National Neuroses

When he resigned as U.S. vice-consul in Toronto last fall, Frank Tinker bade Canada an unfond farewell. "I'm leaving Canada and I'm glad," Tinker wrote in a blunt article in Maclean's magazine. "It's going to be a great relief."

Tinker explained that he was fed up with the spiteful, unfair criticisms that he had encountered during his two-year hitch in Canada. Canadians were forever complaining to Vice-Consul Tinker about U.S. immigration laws, completely overlooking Canada's equally strict screening of aliens. Canadian newspapers railed about the 7% U.S. tariff on Canadian lead, but never mentioned the 25% Canadian duty on U.S. cars. Tinker once heard a Canadian M.P. solemnly talk to a dinner audience about "trigger-happy" U.S. diplomats.

The critical barrage went on in private as well as in public. At cocktail parties Tinker was needled mercilessly by Canadians who seemed to feel that they were entitled to hold him personally responsible for McCarthyism, U.S. foreign policy, and "every bit of claptrap put out by Hollywood, U.S. Steel or the C.I.O."

Tinker's article drew more mail than anything Maclean's has published in years. Surprisingly, half the letters agreed with Tinker in deploring the growth of such carping anti-Americanism. More support for Tinker came last week in a guest editorial written for Maclean's by Author Hugh (The Precipice) MacLennan. "Mr. Tinker has hit nearly all of us where it hurts," MacLennan wrote. "We're chagrined and a little ashamed of ourselves."

MacLennan's urbane explanation for Canadians' behavior toward Tinker and for the American's wounded reaction is that both Canada and the U.S. are suffering from neuroses: the Canadian neurosis is a compulsive desire to be noticed and the American neurosis is a compulsive desire to be liked. Thus, self-conscious Canadians belittle and criticize the U.S. in order to build up their own national ego. And Americans, expecting friendship, are hypersensitive to the needling. Only mutual understanding, MacLennan believes, will resolve the problem: "The Canadian and American national neuroses will continue to howl at one another like a pair of coyotes in the dark until we turn a spotlight on them, examine them, and let them fade into forgotten nightmares."

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