Anne of Windy Willows, Anne of Windy Poplars, and the Fine Art of Being Sparing With the Truth

 

I think I was around five years old when my mother started buying books for me to read. It was strange because neither my mum, who came from a working class English family, nor my dad, who was middle class and came from a Swiss family, really read many books or at least I never saw them read many books.

Thanks to my mum I became an inveterate reader. When I got intense asthma when I was twelve I became an even more inveterate reader (and movie watcher I might add). Most of what I read as a teenager was fiction. I read Shakespeare. I read Mark Twain. I read George Orwell. I read Moby Dick. I read Dickens. I even read Ethan Frome (which was not one of my favourite reads by any stretch of the imagination). And I read all of the Anne books by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery save Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythe’s Are Quoted, which wasn’t published at the time save in excerpts in The Road to Yesterday.

My love of the Anne books has not changed over the years. The books remain amongst my favourites and I have, as a consequence, even collected Anne and L. M. Montgomery books over the years. What did change is that I went to college and I learned how to do research. 

One of the things that has interested me is the fascinating textual history of one of the Anne books, Anne of Windy Willows also known as Anne of Windy Poplars first published in 1938. I learned that Anne of Windy Poplars was not fully the book Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote. Montgomery, of course, had several different publishers. Frederick A Stokes was her publisher for the US market. Harrap was her publisher in Great Britain. Angus and Robertson was her publisher in Australia. McClelland and Stewart was her publisher for the Canadian market.  

Another thing I learned was that that Anne of Windy Willows was the original title of the book and that the American publisher was unhappy with that title and was unhappy with some of the darker parts of the text. For these reasons Montgomery changed the title of the book and excised and changed some of the text.

I note all this because I recently bought the Anne of Windy Populars Sourcebooks edition. Sourcebooks, which is based in Illinois and which has the imprimatur of the of the relatives of Lucy Maud, claims, on the back of the book, that this edition of Anne of Windy Poplars, has the original restored unabridged text of the novel. This, along with the fact that I wanted one Sourcebooks edition of the Anne books, was why I bought this edition.

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Populars is not the original text of the novel. First off, it does not have the original title, the title Lucy Maud preferred, Anne of Windy Willows, a title Stokes apparently disliked because it was close to Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Second, it does not contain the passages excised and changed by Montgomery because the American publisher and McClelland and Stewart which apparently followed the American leader, wanted. So, to sum up, this the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Willows is not the “original, unabridged text” Sourcebooks and the relatives of Montgomery make it out to be. Sourcebooks and the relatives, in other words, are being sparing with the truth. 

Wouldn't it be nice if all concerned could admit the truth, namely that Anne of Windy Willows is the text as Montgomery wanted? And wouldn't it be nice if all the Anne books could be standardised and that Anne of Windy Willows, the fourth in the series (though not the fourth published), could be published in the North American market as part of this standardisation?

A Note: Another thing the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Poplars has done is to renumber the chapters. In the original edition of the book the chapters for each of the three books begins with 1. In this reworked edition the chapters are numbered consecutively.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Dangerous CBC Reds Are Under our American Beds

 

Poor Canada. It is North America’s Poor Edith. Canada, particularly through its public broadcaster the CBC, has, over the years, produced some excellent and stimulating television shows. Hardly anybody within and outside of Canada, however, watches them. When people do watch them in significant numbers it is often a cause for at least some Canadian national celebration. 

There are several Canadian television shows that come to mind when I think about fine Canadian television. There is the excellent and very Canadian Due South, a cop show that explores, with humour, wit, and sometimes even sarcasm, Canadian and American ideologies of exceptionalism. There is Cold Squad, a show about usually cold murder cases from the files of the Vancouver constabulary which the US ripped off in the form of Cold Case. There is DaVinci’s Inquest, a show which superbly explores the dark realities at the heart of policing and politics in Vancouver. There is Slings and Arrows, the best show, in my opinion, ever produced on the theatre and theatre life in which each season centres around two Shakespeare plays and, in the third series, a musical comedy instead of another Shakespeare play, and a show which some regard as the finest TV show ever made. There is Heartland, a family saga set on an Alberta ranch that recalls excellent US family fare like The Waltons though with a Canadian twist and in which its American distributer, particularly in the early seasons, blurs out Alberta licence plates for presumably moral reasons—the dangers of Hot Ash licence plates?—or national reasons—it doesn’t want us to know that it is Canadian? There is the wonderful absurdist comedy Twitch City that precedes and foreshadows similar British comedies like The League of Gentlemen and the work of Julia Davis. And there is Murdoch Mysteries, a show about the Toronto constabulary in the Victorian and Edwardian era that reminds one of great British cop shows on ITV. All of these shows I have enjoyed immensely and been given much to think about as a result of watching them.

Well presumably some Canadians were intrigued to learn that someone, namely American diplomats stationed in Canada, were watching CBC commissioned shows. They were watching The Border (2008-2010), a show that reminds me less of 24 (2001-2010, 2014), a connection some commentators have claimed to see, than to the BBC’s spy, crime, and action-adventure show Spooks (2002-2011) with which The Border has a lot in common including an indebtedness to John le Carre. This last, by the way,  means that The Border, like Spooks, has a lot of reality in it. They were watching the excellent Intelligence (2005-2007), a show about the messy realities of the cross border drug and crime “trade" between British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest and the American and Canadian intelligence and surveillance agents involved in tracking and trying to stop them, brought to us by the same person who created the superb DaVinci’s Inquest, a show that preceded and parallels much in the very realistic US TV show The Wire. They were watching H2O (2004), a drama about an American plan to steal Canadian water co-written by Paul Gross. And they were watching Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), a situation comedy with an occasional bite centring on Canadian Muslims living in a fictional town in the prairie province of Saskatchewan. 

