity of President Barack Obama in Europe is another mask: Europeans adore him because they think he shares their “sophisticated” contempt for the American people.
But the full antipathy will soon re-emerge, as it did after the brief time-out that was last provided by the events of 9/11. Meanwhile, Obama may soon learn the unfortunate political truth: that his predecessor was wiser to play to American, rather than European, prejudices.
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