Editor’s note: The following article, written by Eric Francis, was originally published in December 2007 for the Chronogram magazine. It is now part of the Planet Waves archives, which are only accessible to Planet Waves Astrology News subscribers. We’re interrupting our Days of the Dead celebrations to bring you this important coverage on the final days leading up to the Nov. 4 election. –RA
Dear Friend and Reader,
SOMEONE FINALLY EXPLAINED to me why, when I was living in Europe, so many people asked me if I was from Canada. I didn’t have a maple leaf patch stitched to my backpack, nor did I tote around a hockey stick. I figured it was because my accent isn’t easily recognizable.
It turns out that’s the polite way to ask if someone is American without actually saying it. If, for example, you’re a Belgian cab driver and you can’t sort out the various accents in the English language but you want to know if you’re dealing with an American, you just ask if the person is Canadian. Europe may be attempting to become ‘one country’ but where you and your parents are from is still the hottest topic of conversation that most people can muster.
If you ask a Canadian if they are American, they will typically be offended. They don’t want to be confused with those weird people south of the border who wear huge hiking boots or white sneakers and shirts with the name of a university — and who blow up countries. (Of course as I sit here in Kingston, I am wearing clunky hiking boots and a pink shirt that says B-U-F-F-A-L-O across the front.) If you ask an American if they’re Canadian, they’ll either think you’re a bad guesser or be flattered to be confused with those nice friendly people up north whose tall, handsome cops all have super white teeth and ride horses. They will politely correct you and say they’re from St. Louis, or wherever.
Now that I’m back in the United States, I can see what I was missing all this time. I have always read that you have to leave your culture in order to appreciate it, or even to see it. That is what I did these past four years. Europeans view Americans as naГЇve, which I would say is true. Living in three different countries in Europe and spending a good bit of time in about three others, I slowly figured out that most people from the Old World have something else going for them, which is cynicism. That is, a less-than-subtle bitter haughtiness born of certainty about how bad the world sucks, so you may as well drink your wine by the bottle, smoke a lot of cigarettes and never quite get to the point.
Americans and Europeans both specialize in being extremely self-absorbed. Members of both cultures shop as if the world depended upon it, and politely step over the homeless. There are fewer homeless in Europe, though. And I don’t think any of them are war veterans. (A quarter of the homeless in the United States are vets.)
I find cynicism the more objectionable mental state. Part of why I came back to the States, besides being sensitive to cynicism and cigarette smoke, was because I wanted to be on the front lines to fight side by side with my countrymen when the shit hits the fan for the 2008 elections. I decided I needed a year’s running start to get re-established, amass a war chest and a modest army, and be ready to go to the mats (as we Sicilians say) when Dick Cheney declares himself president for life.