Letters & responses.

Adams, Michael ; Twigg, Alan ; Watson, Patrick 等

To the Editor:

Jason Bristow's take on my latest book, American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States, bore the title "Advancing the Values Debate" (March 2006). I was intrigued, but when I saw that American Backlash was being reviewed alongside Edward Grabb and James Curtis's Regions Apart: The Four Societies of Canada and the United States, and read Mr. Bristow's first sentence ("There are at least four reasons to study Canada-U.S. comparative values"), my heart sank. My last book, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, was about Canada-U.S. comparative values. This book, American Backlash, is not. Mr. Bristow's review was thoughtful and informed, but I feel that the analysis of my most recent book suffered by virtue of the frame within which it was carried out.

The most important issues raised in Mr. Bristow's review as far as American Backlash is concerned are that "conclusions based solely on quantitative values tend to wilt under close historical examination" and that politics is the most meaningful expression of a culture. Mr. Bristow complains that values research is a historical and that there is "an arid detachment between the findings and the richness of experience they purport to represent."

Here I would like to distinguish among different kinds of data used in my work. My colleagues and I begin with quantitative surveys of social values, but take great pains to put the values we find among various kinds of Americans (men and women, young and old, residents of various regions) in the context of these Americans' behaviour as citizens, employees, parents, consumers and spiritual beings. Some of these contextual data are found in census data and some in the work of other pollsters and social scientists.

When it comes to the interpretation of all these quantitative data (not just our own values data, but data on behaviour, consumption and so on), we make interpretive leaps into the worlds of history, literature, and popular culture. In effect, we move from the quantitative realm (of data collected by professionals) to the qualitative realm (of cultural phenomena and artifacts that constitute the environment in which we all live). We begin with values but we sure do not end there. I believe that vacuum-values, values never expressed in behaviour, do not exist and would not be very interesting if they did.

Like Mr. Bristow, I am fascinated with the political. For many people, however, political participation is an insignificant part of life. Voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections has been approaching half (at 60 percent, 2004 was a notable exception). While not everyone votes, everyone does have values--and values have an important hand in leading both voters and nonvoters to their behaviour.

There is no question that a society's politics can be very telling. But to focus on political outcomes to the exclusion of other kinds of sociocultural analysis is akin to sitting in a Toronto City Council meeting debating what Toronto is all about--and asking someone to close the door because Caribana, the Gay Pride Parade and the crowds of Kensington Market are making too much noise outside. For nations as for individuals, there is simply more to life.

Michael Adams

Toronto, Ontario

To the Editor:

Regarding the LRC 100 list (January/February and March 2006), in terms of aristocrats trying to establish a hierarchy for posterity, what interests me most is how quickly people fall from fashion. Every dog has his or her day, as they say. Authors generally do a little better than Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, but invariably they have their tiny epoch and disappear. Some plummet immediately. If you can be "known" for 20 years, that's pretty good. A decade is about par for the course.

Lists such as yours often make that clear. It's a bit painful to see older writers shunted to the side, to make way for the new ones, when they still feel they should be published. George Harrison was right: all things must pass. Hugh MacLennan was great. One wonders whether he will plummet, too. Will anyone read Carol Shields 20 years from now? I suspect not. I'm not even old yet, but it's sobering to see how many of the authors I interviewed when I was "starting out" are now gone. Levine, Laurence, Engel, Davies, MacLennan ... Yikes. We're all an ephemeral blur.

Alan Twigg

Vancouver, British Columbia

To the Editor:

The LRC's provocative list of 100 books is a terrific starting point, and should be an annual event. There were for me some agreeable reminders (both of those I've always meant to ... etc., and those I love).

I was disappointed that Canada as an important player in two world wars did not seem well represented. That while Jewish Canada is prominent, our vast Muslim population is invisible and so is our huge Italian community: where is Nino Ricci?

Poetry's a bit thin. No Ned Pratt. No Representative Poetry, which weighed down the desks of countless undergraduates. No modern poetry. Atwood is there with Survival, an important book, of course, but where is Morning in the Burned House, a pure gem of poetry? Where is Karen Solie's astonishing Short Haul Engine?

And for my idiosyncratic favourite, which we're all allowed, Bronwen Wallace's People You'd Trust Your Life To, the best collection of short stories ever.

There. You've had your corporate idiosyncrasies: now I've had mine.

Do it again.

Patrick Watson

Toronto, Ontario

To the Editor:

I'm quite surprised you didn't include the novel The Shadow Boxer on your list, from a writer defined as the "voice of his generation" by Al Purdy, or any of Erin Moure's books. These are examples of everything bad and foul about CanLit and deserve presence just for that.

Sam DiFalco

St. Catharines, Ontario

To the Editor:

The making of lists is a foolhardy game, and so is criticizing the choices of the list makers. Still, it is hard to see how any list of the 100 most important books in Canadian history could have omitted the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Or, for that matter, the Literary History of Canada, the Historical Atlas of Canada, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada and Painting in Canada: A History, all pioneering works in their fields and fundamental to Canadian studies.

Ian Montagnes

Toronto, Ontario

To the Editor:

I am extremely disappointed at Michael Bliss's myopic dismissal of Canada's historical dreams ("Has Canada Failed," March 2006). He pours scorn on them and only just restrains himself from suggesting that Canada should never have entertained any of them in the first place. Perhaps he is angry because none of them to pass.

Bliss provides a chronological summary of how things have transpired but no analysis. He presents this with arrogance, drawing on his 38 years of teaching history but without disguising his personal bias. He is dismissive of the "quaint Heritage moments" without pointing out why we seem to need them in the first place. There is a lot more to Canada's willingness to live with Cuba than the simplistic idea that it is only a "brutal ... dictatorship." He does not even engage in the very difficult debate surrounding ethics in other countries, international law and, the geopolitics of our nation when addressing the two. As a foreign service brat, I heard the "mantras and moralism" that boosted the multilateral power structure of the United Nations. Where is his analysis of how weak even that institution has become in the face of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? This was--and is--"power politics." To characterize Canadians' clear wish not to join the invasion as "distaste for truly messy situations like Iraq" is an insult to the many discussions that took place leading up to that decision, a decision that would likely have been different if we had not made our views known to our leadership. The fact that we made a different choice is significant.

Bliss slanders history and institutions at will--"the perpetual scandal of the Canadian Senate"--and leads us into the age-old trap of missing the real issue: the House of Commons is the senior democratic institution in the country so should be cared for before the Senate (which is rather harmless in a way that the Commons is not). He dismisses the "dreamers" but laments the "visionaries of ever greater continental economic integration ... another of history's lost causes." (Note the pejorative and affirmative use of language.) Continental integration certainly is not one of my causes.

Canada and the U.S. are different (so far), and diversity is a positive thing. But I must admit that I am reacting to Mr. Bliss because although he does point out a painful lack of sense of who we are or want to be, I feel he hides his own vision about what that could be. Go south, young man, if you are so unhappy with this country.

Lawrence Wardroper

Ottawa, Ontario