Canadian Ressentiment

Abstract

So begins the "Death Chant for Mr. Johnson's America," one of the darkest of the "candid Canadian opinions of the U.S." collected in 1968 (hence the exemplary figure of the draft-dodger) by the poet Al Purdy in a book entitled The New Romans. The title suggests its recurrent theme: a United States of America as strong and extensive as the Roman Empire, but as decadent and as doomed. These verses also reveal something about Canada--not only in such explicit content as the sanctuary Maple Leaf, but generally, in the ironic style which assumes Whitman's idealistic voice not only with Ginsbergian disaffection, but as if in northern exile. This is a supplementary theme which figures Canada as a morally distinct and superior Tiresias upon whose weaker frame the terrible American vision has descended. Another contributor to The New Romans draws on the same gruesome olfactory paradigm and figures this Canadian critical perspective more explicitly, with an uncomfortable self-consciousness: "Geographical statistics apart, America is huge and Canada is small. In a very real way, Canada represents the attitudes of many other less developed countries towards her vast southern neighbor. Canada, like most other countries, [End Page 133] recognizes both the possible goods of capitalism and, at the same time, the rottenness, propaganda, and double standards which actually emanate from it, insidious and omnipresent as the sweat that American sprays, creams, and roll-ons were invented to eradicate. Double standards are as natural as perspiration. But our small, well-to-do country manages to reject--idealistically if not practically--most of the smell." 2