Elbows up, p.10
Elbows Up!, page 10
The play I’m working on here in Berlin has something to do with the war Armenians faced a few years ago when Azerbaijan attacked an Armenian enclave called Nagorno Karabagh where Armenians had lived for thousands of years and made up the preponderant population. They had fought for that land after the collapse of the Soviet Union and secured the territory after a six-year war. Then, thirty years later, Azerbaijan took the land back in a massive attack that the Armenians—overwhelmed by a much larger and more well-equipped army, and without any assistance from strong military allies—never had a chance of defending. Thousands of Armenian young men lost their lives, and over 100,000 families were displaced from their ancestral homes in an explicit act of ethnic cleansing.
I bring this up because I’ve been wondering what would happen if this war with the U.S., currently being played out with competing tariffs and sanctions, escalated into something else? What if the U.S. physically attacked our land? President Trump has stated that it is “highly unlikely” that the U.S. would use military force to make the Canada the 51st state. What if this is a lie? While it’s easy to convince ourselves that the U.S. won’t attack because it would need congressional approval and full military backing, what if the trucks that are transporting food and supplies back and forth over the Peace Bridge were replaced by tanks and portable anti-aircraft missiles? What if troops literally crossed the largest undefended border in the world? Would we suffer the same fate as my fellow Armenians experienced in the territories they lost in Nagorno Karabagh?
There’s no doubt that our artists would be writing songs and books and making films and television series after the fact. Well, I’m not sure about the films and television series. They cost a lot of money and take time to make. Who would pay for this cultural response to our loss? Yes, I could write a play, like I’m doing now. A meditation on what it means to lose something that you’ve been led to believe is yours, something you have been taught is part of your identity and very soul. What role would the rich cultural voice we’ve sustained for over two hundred years play in this horrifying scenario?
We don’t sing songs about the War of 1812. There might be some songs from Quebec about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, but my guess is that they won’t be quickly translated into English so that our soldiers could sing them while they resist an assault by the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. Armenian young men had a rich tradition of heroic songs and poetry to rally their strength in the war of 2022, but it didn’t amount to much except a ton of existential pain and agony. The war was over in forty-four days. My suspicion is that a war with the U.S. would be over way sooner.
I couldn’t have even dreamed of writing these words when I was writing plays for the Greater Victoria Schools Drama Festival in my teenage years growing up on Vancouver Island. A few years before, when I was ten years old, I had handwritten a letter to U.S. president Richard Nixon, begging him not to go ahead with a proposed nuclear bomb test off the coast of Amchitka island in Alaska. There had been tests there before, but in 1971 “Project Cannikin,” at five megatons, was 250 times more powerful than the bomb on Hiroshima. It was to be detonated almost a mile below Amchitka’s surface and the shock would be insanely high on the Richter scale.
A large movement was formed to protest against this bomb, which many feared could set off a tidal wave that would wash over Vancouver Island. My family home, an old beach shack that had no concrete or stone foundation and was made of old wood had no chance. My parents and sister and I would be washed into the seas of Cadboro Bay. I was swept up by the words of this environmental movement (who would later go on to form the group Greenpeace) and put a lot of faith in my gesture. In my handwritten letter to President Nixon, I tried to explain how unfair this was. I said that there was no point to the test, since the world had learned that war was terrible and such destruction was “unimaginable.” I licked the back of the envelope with my tongue and scrawled the words “The White House” on the front, and dropped it in my local mail box.
I remember waiting for a reply. I guessed it wouldn’t be handwritten like my card. Something in me dreamed of a knock on the door of our rickety beach house. A stern-looking man in a crisp uniform would be there to offer me a letter from the President of the United States of America. Maybe there’d be another man with a snare drum sneaking in a snarling little roll as the letter was ceremoniously handed over, and this little Armenian kid from Egypt would open the official response and nod solemnly as he understood the sheer magnitude of what he had singlehandedly accomplished.
Here in Berlin at this very moment, two of the greatest works the people are absorbing are Robert Lepage’s new play at the Schaubühne and Jeremy Shaw’s incredible installation at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum. Neither of these artists would have had their careers if it weren’t for the support of the Canada Council and other institutions that are committed to supporting our distinct culture. My suspicion is that neither of them (though Jeremy Shaw is also from the West Coast) has ever handwritten a letter to the U.S. president. Are kids writing those cards now? Or maybe sending them by email? Is Donald Trump wracked with pain as he reads these heartfelt pleas from the youth of our beloved land?
My high school drama festival in Victoria has disappeared, and the theatre I’m working at now in Berlin is under incredible pressure. Feasibility has come into question. Right now, as Germany is swinging alarmingly back to the right, cultural institutions are under attack, especially ones that represent diverse voices such as mine. I don’t believe that a secret extreme right-wing cabal demolished the Greater Victoria Schools Drama Festival, but I may be Pollyannaish. Would a kid in a Canadian school even write a play about the horrors that would follow if the U.S. attacked Canada with bombs like the one that exploded a mile under the ground at Amchitka in 1971?
