Only in America? WTF?

Not to tease you, my Yankee comrades, but seriously....

I’ll be the first to admit that Canadians have made a national sport out of self-righteousness regarding Americans. There’s one guy up here on CBC, Rick Mercer, who’s so self-righteous he’s almost a point-singularity. He became famous because of a regular feature he did called “Talking to Americans” on the rather “grandpa would find this really hilarious” show called This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

In his segments, Mercer interviewed Americans, asking them questions about things that dealt with Canada so that their answers would expose their awesome ignorance about Canada, the US’s single most important trade partner (that is, without Canada, the US economy would be destroyed). When Mercer went after public officials, okay... maybe fair game, although being asked questions and being ambushed are different things.

But when Mercer went after ordinary Americans, his mean-spiritedness from his editing-room bully pulpit was inexcusable. (Similarly, as much as I appreciate Michael Moore at his best, at his worst, he has distorted people’s responses through dishonest editing and omitted hugely relevant events from his films, as with Flint’s major protests against GM, organised by workers and Public Citizen staffers, for instance.)

Ordinary Americans are victims of an educational and media system that deprives them from a larger view of the world—they’re not the people who constructed that system. It’s also hypocritical, because I can guarantee you that the majority of Canadians (southerners who live within a three hour drive of the Canada-US border) know nothing about the vast majority of the country (the north), its peoples, its languages, or even the number of territories (was two, now it’s three).

Far more devastating an indictment of our national ignorance, you can go to twelve years of public school and never be required:

a) to read a single novel or short story by an aboriginal Canadian novelist (such as the work of Eden Robinson)

b) to take a single, dedicated course of First Nations histories, or

c) to gain even a rudimentary command of any First Nation language.

And furthermore, Canadians as a rule know nothing about our other North American neighbours, namely Greenland and Mexico. In my opinion, given the American example we criticise, we’re on even worse ground, since we should know better.

That being said, I’m curious to know what you all think of the phrase “only in America.”

Having consumed American pop culture my whole life, and having questioned surprisingly little of it until my twenties (for instance, I grew up watching School House Rock and other US educational cartoons; when I was about twenty-five, for some bizarre out-of-the-ultraviolet reason one day I thought to myself, “That cherry tree story about George Washington and ‘I will not tell a lie’ is bullshit!”), I absorbed without challenging the phrase “only in America,” and don’t recall challenging it until the Clarence Thomas hearings and ultimate ratification.

You may recall that Judge Thomas, after having been excoriated in the press (for a variety of good and bad reasons, but I tended to side with the anti-Thomas forces; Ishmael Reed has some fascinating counter-arguments), Thomas said upon news that he would soon be a US Supreme Court justice, “Only in America!”

The phrase struck me as so obvious it was actually stupid. Clearly, only in the US could one become a US Supreme Court justice. Duhh.

But the phrase seemed to imply, in a racially-charged context, that only in the US could a Black man (i.e., an African) become a supreme court justice. Of course, most of the 54 countries of the African continent and across the Caribbean, virtually all supreme court judges... and, for that matter, doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers, generals, presidents, movie directors and laundromat owners are Africans (so-called “Black” people).

Thomas’s flag-waving was all the more absurd since he’d just been claiming that his enemies had subjected him to a “high-tech lynching” because he was “an uppity Black man.”

Both of those phrases speak to centuries of racial oppression and murder in the US, but what either had to do with Thomas is less clear (although Ishmael Reed, I think, was suggesting that White second-wave feminists were covert and sometimes overt defenders of the existing US racial hierarchy, so his argument is an entirely separate issue).

But now US Democratic Party presidential nominee Barack Obama has chosen to weld that same idiotic phrase to his nomination, choosing a song titled “Only in America” as his convention anthem.

Again, of course, his use of the idea is self-evident; of course, only in the US can you be nominated to become a US president. But to see just how damnably faint is the praise, let’s go to the comments of a lady interviewed at the DNC on Democracy Now!:

“I’m almost sixty, OK? So, say like some of us that are in our nineties, like one old lady, she got so excited, almost ninety in here tonight, and fell, just dropping, passed out. These are people, they’re coming from generations of slaves. That we have a baby from a white woman from Kansa—I’m from Kansas, too! And the love she had, and her white mother and father that raised that little black baby to be so sweet—where do you see that, but in America?”

Uh... except for the Kansas part, how about in Canada (as in my case, as a Kenyan-Welsh Canadian)? Or in England? Or in many other countries?

Let’s take it a step further. Suppose all these folks who use the phrase “only in America” to address Obama’s situation (including Obama himself) mean, “Where else but the US could someone from the despised and oppressed group stand one election away from leading the State?” I suspect this is what people mean, but:

a) they’d be wrong, and

b) their concept is a grave indictment of American injustice.

Why a)? Because Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, both men of indigenous extraction (particularly Morales) became presidents of countries in which indigenous people have historically been ruthlessly exploited and their needs dismissed with contempt by the Iberian and Mestizo populations. And how about Nelson Mandela? Or any number of presidents of African countries following independence?

Why b)? Because, given that Africans comprise about 13 per cent (says my friend, author Shawn Taylor) of the US population, Africans should have been 13 per cent of all US presidents to date. Out of 43 presidents so far, that would be about five.

Since there’ve been zero so far (and don’t get me started about Bill Clinton), that means the situation is nothing to brag about. Not even close. Obama’s position in this race isn’t anything that should bring Americans pride, any more than having someone not beat the shit out of you on the way to work deserves headlines. And I haven’t even begun to address how his pretty face is merely the newest branding of American empire and a nearly ideal weapon to oppose the newest iterations of the Civil Rights movement and the pro-democracy movement .

I'd love to hear your thoughts on your own reactions to the phrase "only in America."