Annie
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- Nov 22, 2003
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Go ahead, call us Cowboys! At the outset, I think the article has a lot of merit, the one thing I would perhaps mention is that most of us are 'born' to our systems and love our country. There are 'many Americans' that just haven't arrived here yet and I'm sure the same with Canada.
This is a rather long essay, it's a registered site and I'm unsure of how that will work for our Canadian friends. I think what I'll do, is print some quotes. If you want the whole article, email me, do not pm, it's too long and I'll send it to you.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005369
This is a rather long essay, it's a registered site and I'm unsure of how that will work for our Canadian friends. I think what I'll do, is print some quotes. If you want the whole article, email me, do not pm, it's too long and I'll send it to you.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005369
Go Ahead, Call Us Cowboys
A visit to the Alaska-Canada border brings home the differences between the cultures.
BY ANDREW KLEINFELD AND JUDITH KLEINFELD
Monday, July 19, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Everywhere, Americans are called "cowboys." On foreign tongues, the reference to America's Western rural laborers is an insult. Cowboys, we are told, plundered the earth, arrogantly rode roughshod over neighbors, and were addicted to mindless violence. So some of us hang our heads in shame. We shouldn't. The cowboy is in fact our Homeric hero, an archetype that sticks because there's truth in it.
Cowboys were of course plainsmen--Midwesterners operating from Texas to Kansas to the Dakotas. But their ideas and ideals spread across the continent to our Mountain West as well, even as far as the Alaskan West.
A few years ago, a Canadian anthropologist explained to us how different her countrymen are from Americans. She had a perfect comparison to illustrate this. She suggested that we go to the extreme western edge of Canada and have a look at two small towns named Stewart and Hyder. Stewart is situated in British Columbia, Hyder at the southeastern tip of Alaska. Though just two miles apart, these towns are very different in their "habits of the heart." If we visited them, our anthropologist friend implied, we would immediately understand the superiority of Canadian culture.
We decided to take up her challenge.
First we called up the respective town authorities. Hyder, the American town, turned out to have no town authorities--and, technically, no town. The Hyderites chose not to incorporate as a municipality, creating instead a community association--a private nonprofit corporation. Stewart, the Canadian town, is a real municipality with a traditional government.
When we phoned Stewart, the government agent refused to answer any questions until they were submitted in writing. The Hyder community association representative said, sure, she'd tell us anything we wanted to know, right now, on the phone. But to make it a fair comparison, we faxed written questions to both parties, and got written answers back.
The Canadian government official, evidently aspiring to create a faceless bureaucracy in this 700-person outpost, signed the response as "Government Agent"--capital letters but no name or sex--and explained that Stewart had a "Municipal Government incorporated under the laws of the Province of British Columbia," with a mayor and a city council of six members. As to Stewart's nearby neighbors, Government Agent from Canada said diplomatically, "I'm not sure how Hyder is governed," but expressed polite disapproval of its apparent libertarian streak.
Stewart developed very early into a regulated community, explained Government Agent, while Hyder chose to follow the path of less community and more personal freedom. Hyder is a collection of individuals first and a community second, while Stewart has a "community first" attitude, according to Government Agent. "We are generally more accepting of government's involvement in our day-to-day lives."
The Hyder representative--definitely not a Government Agent--signed her name, Caroline Gutierez, to her answers, which she sent on her personal stationery advertising her several businesses. She runs Boundary Gallery, where she is proprietor as well as artist, and Wood Bee Lumber Enterprise, as well as filling eight community positions ranging from music teacher to curator of the town museum. "I came with my family to Hyder on a summer vacation and am pleased to say I am still on vacation," Ms. Gutierez said. She applauded the very same cowboy attitudes that Government Agent disdained. Hyder, she said, was "spirited, rebellious, and independent," while Stewart was "cautious and cleaving to Mother England."
The differences in these answers were interesting enough to convince us to undertake a three-day, 1,200-mile drive from our home in Fairbanks, Alaska. We arrived first at Stewart, Canada, an orderly, well-kept town with paved streets. Then we drove off the blacktop into Hyder, USA--a mélange of disorder where at dark we could find little but a raunchy-looking bar and lodge. We stayed on the Canadian side, at the King Edward Hotel. At our lace-and-doilies Stewart breakfast spot, we found a promotional map. It showed that Stewart had a neat grid of streets and municipal facilities, but not much else. Hyder, on the other hand, with about one-seventh the population and no straight or paved roads at all, had 23 business and community enterprises.