Of course, such bombs would never be used, but they might certainly be threatened if our Canadian forces put up a strong enough resistance. Vladimir Putin mentioned a possible nuclear response in Ukraine, though we can only hope that the use would be limited. Canada is way bigger than Ukraine, and a nicely placed bomb in an uninhabited part of the Great North would go a long way to silencing any opposition. Or maybe something detonated just off of the coast of Vancouver Island, bringing to life my worst preteen nightmares of being drowned by a huge tidal wave.
The chilling fact is that nothing is off the table with the person calling the shots in Washington right now. There is a limited sense of empathy and concern for world peace in the jingoistic strains of America First and maga. As horrified as a large group of Americans might be about what is happening in their country, they have absolutely no space or energy to fight our battle right now. They are completely focused on what is happening to their schools and universities, their essential government services, the dismantling of their foreign policy and pressures on their precariously free press to spread false information. Right now, we’re on our own.
There’s something that very few artists like to admit. Most culture doesn’t shift the political landscape in an overt way. Even a huge megahit like Come From Away—the musical about what happened when planes bound for New York were diverted to a small airport in Gander, Newfoundland, when the Twin Towers were attacked—didn’t seem to have a huge impact on the way people voted in the U.S. Many months ago, at an event in Newfoundland, now prime minister Mark Carney stated to some voters that “we’re over the shock of betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves and we have to look out for each other, like you did in Gander all those years ago.” He wasn’t naive enough to state, “I wish our neighbours who we helped would learn important lessons about humanity from the wonderful musical that was such a success on Broadway.”
Culture needs to speak to the artists who make it and then emanate outward to whoever is listening and moved by the artist’s work. In the extremely tough times we have ahead, I have no doubt that our brilliant Canadian artists will be inspired by this existential moment. Our arts councils will be challenged, but will they always remain feasible? Would invading U.S. troops make a beeline for the headquarters of the Canada Council, and publicly execute the staff caught wild-eyed in their offices and conference rooms? And to rub salt into the wound, would all this happen just as a jury of my peers were about to approve my application for a grant to make my experimental film meditation on the letter I wrote to President Nixon fifty-five years ago?
Art is never a definitive socio-political statement. An article that I recently read here in Germany says that art stands for something that is a mark of human thought and should reflect in its very essence a “tolerance of ambiguity.” According to Else Frenkel-Brunswik, this psychological term denotes an individual’s ability to “recognize the coexistence of positive and negative features within the same object.” Is Canada a massive work of art? We’re certainly a huge work in progress. And any artist will tell you that it’s heartbreaking to have a work in progress interrupted. The current war with the U.S., now being played out through tariffs and insulting words at the very highest level, is a clear and present danger.
I don’t have clear and present answers to these questions. Just as I don’t have clear and present answers in the play I’m presenting here in Berlin about the situation in Armenia. In both of these cases, the lands under threat and the cultures they represent and the lives that are living on those lands are precious to me. I won’t bother to write a letter to the President of the United States of America at this point in my life. But these questions do keep me up at night. And somewhere in my mind, I can hear the snarling roll of a snare drum as it marches toward my front door.
Maybe it’s all just a crazy bad dream. We’re all still looking for a place to happen, and we’re all terrified of the huge possible stop along the way.
CATHERINE HERNANDEZ
The Things That Need to Be Said
FARLEY MOWAT
THE NEW ROMANS (1968)
Letter to My Son
My dear Sandy:
A couple of months ago you asked me whether I thought it had been worthwhile to have spent so much of my time and energy tilting against American windmills. Feeling that there was a certain measure of condescension in the question, I replied with one of my facile, TV-type answers: to wit, that there can be no other real choice open to a Canadian except to resist the Yanks and all their works so that we, as a people and a nation, may escape being ingested into the Eagle’s gut, never to emerge again except—maybe—as a patch of excrement upon the pages of world history.
That should have disposed of your question—but it didn’t, and the damned thing has been festering within me ever since. It has finally forced me, very reluctantly you can believe, to make a new evaluation of the belief which has sustained me through some twenty years of waging verbal warfare against the encroachments of Uncle Sam. Have I indeed been wasting my time? I’m afraid, God help me, that I have. I can no longer convince myself that we have even a snowball’s chance in hell of escaping ultimate ravishment at the hands of the Yankee succubus. And what really hurts is the belated recognition on my part that there never was much chance; that Canadians have become so fatally infected with a compulsive desire to be screwed, blued, and tattooed as minions of the U.S.A.: that they not only do not wish to be saved—they are willing to fight against salvation with all the ferocity of cornered rats.
So wipe that smug smile off your face. You knew it all along, eh? Well, I should have known it too. God wot, enough people have tried to put me straight. There was Joey Smallwood for one (as smart a promoter as ever hustled a vote), who gave me a fatherly lecture about a year ago. “What the U.S. wants it will get,” he told me. “And if we don’t give them what they want, they’ll take it anyway. And what they want—is most of what we’ve got.”