How do we know American diplomats and American agents stationed in Canada were watching these shows? Well in 2010, during the Barack Obama presidency and the prime ministership of ex Reform and new Tory pro-American Stephen Harper, it came to light, thanks to the Canadian national newspapers the National Post and Globe and Mail, and thanks particularly to Wikileaks, which had gotten hold of thousands of US secret diplomatic “cables”, that some bureaucrats in the US diplomatic corps who had watched these three shows reported in cables dated 2008 that they thought they were “anti-American”. These diplomatic and perhaps not so diplomatic missives accused these four CBC shows of stereotyping Americans via emotion laden “anti-American” melodrama. They claimed that that while these shows, produced with Canadian governmental aid, hardly constituted a diplomatic crisis between the two now close neighbours, they did reveal that the CBC, Canadian pubic television whose remit, in particularly, was to make Canadian television, twisted current events in order to feed Canadians negative images of the United States (ah there is that old saw of Canadian identity being a product of Canada and Canadians marking themselves off against Americans). They asserted that these shows reflected a Canadian nationalism that counterpointed Americans engaged in all sorts of “nefarious" actions while Canadians tried to stop them and even sometimes opposed them, shows that all too often counterpointed American black hats to Canadian white hats. 

The controversy that resulted over these cables, some of if gosh this is what American tax dollars are paying for variety, when they were released by the Canadian national press and Wikileaks was such that the American ambassador in Ottawa was forced to confess that while he had never seen any of these shows he doubted that any of them were “anti-American” while a spokesman for the US State Department in Washington emphasised the close friendship between the two countries and claimed that no one knows us, the US, better than Canada, a comment that opens up the Pandora’s box of double edged swords. What he also neglected to note is that these “anti-American” not “anti-American" television shows were also shown in the US on retro channels, if often late at night and in the wee hours of morning. Can US TV be "anti-American" too? 

Speaking of being an anti-, The Border one of whose creators was Lindalee Tracey of Not a Love Story fame, also sometimes skewers the Russians, the Chinese, two nations regularly skewered on US TV, the British and the Canadians, the last two often for good reason. MI6, the British not so secret spy and sureveillance agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, in particular, come in for criticism, the latter quite regularly, making The Border, perhaps, at least for those Canadian politicians and nationalist Canadian historians—you know, the Canadian politicians and historians who think that only they are the only real Canadian patriots and who seek a more militant Canada with greater military, surveillance, and intelligence ties to the US—a prime candidate for the epithet “anti-Canadian”. Can Canadian TV be “anti-British” and “anti-Canadian” too?

Of course, what is never interrogated and never analysed empirically in this claim that something is “anti-American"is why and how something is “anti”  Now I will grant you that comments such as America sucks and Americans are dicks, that Israel sucks and Israelis (not Jews) are pricks, that Iceland sucks and Icelanders are sicks, and that evil Russkies suck and Russkies and dicks, pricks, and sicks (a common ideologically driven malady in the US which is used to great effect by the military, industrial, governmental, and university complex) are ill considered, if intellectually considered at all, lowest common denominator nonsense perhaps not even worthy of a seventh grade or first form mind. What I will not grant is that claims that the US is an imperial power, that it often throws its weight around, including in Canada way too often, that it regards itself as the chief policeman of the “civilised" world, that it has an increasing divide between the haves and have nots, and that it has had and continues to have racial problems, to name a few, is "anti-American". All of those critiques are valid empirical critiques of real America and, save in the minds of manipulating demagogues or polemicists and apologists and the socialised for conformity manipulated masses is not "anti-American". They are simply descriptions of reality. 

One can, of course, extend this point to other “antis". The differentiation between emotion grounded lowest common denominator schoolyard criticism versus empirical and analytical criticism can be applied to Israel as well given that Israel, empirically speaking, is a regional imperial power, thanks particularly to the US, with all that entails in terms of policing, surveillance, violence, and power, and where some Jews and many Muslims and Christians are second class citizens and experience segregation and violence. A lot of the same empirical criticism made of the US can also be made of Russia, including the observation that it is an imperial power, with the caveat that Russia is a second or third rate great power compared to the US (and certainly isn’t a threat to world domination and even if they were surely 007 or his American counterpart would be able to stop them single handedly as always) and so one’s empirical criticisms of that state’s power ambitions—all great powers including the US and Israel have power ambitions, of course—have to be adjusted accordingly in order to more accurately fit the Russian case. 

That so many of the socialised for conformity masses who are easily and readily manipulated by demagogues, by polemicists and apologists strategising for ideological and hence political advantage through the use of  emotional appeals, fall for the spurious rhetoric and discourse that even empirical and empirically verifiable criticisms of the US and Israel and Russia are the same as lowest common denominator “antiism" tells you a lot about the life of the mass mind in the modern and postmodern world and about how cultural and ideological power works in the modern and postmodern world. And who says that human life is not inherently absurd?

