Great and Terrible Possibilities

If there were any John McCain sympathizers in Wednesday night's Festival audience at Performance Works they were being very quiet.

Less than two weeks before the American election, and the in some ways astounding possibility that the United States will elect its first black president, A Great and Terrible Nation brought together four American writers to give their perspective on that country of extremes to the south of us. The event began with Peter Matthiessen, George Pelecanos, Jonathan Raban, and Meg Wolitzer each speaking individually about the question "what makes the United States great and terrible?" A panel discussion followed, moderated by UBC English professor and expatriate American Jerry Wasserman, and the writers also read short passages from their latest books.

And while the engaging discussion, and subsequent Q&A, explored intriguing aspects of America's history, geography, its environment, and its society, the politics of the moment was most on the panel's, and the audience's mind. As the event neared its end, the full room now very warm, the panel was at its most relaxed. What became apparent is that these writers, as representatives of fifty percent of Americans, plus or minus one, have "a huge investment in Obama"—Jonathan Raban's words—while they also recognize the challenges that would face Obama if he wins. Raban held up crossed fingers after pleading with his fellow panelists not to speak about an Obama presidency in the future tense, as if it were a fait accompli. Likewise, Meg Wolitzer talked about not wanting to jinx the outcome. Hope, and possibility, and yearning for change, are swelling almost painfully within left-wing and liberal-leaning Americans, but underlying that is a deathly chill. The memory of how their hopes were crushed in the past two elections, the spectre of electoral fraud in 2000, are acutely present.

Raban, who left England for the United States almost twenty years ago, was the most specific about the reasons for the left-wing trepidation. As much as the panelists might enjoy Tina Fey's impersonations of Sarah Palin, Palin is no fool Raban points out. He calls her "a rabble-rouser," and likens her to early twentieth-century American demagogues Huey Long and Father Coughlin (who, interestingly, was Canadian). She is able to connect with and animate huge numbers of voters in the American exurbs and hinterland, and it is these areas of the country, resentful of the power exerted over them by the largely Democratic cities, that could well be responsible for McCain and Palin winning the White House.

And what of Canada in all this? It rankles me when Canadians talk about an American president as if he (and perhaps at some future point, she) were our national leader. And yet to pretend that American affairs of state do not profoundly affect Canada is naïve. Empires are great and terrible—flip sides of the same coin—and the decisions they make reach far beyond their physical borders. Canada is neither great nor terrible, at least in the terms posited by Wednesday night's event. Most of us here like it that way.