That was about as clear an expression of Realpolitik as one can expect from the political animal, even if it was primarily a rationalization intended to excuse our political masters for having already given the Yanks almost everything of any value in this country. Nevertheless, Joey’s point was well taken since those who rule us (they do not “govern”—that word implies statesmanship combined with honourable intentions) have, for their own reasons, long since sold us out. Or maybe they just saw the light a long way back and, in keeping with their dubious professional practices, took the line of least resistance. Some of them, that is. Others sold out with deliberate intent. One day I must tell you the full and stirring story of one of the greatest of all such salesmen—C.D. Howe—and of how he put us on the block. Of course, Howe’s plan was to sell us down the river on the national scale, and we’ve progressed since then. Now every single province is trying to conduct its own sellout, in direct competition with the Ottawa salesmen, and it wouldn’t surprise me much to see the game, which is called “who’ll sell out the mostest, the soonest,” reach right down to the municipal level before too long. Hell, what am I saying? It is past that point already. Witness the almost frantic rush of businessmen and owners of Canadian resources to sell themselves and their holdings (“their holdings”? I mean ours, of course) for a quick handful of Yankee bucks.
Joey wasn’t the only one to point me in the direction of acute awareness, and I must add, in my own defense, that I wasn’t as stupid as you may think. I realized what the politicians, at least, were up to ages ago. My naivety—if such it was—lay in my continuing conviction that the people of this land would not forever continue to acquiesce in this piecemeal betrayal of themselves and of their country. I was much influenced by what took place in Cuba and, before that, in Mexico. I believed that if such small, relatively powerless serf states could muster the guts to really kick Big Uncle in the backside, the people of Canada might be goaded into an equivalent demonstration of courage. Alas, Canadians are not Mexicans or Cubans, and I realize now that I miscalculated on a horrendous scale in ever thinking that Canadians would risk cutting off rich Uncle’s dole by assuming the posture of a Man.
This is a fact that I am going to have to learn to live with. We have become a prostrate people—by our own volition. Actually the only time Canadians even raise themselves on their elbows these days is to defend their chosen masters and to attack, with the bitter hostility only known to turncoats, those who dare reproach them for their spineless espousal of slave status. (If this letter to you should ever see publication, the response in the “Letters To The Editor” column will show you what I mean!)
But there is no point in running on about what’s past. My concern is for the future, because the future contains the world in which you’ll have to live. So I have a few words of wisdom for you. Here speaks the hoary elder, and if I belabour the obvious a bit, bear with me.
Despite poor old Lester Pearson’s recent statement in Maclean’s that “the Americans are the least imperialistic people in history” (honest to God—that’s what he said!), the Yanks now control the largest empire the world has ever known. Its citizens have, as Henry R. Luce (founder of Canada’s two favourite magazines—Life and Time) once put it, now risen to the challenge: “to accept wholeheartedly the duty and opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit” (italics mine). In this delightfully frank statement, combined with one by John Foster Dulles—“There are two ways of conquering a foreign nation. One is to gain control of its people by force of arms. The other is to gain control of its economy by financial means”—you have the essential dogma subscribed to by the military-political economic hegemony that runs the U.S.A. Once you understand this dogma you will have no difficulty understanding the true significance of current events in Spain, Korea, Greece, Formosa, the Philippines, Venezuela, Dominica, and all the rest of the sixty-odd serf states which are euphemistically referred to as U.S. “client” states. Note with particular attention that most of these U.S. “client” states are run by military, aristocratic, or political juntas of a totalitarian nature—juntas whose prime allegiance is to the hungry Eagle, rather than to their own peoples: juntas, many of which are maintained in power by the United States through classic applications of the principles of bribery, blackmail, subversion…and armed force.
Or, if you find such a mass of evidence too complex for easy assimilation, take a long look at Vietnam instead. Observe, if you dare, the fantastic and fearful similarities between the way the United States is behaving in that small and benighted country and the way Hitler behaved in his heyday.
Having done one or the other—preferably both—I ask you to consider the reality behind the American claims (ably supported by such pillars of righteousness as our own Paul Martin) to being the world’s greatest defenders of democracy. Democracy? My God, it is to laugh…but bitter laughter it must be since demonstrably the United States is currently engaged in almost every form of domestic and external brutality, aggrandizement, degradation of the individual, and destruction of freedom which, so the U.S.A. maintains with a straight face, are the singular hallmarks of the beast called communism.
And what, you say, is this tirade in aid of? Well, it is intended to ensure that you harbour no further illusions about living in a democracy or of being protected by one. You, my son, are a helot, born and bred under the aegis of the United States, and you had damned well better come to terms with this inescapable fact. The illusion of democracy is one that you and your generation can ill afford to nurture. You must recognize that hard reality which not all the cherry-flavoured words of all the hucksters in the world can adequately conceal—you are a serf, no more than that…and Massa lives away down south.
