A watershed for the west, 9/11 was a wakeup call for Haligonian
teacher Steven Edwin Laffoley to reflect on the Zero that Ground
Zero signified: an absolute nothing; an absence of meaning; rather
the ushering in, as he put it, of the Dark Age of Unreason. For
him, the halogen lights on Manhattan site illuminated an emotional
void and not the image of good and evil that television drummed out
minute by minute. So he embarked on a journey of reflection. In the
process, he looked at how he was shaped by American values wrought
by birth and upbringing, twinned with Canadian values adopted over
20 years. His journey takes him from the American undemocracy of
dissent to the calmness of Canada, through the territory of the
supersized where less is not more, and along the way he tweaks a
number of nerves in his personal and personable anecdotal style.
Laffoley meanders delightfully from Plymouth Rock and Champlain
through places and people to art, poetry and teaching typing
without a typewriter in a reserve in northern Ontario. He goes
right back to William the Conqueror, who he pairs most gloriously
with his current counterpart, George Bush, and the selective truth
of the Bayeux Tapestry plundering and what he says will be the
Baghdad one. He writes of bridging the 20th-century abyss which
crossed from Verdun and Vietnam, pogroms and Auschwitz to reach
9/11; and says, chillingly, that it is dark in America. Canada, a
better option by far, is not left untarnished… the fact that more
children exist now in poverty than they did in 1989 or the
consequences of Canada's third-highest ecological footprint are
targeted. His easy style is seductive, but you know he has counted
every word when he tells you the new wide-screen television screen
on which he has been watching images of killings in Iraq cost an
arm and a leg.
Laffoley's arresting and penetrative observations are often
searing, but for all the darkness of his topic this is an
entertaining and enlightening read. While Bush appears often (have
you ever thought of the choice between Bush and Kerry as that
between Bush and Bush Light?), don't hold your breath waiting for
Angus. He only appears at the end, as the person who epitomizes the
Canadian moment-the ability to disagree about something and still
be civil.