Mr Bush, Angus, and Me: Notes Of An American-canadian In The Age Of Unreason

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.