Nationalism as a form of denial: It’s amazing. Sixteen years after free trade with the U.S., Canadians still feel proud and distinct, perhaps more than ever according to surveys. It’s also amazing that further “integration” is being pushed by the same corporations that rammed through the original. They released a tri-national “task force” report this week. How do such opposites co-exist? You can say Canadianism is so strong it will resist any degree of U.S. encroachment. Or you can say encroachment creates patriotism as a reaction.

Or you can call current Canadian nationalism a state of denial, as poli-sci prof Stephen Clarkson did over a gloomy lunch recently. How so? Because no matter how much of your country they own or control, you can still feel Canadian; it’s exactly what helps you avoid facing the reality — even as concrete signs and benchmarks of independence recede, the way Molson’s suddenly went south, absorbed, basically, into U.S. beer maker Coors. Now there’s a fine example of the whole gestalt.

Nothing belted out the new national pride like Molson’s “I am Canadian” ad. I heard “Joe” do it live before a Leafs playoffs game (sigh) and the place exploded. It was sheer attitude; it had a mighty will to be Canadian, along with zero economic or political content. Yet its raw emotional power may have affected concrete decisions like staying out of Iraq. Leaders aren’t unaware of how people feel.

But it needed one thing: a sponsor who was actually Canadian, for credibility and costs. There is a point when even something as airy as a beer ad requires, as Marxists say, a material economic base. This week the new, sold-out Molson cancelled those ads; who could take them seriously now? John Turner told Brian Mulroney in their 1988 free-trade election debate that, when you lose the “economic levers,” the rest of your country — beer, ads, culture — will eventually perish, too.

Wry Cameron: Bill, who died of cancer at 62 last week, was hailed in obits as a “great writer,” something you rarely hear about someone known mainly in broadcasting. In the 1990s, I learned that his commentaries as host of Toronto CBC news had become a cult item with students. I always liked his local work best (he began as a newspaper columnist), though he did the de rigueur globetrotting.

I asked him to slip me a few favourite pieces and wrote a column on them. I got a furtive, appreciative voice mail saying, “I know the, um, toro is not supposed to make contact with the, ah, torero . . .” That wry humour was an essential part of him; it was in a TV news tradition going back to David Brinkley in the 1950s. He left CBC unhappily, feeling, I think, that since he was not a lifer, they were unwilling to find a satisfactory place for him. I know one tends to omit negative notes in an obit, but he was only 62, in virtual mid-career these days, and I think we can consider this a sad interruption in what would have been an ongoing, absorbing journey.

Trope of a new age: I believe I’ve spotted the main rhetorical device for this decade, in the way that irony was the big trick of the 1990s. It is playback: You simply repeat what your foe or target said, letting the audience realize how dangerous or vacuous it is.

Think of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. He plays a clip by a public figure. Then he repeats it himself in an amazed tone. It’s devastating. It would probably work if he merely replayed it. You add nothing, you throw responsibility onto the audience’s intelligence, with a hint of where to look. Analysis is replaced by playback.

Other “smart” shows do this, too, like CBC’s The Newsroom, where characters often repeat with puzzlement what they just heard, exposing each other. Or The West Wing, full of played back lines, with reactions. (It’s a verbal version of an old comedy visual, the double take.) All these shows are, in a vague way, “left wing.” Right-wingers don’t seem to do playback; they are more confident, they do direct attack and assertion of their own (superior) views. Playback may be the mode for a sector on the defensive, without a clear forward strategy, but with the wit to expose the other side.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.