Read the cables here…https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/canada-08OTTAWA136

The Books of My Life: Values in Conflict

Colleges and universities, universities and colleges, colleges within universities, colleges as universities, whatever the equation, education and higher education have occasioned much gnashing of teeth over the years in the cultural wars that have come to typify the modern and postmodern worlds. One of the domains where these culture wars have been fought out in the modern and postmodern worlds is in the highly bureaucratised educational sectors of modern core nation societies, sectors that are thought by many to be central to the “proper” functioning of a modern and postmodern society. Talcott Parsons would certainly be fascinated by it all.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw no less gnashing of teeth about higher education and particularly higher liberal arts education then, well pick almost any date, the 1900s, the 1920s,  1960s. the 1980s, or the early 1990s as York University Canadian historian and social scientist Paul Axelrod reminds us in his Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education (Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press, 2002). If one can conceptualise the polemics and apologetics over higher education and particularly the polemics and apologetics over a liberal arts education as lying on a continuum with total “traditionalism"—however that is defined since, as Axelrod notes, the notion of what constitutes a liberal education has changed across time and even space—on one end of the spectrum and total innovation—again however that is defined since notions of innovation have changed too across time and space—on the other, Axelrod lies, I think, somewhere in the middle. 

Axelrod recognises that things have changed not only educationally but politically, economically, culturally, geographically, and demographically in the modern and postmodern world and he recognises that higher education must adapt to those chances. At the same time Axelrod wants to preserve, in the midst of this change, the core of a what he defines as a liberal education for a postmodern world, a liberal education that encompasses creativity, autonomy restraint, control, intellectual breadth and specialisation, diversity, tolerance, and a liberal education that produces (or potentially produces) well rounded potential employees complete with essential good employee traits. The problem, as Axelrod notes, in making the argument for the contemporary importance and relevance of a liberal arts education is the important role economic elites and politicians with their education for a job “pragmatism” play in contemporary higher education and in higher education bureaucracies.

Axelrod, of course, is not the first polemicist and apologist writing on higher education to defend the value of a liberal arts education in the face of higher educational change and societal change. As Axelrod reminds us the eccentric social scientist Thorstein Veblen in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 pointed out the dominance of business interests in the rise of the modern research university of the late 19th and early 20th century and the impact this was having on faculty activity, the university curriculum, and the governance of research universities, public or private, with their mania for new educational technologies (in Veblen’s era a mania for the modern Prussian and German higher education model), more students, and higher education public relations spin and decried it. As Veblen notes, by and large the US, and I would add the Canadian universities in the process of becoming research universities, largely chose not to follow the Oxbridge or Camford model of governance, one that gave academics control over their Oxbridge colleges at least until Margaret Thatcher assumed the throne in that green and “blessed" isle, something that says a lot about the cultural meanings and ideologies that dominate both nation-states.

One of the things that became central in the age of university expansion in the age of Veblen and after was branding, something Veblen notes was important to research universities when he was writing in the early part of the twentieth century. Spin doctoring has continued since Veblen’s day and has become central to colleges and universities as a even a brief gander at college and university Facebook pages quite clearly reveals (something that also brings to mind academic discussions of bullshite). One of the pieces of  public relations universities particularly relied on after World War II, an era that saw an increase in government expenditures for education and particularly higher educational research, relevant research in particular, of course, and in students, was that education could prove helpful—particularly monetarily helpful—in the job market of the seemingly ever changing post World War II world. 

These burgeoning research universities still had a bit of the old amidst the new in the era after World War II. They were characterised by a paternalism, a hangover from the higher education produces gentlemen and, if in a lesser and in a more circumscribed way, genteel ladies ideology, and they limited free speech. These research universities limped on in the early sixties and by the mid and late sixties were conceding some things to student activists during the “revolutionary” era which ended in loco parentis to some extent and only for the moment. They were also helped immensely by the seemingly never ending financial largesse of the government and growing corporations coming their way during the era.

And then the oil crisis hit followed by inflation and stagflation and later a host of capitalist booms and busts. In the wake of the oil crisis governments and corporations, both increasingly caught up by the passionate wet dream that there was money to made in them there gilded hills of economic globalisation. As Axelrod notes, the post oil crisis era was an era characterised by declining public support for colleges and universities. It was also, he notes, an era of increasing grade inflation in universities, increasing college and university reliance on student fees, private gifts, and targeted state support, mostly not for the liberal arts. It was an era characterised by the increasing corporatisation, bureaucratisation, consumerisation, and retailisation of universities, something which gave us, amongst other things, university and college speech codes and calls for universities in particular to remould themselves for the realities of the job market in a world where neo-liberalism with its belief in the market as god had triumphed at least for the moment, the new paternalism. And, perhaps even more importantly, it was an era in which new technologies, thanks to the triumph of the brave new digital world and its shiny new toys, new toys which bred speculation in universities, government, and business about how these shiny new toys might change higher education and how higher education “commodities” are delivered.

In a final coda Axelrod wonders about where universities might go in the wake of the early 21st century. Of course, writing from the vantage point of 2024 one has a little better idea about how to answer this question. Neo-liberalism remains dominant in the political culture of Canada, the United States, and England. Universities and colleges continue to pursue governmental, noblesse oblige, and corporate monies, and social media like FaceBook have simply added to the university and college penchant for pollyannaish spin doctoring or public relations work. Grade inflation continues at liberal arts centred universities where probably too many students with a limited interest in the liberal arts are matriculating given the continuing—and at this time still at least partially correct hypothesis— that more education equals more financial remuneration. Universities and colleges still try to be relevant though the relevance of Women’s Studies, African American Studies, and Latino and Latina Studies (Latinx Studies) has been increasingly overshadowed by “pragmatic” education” for the “new” economy and programmes like computer science, security studies, and data collection. The culture wars over higher education continue and right wing populists continue to maintain and expand their better poker hands thanks to claims that universities and colleges are dens of political correctness (hyperbole grounded in a selective gaze) though those making such polemical claims are themselves politically and ideologically correct (not to mention demagogic and hence skilled at manipulating the masses for political and ideological power ends) though not all of them seem to recognise the rather obvious fact that they are (hypocrisy). Events like the recent Israel-Hamas War have allowed authoritarian if not fascist university and college presidents or chancellors acting not only at their own behest but at the behest of boards of governance dominated by more “traditionalist” business types and rich donors, to increasingly rely on the surveillance and forceful arm of the increasingly militarised and fascist police (when it comes to outsider dissidents not to mention minorities) to maintain "law and order" on campus.

