438
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
a Canadian in the shadow of the Image of Liberty that once was
America
if
you didn't happen to live in it yourself. Certainly McLuhan's
view of Canada contains both affection and condescension:
Explorations
became an international magazine because it had some–
thing to say to the world, something new.
It
excited a lot of people.
The idea that one could run something of real international interest
and excitement in a backward place like Canada charmed them.
Canadians are all a very humble bunch. They take it for granted
that everything they do must be second rate. Carpenter and I just
blithely assumed that, since nearly everything in the world is second
rate at best, there was no reason why we couldn't do something that
was first rate here. So it happened.
This depends on believing both that Canada really is backward, so that
Explorations
seems all the more remarkable coming from
there,
and that
its backwardness is only an illusion of parochial self-doubt, since after
all the magazine did happen in Canada and nowhere else. You accept
"international" standards even as you insist that most things are second–
rate everywhere. Where a boy from Sioux City might dream of saying
something to America, a boy from Edmonton must have "something to
say to the world."8
The transmutation of Canada into the great globe itself may be a
mythic motif in McLuhanism. His fascination, approving or not, with
"tribalism," the idea of the world as "global village" all electrically
wired up to itself, seems a natural interest for a mind shaped by physical
and cultural solitude. As in western American writers, you expect both
a yearning for and a "country" hostility to the great world of city cul–
ture; but for a Canadian, I suppose, that world isn't Montreal or
Toronto, themselves tainted with the national sense of inferiority, but
New York, Washington, imperial America as the pattern of provincial
desire and the awful proof of where that desire leads in the end.
Certainly McLuhan's modern world is preeminently America, the land
where media rule, where print culture
was
the only one achieved before
the great plug-in came. He tells Stearn that "ear cultures" still exist in
Russia, all backward or semiliterate societies (his examples are China
and Ghana), Eskimo regions, "the Negro world," Castro's Cuba, the
American South and (breathtakingly) England, though "the British
are unaware of their auditory culture." Not much left. For "western
3 Stearn tells us in
Hot
&
Cool
that McLuhan's elocutionist mother was
known as "the Ruth Draper of Canada," which might have seemed to carry
the cruel implication that there was
another
Ruth Draper, the real one, for the
rest of the world?
