I'm going to wander a little off the beaten path here. Apologies.
Last week the New Yorker published a profile of Michael Ignatieff by Adam Gopnik. Whenever a significant American publication (particularly the New Yorker) writes about Canada I get the same weirdly specific, specifically weird sensation born of the assumed asymmetry between Canada and the United States. That is to say, we know everything about them and they know nothing about us.
Born in the States then raised in Montreal where he graduated from McGill, Gopnik is the ideal candidate to write a story for Americans about Canada. He knows a lot about us and he's been writing for the New Yorker since the dawn of time, so he knows how to translate that knowledge in such a way as to be readily understood by homo Americanus.
This, though, is where the going gets weird. To a Canadian ear, Gopnik's tone will sound the same as just about other any other fluent American writer holding forth on any other "foreign" part of the world like, say, Estonia (only in this case Estonia sits a hair's width to the north of what used to be called the longest undefended border in the world). It's a tone that indicates throughout the disquisition "they're odd. They're not like us. And yet by exercising the powers of your imagination you can achieve that most American state of mind somewhere between empathy and pity, secure in the knowledge that your country can kick the crap out of whatever country the writer is suggesting matters enough to take up your time. "
As a result we read things like the following:
"Ignatieff's exile and return are really not mysterious. Almost every ambitious Canadian at least thinks of leaving, because, model liberal country or not, Canada offers a small stage."
Now this sort of gag-inducing claptrap is rather more pronounced when Canadian journos leave then turn around and write stuff about the country they left behind. It's a form of self affirmation. "I climbed and clawed my way up all the way to a two bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side and by god the people who I crawled over to get there had better remember who are their betters; namely, uh, me."
It's particularly rich when we read Gopnik observing that in Ignatieff "the ironic apologetic look by which writers signal to each other intelligence and powerlessness had been replaced by a look of slightly slant-eyed amused self possession-just inflected, I thought, by the beleaguered caution of someone who opens the morning paper knowing that somewhere in it will be a snide putdown of something he said the day before."
This as opposed to that old disengaged sideline soothsayer Adam Gopnik of whom Renata Adler once observed:
"I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do."
I'm quite certain that once this makes its way onto the interweb, I'll be accused of expressing my own predilection to the tall poppy syndrome. So be it. I simply don't have sufficient ambition to do otherwise.