Axelrod’s book is an interesting addition to the culture war polemics and apologetics over education and higher education in a neo-liberal dominated world and a reminder that the culture wars over education seemingly, never stop. This educational theory and practise Sisyphus, like rust and decay, apparently never sleeps. In the end, as I was reading Values in Conflict, I, a child of the sixties for good and bad and a dystopian leaning student of utopianism whether of “left” or “right”, Bolshevik or capitalist, persuasion could’t help but muse about the fact that the more things change the more they seemingly stay the same. Values in Conflict made me even more certain that my scepticism about any form of social engineering, whether heartfelt or cynical, and whether educational or general, was misplaced and that utopian engineering of all stripes is likely doomed to failure in the long run. Additionally, I couldn’t help but muse about whether the liberal arts university and college and the liberal arts themselves will survive the latest utilitarian threats to them. I suspect they will survive in some form or another but likely largely at major high status and wealthy research universities like the University of Toronto and the University of Texas and in research colleges like Amherst, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar. Stay tuned for further episodes in the never ending saga of the Trials and Travails of a Liberal Arts Education coming next year to a theatre near you.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Strange Case of Missing Canadian Content on YouTube

 

There have been a number of, in my opinion, excellent Canadian television shows over the years including the innovative and influential Degrassi trilogy of The Kids of Degrassi Street, (CBC, 1979-1986) Degrassi Junior High (CBC, 1987-1989) and Degrassi High (CBC, 1989-1991),  Degrassi before Californication, Anne of Green Gables (CBC, 1985, 1987), Due South (CTV, 1994-1999), Slings and Arrows (The Movie Network/Movie Central 2003-2006), a show turned down by the CBC for perhaps being too much of a satire of a Canadian cultural institution, Stratford, Being Erica (CBC, 2009-2011), the long running Murdoch Mysteries (City, 2008-2012, CBC, 2013-), and the long running Heartland (CBC, 2007-), to name a few. None of them, however, get either the attention they deserve or the props they deserve from the seemingly omnipresent but certainly not omniscient “reactors" on YouTube, whether Canadian or not, whether scholars, who are a vast minority on social media, or not.

There are, as anyone who has browsed YouTube for a period of time knows, a number of Canadians who do music, film, and television “reactions” on that social media site. They, like the English Canadian duo CineBinge, Popcorn in Bed (who is sometimes joined by her sister) and darcie’s watching stuff, both of whom hail from Alberta, the most Americanised of Americanised Canada, the Torontonian shadowcat, or the Canadian francophones Vic, and Verdy, however, largely react to American stuff though Popcorn does occasionally, very occasionally branch out into British stuff. A few, like the Hanier Family and Bars and Barbells do have Canadian content rules and periodically “react” to music by English Canadian bands like Rush, Triumph, and April Wine but not generally to lesser known English Canadian bands such as Great Big Sea, Figgy Duff, The Northern Pikes, Frozen Ghost, lesser known French Canadian bands like The Box and Men Without Hats, or very English Canadian Canadian bands such as The Tragically Hip or Sloan.

There is one Canadian “reactor”, however, an expatriate Canadian actor living in London in the United Kingdom named Megan Ruth who generally “reacts” to British television shows like the innovative and influential Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-1976), Fawlty Towers (BBC, 1975-1979), Blackadder (BBC, 1983-1999), Inbetweeners (E4, 2008-2010), and The League of Gentlemen (BBC, 1999-2002, 2017), all TV shows worthy or “reactions” and all British TV shows largely ignored by the majority of “reactors” on YouTube in favour of the much more mediocre American programmes that dominate “reaction" videos on YouTube. That makes Ms. Ruth somewhat of an anomaly amongst “reactors” on YouTube. 

In many ways Ms. Ruth, CineBinge, Popcorn in Bed, darcie’s watching stuff, Vic, and Verdy are allegories for Canada itself past and present. Ms. Ruth symbolises the English Canada of yore, an English Canada proud to be part of the British Empire, an empire that is more of a memory than a reality these days. CineBinge, Vic, and Verdy symbolise the Canada of today, a Canada that is a client state of Imperial America and in thrall to Californicated American culture. All of them ignore Canadian content generally. Ms. Ruth ignores Canadian television programmes that are similar to the British television shows she does “react” to such as the fascinating Twitch City (CBC, 1998, 2000), the brainchild of Canadian art director Don McKellar. CineBinge ignores the films of the brilliant Canadian artist, Guy Maddin while Vic and Verdy ignore the work of English and French Canadian artists. 

