Independence Day

We have arrived at yet another "Independence Day" for our neighbours to the south.  This was brought to prominence in my mind this morning, by a reading on "National (meaning United States) Public Radio", of the list of grievances in the United States' "Declaration of Independence".

I am not a student of United States history.  In fact, there are times when I wonder if there are many students of United States history.  Perhaps most of us -- United States citizens included -- live with a kind of shared, superficial, comic-book notion of the more-than two-hundred-year political, cultural, economic and military enterprise that dominates much of what goes on in the everyday world across the entire globe.

In Canada, not only are we not removed from this influence, there are times when I feel Canada and Canadians are perhaps fast becoming a doppelgänger for our powerful neighbour.

We are not there yet; but current events and in matters of public policy, not to mention in the pervasive shared corporate culture, one increasingly captures glimpses of the persona of the other in our Canadian ways.  But that assimilation of another national identity is not my focus today.

Today I want to think out loud about what I view directly by looking south on their Independence Day.  I want to look at two things:

• the first is suspicion of government, and
• the second is the notion of being under external threat, including terrorism.

From years back, I recall viewing the hearings on what is known as the 'Iran-Contra Affair'.  In particular, the comments of now-United States-senator, Daniel Inouye, in rebuttal to some of the silly pronouncements of then-colonel Oliver North, first drew my attention to the idea(s) of the United States.  And it seemed to me that, at the very least, Inouye was telling the colonel that he really understood nothing about this idea.

Over the years, this notion of the United States as an idea, and perhaps as a grand experiment around the idea, took me to some of the early writing related to this experiment.  Prominent among these is Thomas Paine, who wrote and published a pamphlet called, "Common Sense", Feb. 14, 1776.  Early on in this publication, Paine states, "government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one".

In much of the partisan rhetoric of today from our neighbour to the south, it seems that Paine's pronouncement remains as a kind of standing wave in the rushing stream of the social sensibility that makes up the United States of America.  Whereas the Declaration of Independence was based on the perceived and actual oppression of the governance of the British King George III, the earlier anti-government sensibility appears to have been transformed into the notion that no government is better than any government, except perhaps for an important role in border defense of the state.

And this sensibility appears to be increasingly making its way into the Canadian context, even though, as Pierre Berton (Why We Act Like Canadians) suggested, key tenets of the Canadian sensibility (1982) seem to have been built on "law, order and good government".  An interesting contrast to Paine.

My second point, the notion in the United States collective psyche, of an ever-present danger from the outside.

As the National Public Radio program this morning presented the list of grievances set out in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, I realized that not unlike the early pronouncements of Paine, the United States' concern for national security prevalent today did not arise only (perhaps not even primarily) from the experiences of Pearl Harbor or the more-recent attack on the twin towers.  This concern for security sensibility too seems to me more like another standing wave in the more-than two-hundred-year collective understanding.  Out of many grievances set out in 1776, the following seem to me to point to this way of seeing the world, even today.

• [George III abolished] "the free system of English laws in a neighboring province [now Quebec], establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries [my emphasis] so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies."
• [George III] "has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers..."
• [George III] "has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people."

In my experience from a distance, the Declaration of Independence is most often conveyed in the popular culture as a response ultimately to unfair taxes and taxation without representation.  And while that is not inaccurate, one can see from just these additional grievances above, that taxation was hardly the whole story.

It seems that an ongoing suspicion of powerful forces outside the borders is written large in the national psyche from the outset of the American experiment.  Later incidents only serve to reinforce and justify the original concerns.

Clearly, my thoughts are only initial and partial.  But and a resident of some of the other parts of North America, this is what strikes me today -- so to speak.