Driving back and forth in daylight, our initial impressions of Stewart as solid and prosperous, Hyder as wild and ramshackle, turned completely inside out. Stewart is definitely much more attractive and inviting, with sidewalks, flower boxes and bicycles to borrow free at the well-staffed government tourist office. But Hyder was the confident, prosperous community. Stewart's houses needed paint. Its shops needed tourists. Its roads needed traffic. It was a semi-ghost town, bravely struggling on. With mining and logging drying up (environmentalist-orchestrated bans on logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest and the closing of Ketchikan's pulp mill devastated the lumber economy in this region), many of Stewart's businesses, elegant restaurants, and small tourist attractions (e.g., the world's leading toaster museum) had discreet "for sale" signs in the windows.
Hyder, meanwhile, turned out to be a lot more productive and enterprising than it had looked at dusk. The Hyderites had evidently found other ways to make money when the mines and mills were shut down. The pickup trucks in Hyder were newer and better, and there were a lot more satellite dishes.....
The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make themselves seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as individuals as that they choose to be different as communities.
The enterprising and economically productive Hyderites pretend they're just fooling around. Hyder's most available T-shirt shows a logger with red suspenders and a bottle of something warming, and the slogan "I've been Hyderized." The Stewartites pretend they're upright Victorians. Their most featured T-shirts display the official seal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police....
Canadian sociologist Kaspar Naegele compares his country and the U.S. this way: "In Canada there seems to be greater acceptance of limitation, of hierarchical patterns. There seems to be less optimism, less faith in the future, less willingness to risk capital or reputation." American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset concludes that Canada is a "more law-abiding, statist, and collectivity-oriented society" than the U.S....
But when we reacted to these two towns emotionally, instead of with checklists, Canada left us feeling flat and constrained. It was nice, but it wasn't us. When we crossed the border a couple of days later, out of the calm Canadian dusk into American neon lights, Joshua, our Yale philosophy major son, put his finger on our collective feelings. "America is thumos," he said. Thumos, an ancient Greek psychological concept, cannot be translated directly into English because it combines the qualities and emotions of passion, spirit, energy and courage. Thumos has a negative side--the anger of Achilles, or the Hyderites' reckless burning down of their own firehouse. But it is also a creative force of great and positive life powers...
The role of freedom in creating prosperity has been the central discovery of economics over the past two centuries. What still tends to go unappreciated is that individual freedom has an emotional and spiritual value at least as important as its economic value. When one's activities are freely chosen and freely pursued, they create pleasure in themselves, not just through what is produced. That's why Caroline Gutierez of Hyder saw herself as "still on vacation" despite her two businesses and eight volunteer positions...
America's thumos appears most often in our pursuit of enterprise. The ancient passions for bravery in battle have reappeared in our prosaic, commercial culture. Tocqueville was quite taken with the American style of building lower-quality sailing ships, then taking over ocean commerce by sailing more of them faster, heedless of the risk of shipwreck, so that shipping could be cheaper. "Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce," he noted.
The place where America's national legends have been acted out has been our Western frontier. Even as the frontier has moved, we continue to use its imagery to describe ourselves, as when we refer to "homesteading on the electronic frontier." America's critics also favor Western and frontier imagery to describe us, as in the disdainful European references to "cowboys."
In every language in which we have tested this, "frontier" means something nearly opposite to its American sense. The French Larousse gives only one meaning for frontière, and that is the border between two nations--which in an oft-invaded country like France conjures up danger rather than opportunity. In Mandarin Chinese the term is bian jie or "boundary." In Cantonese, the word for frontier is huang di, which carries a negative connotation of "wilderness" or "wasteland." A frontier is a barren hardship post, not a place of opportunities, explains a Chinese colleague.....
Because the cowboy melded the aristocratic virtues of honor and indifference to material things with the democratic values of self-reliance, discipline, and independence, this myth appealed deeply to our national character. Freedom imposes burdens--isolation, inequality and anxiety about whether our choices are wise. The cowboy ideal stimulates in us the vigor to attempt difficult new tasks.
When foreigners see us as cowboys, they are not mistaken. As a people, we still exhibit a high degree of courage, independence, aggressiveness, competence, and spirit. Diplomatic Europeans have responded to tyranny over the latest century mostly with accommodation, like the townspeople in "High Noon." Cowboy Americans, on the other hand, have hungered to confront and defeat tyrants, in real life as in legend. Our Western experience--love of freedom, little deference to wealth and status, an idealistic drive for justice, and a willingness to be ferocious toward these ends--continues to drive much of what is best about America.
So can they call us cowboys? You bet. Because we are. Our response ought to be that of the Virginian when he was described as a son of a bitch: "When you call me that, smile!"
Mr. Kleinfeld is a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Mrs. Kleinfeld is director of the Northern Studies Program at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. This article appears in the July/August issue of The American Enterprise.
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