Of course, this state of affairs—the strange case of missing Canadian content on YouTube—is not surprising given that “reactors” have made themselves into commodities whose goal it is to make monies off of advertising revenue on YouTube. And the best way to make money off advertising revenue on YouTube is by “reacting" to American stuff given that American Californicated culture is one of the dominant imperial cultures on the planet and the dominant English language culture on the planet. Perhaps the strange case of missing Canadian “reaction” content on YouTube is not so strange after all. 

Canadians, by the way, are not the only “reactors” to ignore their own media history in favour of American television and movies. Most of the Brits on YouTube largely ignore great British television and movies like Inspector Morse (ITV, 1987-2000), Lewis (ITV, 2006-2015), Broadchurch (ITV, 2013, 2015, 2017), and Happy Valley (BBC, 2014, 2016, 2023), all of which are all far superior artistically speaking to almost anything and everything on US TV, in favour of American content just as Canadians largely ignore Canadian content and gravitate toward American media. But then like Canada once Imperial Britain is now a client state of the Imperial United States. By the way, the same state of affairs can also be found among Australian and Kiwi “reactors” to television and movies on YouTube, citizens of two other English and British settler societies that are now client states of the US who focus most of their "reactions" on American content.

One last word about Ms. Ruth, I have occasionally imagine that her show must be brought to us by CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s version of MI5, MI6, the CIA, and the FBI. Why? Because she apparently deleted a post of mine noting her exclusive focus on British media and her exclusion of Canadian content. Whether she did delete this comment or not I don’t know. I have no empirical data to verify that she did or didn’t do this. Still I like to imagine that she did. After all, it would make so much sense in the wider world of politically and culturally correct YouTube “reaction” videos.

The Books of My Life: The Penguin History of Canada (Bothwell)

 

Robert Bothwell's The Penguin History of Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 2006), is an excellent introduction to Canadian history from French and English colonisation, with a few details on the indigenous history of Canada thrown in, to the election of the American style Tory government with Stephen Harper as prime minister of Canada in 2006. Bothwell's history of Canada is, one presumes, a replacement or perhaps better a supplement to Bothwell's teacher Kenneth McNaught's much revised classic The Penguin History of Canada (London: Penguin, 1988), first published in 1969.

Bothwell's book is largely traditional in form thanks to its emphasis on great men and great events. While Bothwell emphasises the usual suspects in the political and economic history of Canada he does occasionally throw in some useful social history in the form of demographic history and a bit of cultural history, mostly on ebb and flow and complexity of Canadian identity history, into the mix.

Some may like the fact that Bothwell's book, given that it is authored, by a single historian, is a coherent well-written narrative of Canadian history that virtually anyone with an interest in Canadian, English and British settler societies, and comparative history can read unlike the fragmented multi-authored textbooks that dominate introductory university classes these days. Some may be slightly annoyed with Bothwell's periodic editorial comments about Canadian political history and economic history and his editorial comments of the "great men" of Canadian history. Others may appreciate Bothwell's editorial comments given that it allows readers a peek behind the wizard's curtain and into Bothwell's ideological convictions. For those interested in an excellent and relatively recent history of Canada, I highly recommend Bothwell's The Penguin History of Canada which gives us a history of Canada warts and all.

The Books of My Life: Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class

 

The study of Popular Culture in American universities while present in small doses before 1960 is, like African American Studies, Latino and Latina Studies, and Women’s Studies, largely a product of the culture wars of the 1960s. Still even In the wake of that “bloody” culture war the study of popular film and eventually popular music and popular television in the university has been accepted only grudgingly in many quarters. 

The struggle to bring film, television, and popular music into the liberal arts curriculum thus has not been easy given the fact that for many intellectuals and academics in the 1950s and the 1960s the mass media, including film, pop music, and television, were seen as lowest common denominator opiates—which in some cases is true--that were of little interest to those who studied culture, meaning high culture, in the academy. By the time I went to university in the 1970s, however, film was comfortably ensconced in English, Comparative Literature Departments and even Film Programmes and Departments began to appear. Eventually, Popular Culture, if in a more practical and pragmatic key, was added into the curricular mix as those neo-liberals who ran and run the increasingly retail oriented bureaucracies known as universities and colleges discovered that there is students to be matriculated and monies to be made from the teaching of film, television, and pop music as a “profession”, even if they are all professions that, like professional sports, are not easy to break into.

As someone who came of age in the 1960s I grew to love film, popular music, and eventually television, once it, from my perspective, matured. By 1963 I had grown to love the Beatles and could barely wait for the next Beatles single or album release to appear at the record store, department store, or drug store down the street from my Dallas home. By 1967, thanks to the Beatles albums Rubber Soul. Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, I had increasingly come to see popular music as an art form. In this I was not alone as William Mann’s famous 1963 review of Beatles songs as art in the Times and the rise of “intelligent” rock magazines like Rolling Stone, NME, and Melody Maker make clear. By 1968 I was listening to what we would now call an alternative FM radio station in Arlington and developing a taste for progressive art rock and progressive psychedelic bands like King Crimson, the Moody Blues and later on Yes, Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator, Spirit, Kansas, Captain Beyond, and, in particular, Gentle Giant. Prog became my popular music of choice—I was already a devotee of classical music--though I continued to enjoy selectively other pop music genres in the increasingly segmented world of popular music including pop, power pop, soul, hard rock, punk, new wave, new romanticism, goth, hard rock, grunge, and even a bit of heavy metal.

Another of the bands I "got into” in those years was Rush. I first heard the Canadian rock trio in 1974 when I bought their eponymous first album. I liked it and still do. Despite this I really didn’t connect with Rush’s subsequent albums until Permanent Waves came out in 1980. I suspect this was because I was never a comic book nerd, a science fiction geek, or a fan of Ayn Rand and her cult. I was more into Hitchcock, Mark Twain, and Max Weber. Permanent Waves, however, with its, what seemed to me at the time, more progressive nature, appealed to me a lot and made me a Rush fan again. I bought every album they released afterwards save for Clockwork Angels, which I will hope to pick up at some point.

Even though I was into rock I was never an inveterate reader of rock magazines. I tended to dismiss rock "critics" because of their, what seemed to me, low level “criticism", a “criticism that seemed to me a hodgepodge of new journalistic narcissism and arrogance a la Pauline Kael blended with an inability to comprehend that beauty and value are in the eye of the beholder. What I valued was what I, for whatever cultural, economic, political, demographic, or geographic reason or reasons, liked. The fact that what I liked was not liked by most “critics” particularly at Rolling Stone, didn’t matter to me. I did not give a crap what they liked for whatever musically correct reason. I liked what I liked and that was good enough for me. After all, I was never someone to wilt before peer pressure.

When I matriculated at university I discovered that there were books on popular culture. I discovered Robin Wood’s book on Hitchcock. I discovered Dick Hebdige’s book on the mods, the punks, and subcultural style. I discovered several of Simon Frith’s many early books on popular music. I discovered John Tulloch’s and Manuel Alverado’s book on Doctor Who, a show I grew up with. I discovered the publications of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and even thought of applying there for postgraduate work there. I was lucky I didn’t as I did not anticipate the devastation and destruction Margaret Thatcher left in her godzilla like wake. I even began to, if tentatively, write on popular culture when I wrote an essay on Punk Names for an Anthropology seminar on Names and Labels though it was not at the heart of what I studied in university.

Given all this it is not surprising that I would eventually get around to reading Canadian ethnomusicologist Chris McDonald’s Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). McDonald does an excellent job of bringing together textual analysis, sociology, ethnography, and history in his analysis of Rush. For McDonald Rush and its science fiction and fantasy lyrics, its dispassionate lyrics, its musical virtuosity, its musical inventiveness and experimentation, and its emphasis on hard work and professionalism, is a middle class band whose music particularly appeals to other White middle class male nerds—like myself—including middle class musician nerds—not like myself--who too feel like outsiders in the suburbs they grew up in. McDonald also does a nice job of exploring the different cultures into which White middle class male critics—many of whom act as rock’s tastemakers for many listeners--are inscribed one of which has made Rush and its progressive rock confreres virtually the spawn of a rock and roll Satan.

I did have a few problems with McDonald’s book. McDonald seems to take the position that Canada, from where Rush hails, is either like the US or converging with it while not arguing for either position. Did the US academic publisher balk at too much Canadian content? He does not inform us where those he interviewed are from. Does he think it not matters? But does it matter? Still I found Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown an excellent analysis of Rush and its contexts and recommend it to those with an intellectual interest in popular culture. Those who respond to any scholarly work on popular culture, like the aptly named Xtreme who offers a rather typical knee jerk anti-intellectual “review" of the book and the aptly named Tom Brady, who doesn’t grasp that the formulaic claim that something is “boring" tells us little about what is being reviewed and a lot about the “reader” or “listener” doing the “review", on Amazon, one of the many brave new digital world sites that has opened its coffers up to the lowest lowest common denominator, need not apply. They, after all, appear to prefer their world unexamined so they can continue to live their lives in a world where myths and fairy tales are mistaken for reality.

The Day a Bison Nearly Set on Our Tent in Elk Island

 

Lea and I had been camping in Waterton Lakes National Park and Glacier National Park on the border between Alberta and Montana, Canada and the United States, for eight days. They turned out to be two of our favourite camping and hiking spots on our journeys through Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, British Columbia, South Dakota, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia (again). 

We decided, however, that it was finally time to head north. So we hopped in the Camaro and left Waterton. On the way north we passed through Cardston, the earliest LDS settlement in and capital of Mormon Alberta and hence Canada, High River, later one of the Alberta homes of the superb CBC show Heatland, Calgary, and Red Deer finally arriving in Edmonton in the early evening. We went straight to the West Edmonton Mall to see the waterslides, something my then friend Lea had a fancy for and wanted to see. Needless to say, they were impressive. When we learned that we could get free tickets to the waterslides if we stayed in the hotel attached to the West Edmonton Mall we decided to check into the hotel, a nice luxury after weeks and weeks of tenting in “primitive” conditions. We stayed at the hotel four days and not only did we get free tickets to the waterslides but also to the submarine, the second largest submarine fleet in Canada folklore has it, to the skating rink, and also a host of other attractions in the small city that was the mall, a mall which had its own police station and chapel. 

One of the first things we did when we checked into our room was to get into the hot tub for a bath, something that we had not really had to that degree anyway, for weeks. Sink baths and one minute showers (which all the “civilised Canadian national parks we visited had) are just not the same. We spent four days in the mall sliding on the water slides, riding in the submarine, and reading free copies of the Globe and Mail amongst other entertainments. I bought a sweatshirt (which I still have), got a haircut—my hair was too long for camping and tenting in “primitive” conditions, and we ate at some very good restaurants. We had a great time. I even got to visit one of my mentor’s in Mormon Studies at the University of Alberta and several nice nearby bookstores.

But Murphy’s Law was, as it almost always in, in operation though we didn’t know it at the time. The weather was wonderful during the four days we spent in the mall. It was sunny and only partly cloudy. When we went east to camp and tent in Elk Island National Park, however, the weather turned rainy and we “enjoyed” four days of rain in that park tramping around in our Sierra Designs rainwear. 

One of the most entertaining aspects of the park, as it always is in national parks, was the geology, the flora, and particularly the fauna. We saw, for example, a large moose enjoying a frolic in one of the ponds of the park. And we saw a lot of bison. One of these bison, a big bull bison, “liked” to be around us so much he walked and walked around our lonely tent in the campground, the only tent in the campground. At one point it appeared as though he was going to sit down on it crushing it, we were sure, in the process. We were, to say the least, a bit disconcerted by the absurdity of it all.

Fortunately the bison decided not to sit on our tent. It survived to live another day. So did we. We left Elk Island for Jasper National Park arriving there several hours later.

The Books of My Life: Your Country, My Country

Robert Bothwell's Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) is yet another entry into the are United States and Canada similar or are they different sweepstakes. Like so many books written on this subject, one constituting perhaps what might now be called a sub-genre of English and British Settler Society Studies, Your Country, My Country is written by a Canadian (my country), a Canadian historian in this instance, a fact which, in itself, may say something about the stereotype of the Canadian obsession with the elephant living next door (your country) and the widespread American lack of interest in its neighbour lying to its north save as a place for vacationing or imagining.

The issue of Canadian and American similarities or differences in the Canadian and American post-World War II scholarly and academic worlds, was stimulated by and dominated by (and perhaps still is) by a book which began life as a Columbia University dissertation and which was published by the University of California Press in 1950  Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology. In Agrarian Socialism up and coming sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset focused his gaze on the democratic socialist political party that largely governed Saskatchewan from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, in order to ask a larger question, namely why democratic socialism was successful in Canada but not in the most advanced industrial nation on the planet to its south, the United States, the place where it (along with Germany, the other industrialising giant of the nineteenth and early twentieth century) should have been successful if much socialist theory was correct and a question, not surprisingly, that has exercised the minds of many Western socialist intellectuals ever since. 

In Agrarian Socialism and in subsequent books including The First New Nation, published in its first edition in 1963, Continental Divide, published in 1989, and American Exceptionalism, published in 1996, Lipset traced the differences between the Canada and the United States to several historical factors that, he argued, made the United States "exceptional" or unique. According to Lipset, the lack of feudalism in the United States (something Louis Hartz would emphasise in his Liberal Tradition in America of 1955 and in the collection of essays he edited and contributed to on the subject of Latin and English/British settler societies, The Founding of New Societies of 1964), the consequent prevalence of equality in the United States, an equality that opened up opportunities for many of European background in the United States (something that De Tocqueville made much of in his Democracy in America of 1935), and the migration, often forced, of British loyalists out of the new United States after the civil war that rent North America in the late eighteenth century, the war Americans refer to as the American Revolution, and into the nineteenth. These differences, Lipset argued, initially made Canada, born in Tory loyalty to Great Britain and the Crown and reaction to the more radically Whig United States, more conservative than the new United States. Paradoxically, according to Lipset, conservative Canada would prove more conducive to Western European style democratic socialism in part because of this British and consequent European heritage.

Others have followed in Lipset's footsteps. Social scientist and pollster Michael Adams, for instance, argued in his Fire and Ice (2004) that the notion that Canadians and Americans were converging on a variety of social indices was more myth than reality. The Canadian historical geographer James Lemon, in contradistinction to those who argued that Canadian and American cities were similar and were converging even more in the post World War Ii era, argued that there were significant political, economic, central city, suburban, and planning differences that characterised Canadian cities like Toronto and American cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles in his Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits (1997).

Not everyone, of course, agreed with Lipset's conclusions despite the fact that Canadian exceptionalism had become and remains a central symbol of Canadian nationalism just as American exceptionalism was and is a central symbol of American nationalism. Some, including many politicians particularly south of the 49th parallel, have emphasised the similarities between Canada and the United States (and Australia and New Zealand) including their common federalisms, their common liberal heritage with its emphasis on liberty, freedom, equality, and private property, their common language (if you exclude French Canada), their common Protestant religious culture (again if one excludes French Quebec), their common Anglo-Saxon demographies and Anglo-Saxon political and economic dominance, their common capitalist economic culture, their common foreign policy interests, their similar immigration patterns, and their common popular culture, and pondered why the two nations have not yet merged (the high apologetical and polemical priests of what we would today call the Anglosphere which currently includes Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand), something the United States tried to bring about, of course, through force on several occasions via its several invasions of Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a reflection of the ideology of American manifest destiny, a closely related symbol to the central symbol of the American nationalist faith, American exceptionalism.

Others, like Robert Bothwell, have emphasised both the similarities and differences between Canada and the United States. Bothwell's "unified" selective history of the two countries is, despite the claims of one truly deluded Amazon poster who claims that My Country, Your Country is an example of demonic social history, actually pretty standard traditional (meaning late nineteenth and most of twentieth century history) historical fare given its focus on great events, including wars, great treaties, and great men even though it does have a bit of quantitative social history and cultural history thrown into the mix for good measure. 

 

Bothwell emphasises the role that both history and geography have played in making Canada and the United States both similar and different. Given the important role Great Britain has historically played in British North America, Canada, and the United States, Bothwell rightly notes that both Canada and the United States are English and British settler societies and that have both been impacted economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and even geographically (Great Britain, particularly its navy, served as protector of both in the nineteenth century) and hence united by the fact that they are both English and British settler societies. That doesn't mean, however, as Bothwell notes that there haven't been or aren't differences between the two. As Bothwell notes, the similarities and differences between Canada and the United Stares have ebbed and flowed across historical time and geographical space. In times of tension between the two nations, such as during the American Revolution and the civil war between Britain that followed in the early nineteenth century, periods of tensions over trade, periods of tension over civil rights for Blacks and over America's imperial adventures in Vietnam, they have ebbed. In periods of common political and economic purpose such as World War I, World War II, the early Cold War, and willingness to create an Canadian and American "free" trade zone, they have flowed.

There is, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, nothing wrong with My Country, Your Country generally or with Bothwell's understandably, given the length of the book and its subject matter, traditionalist approach to the history of Canadian and American interactions and similarities and differences. Nor is there anything wrong with Bothwell's ruminations on a theme one also finds in a book by two Canadian sociologists, Edward Grabb and James Curtis, Regions Apart (2010) and the American Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America (1982), namely that there are more similarities than differences between certain Canadian and American regions than to other parts of their respective nations. Clearly oil rich Alberta, (the dominance of oil in the Albertan economy makes that province vulnerable to the ebb and flows of the speculative stock market as recent history shows) and other parts of the Canadian Prairies, for instance, share more with parts of the American West, South, Midwest, Oklahoma and most of all Texas than with Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and even British Columbia while the American Northeast shares a lot with Ontario. All this, if it is true, of course, means that Canada and the US are not really nations but nations within nations, a fact that increases tensions within both states.

There are a lot of things to like about Bothwell's book. I appreciated his integration of the mother country, well one of the mother countries, Great Britain, into the book. I appreciated Bothwell's emphasis on history and change as being important in the study of Canadian and American similarities and differences. I appreciated Bothwell's attentiveness,  if more in theory than in practise, to the reality of subcultural and countercultural variants of the dominant or hegemonic culture of difference and similarity in both nations.

 

That said, I did find things to criticise, as critics always do, in Bothwell's book. Some readers would, I am sure, myself included, have liked to have seen a healthier dose of cultural analysis in My Country, Your Country, something that Bothwell could have done, for instance, by exploring the playful depictions of Canadian and American similarities and differences in a Canadian and American television show that made Canadian similarities and differences and their myths and realities central to its tale, Due South. An exploration of Due South (CTV, CBS) would also have allowed Bothwell to explore the vast differences in American and Canadian power given that the show was on life support twice thanks to CBS pulling its money out of the show. It remained on the air, though in shorter form and somewhat changed, thanks, in part, to the BBC, a fact that would have allowed Bothwell to explore the continuing ties between Canada and Great Britain (a relationship that also ebbed and flowed), something that he makes so much of in My Country, Your Country. Others would probably liked to have seen greater exploration of the sketchy comparisons Bothwell makes between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, British settler societies all, that are simultaneously similar and different (and whose similarities and differences have also ebbed and flowed) from one another thanks to their somewhat different post-colonial histories. Some, like myself, likely will have preferred a more systematic and analytical exploration of Canadian and American identity and identities as opposed to the implied one Bothwell offers. Some, like myself, may object to Bothwell's manichean division between Western democracies and authoritarian regimes and find this binary problematic given that Canada and the US have long been oligarchies and, with the coming of managerial capitalism in the Victorian era, became even more oligarchic thanks to their corporate economic and political bureaucracies, something that resulted in the increasing political power of economic elites. Needless to say, the USSR was also a modern oligarchic bureaucracy. Some, like myself, may find Bothwell's speculation that one may be able to usefully compare post-1960s "reliably" liberal (but not reliably Liberal) francophones with post-1960s reliably liberal Hispanics in the US interesting while at the same time recognising that it was a prophecy that would prove rather premature given the success of Republicans in places like Texas with some Hispanic voter. Some, like myself, may find Bothwell's book a bit too gossipy at times.

 

So whither Canada and the United States? Both Canada and the United States have changed, as Bothwell notes, just as they have before, during that era dominated by the theocratic Church of Neoliberalism in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States (and Australia and New Zealand) with its powerful mandarin priesthood. All three countries have experienced a radical increase in the chasm between the rich class and status group and other class and status groups and a consequent increase in the power of economic oligarchs to determine "public" policy. They have also experienced, perhaps even more worryingly, a decline in fact if not in mythhistocially inscribed fiction, in social mobility, so much so, in fact, that the old Canadian and American dream of opportunity, mobility, and making it, seems to be more alive and well in the more democratic socialist nations with higher tax rates and larger social security or social insurance nets of the Nordicsphere than in the increasingly lower taxes, shrinking social security net states of increasingly neoliberal Canada and the United States. And perhaps, as Bothwell suggests, that is why there is increasing regional political, cultural, and ideological tensions within both Canada and the US these days, something both the demagogic Trump and his increasingly looney Republican Party and the demagogues in the increasingly looney and once again renamed Conservative Party of Canada manipulate for fun and/or electoral profit.

 

In the end, Bothwell and others are right. regardless of how alike and how different Canada and the United States are in the end both Canada and the US serve as a reflecting and deflecting mirrors for the mythhistories, whatever those mythhistories might be and however these mythhistories are interpreted by dominant, subcultural, or countercultural elements in each country, of each other. And that makes the comparative study of the similarities and differences--economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic--between Canada and the United States, fascinating. I highly recommend Bothwell's book to anyone interested in comparative history, comparative settler society history, Canadian history, American history, and relations between the two.