Summer in Canada While Deep Freeze Grips US?

This is a selection of headlines in the Spanish press referring to the recent weather emergency in North America:

– Polar Cold Breaks Historic Records in Half of U.S.

– Snow Storm Paralyzes New York and Part of Eastern Seaboard

– New York Suffers Most Intense Cold in 118 Years

– Polar Cold Snap Turns United States into Ice Floe

The United States — always the United States. Could it be that the recent apocalyptic polar vortex made a strange detour in its route south from the North Pole? Just take a look at the map; check out the location of Canada. Is it likely to be summer in Canada while the United States is frozen over?

And Canada is no insignificant country. With an area of almost 10 million square kilometers, only Russia is larger. Its population of 35 million is considerable, though barely one-ninth of the U.S. population. Canadian statistics for quality of life, human development, citizen safety, health, education, social services, domestic solidarity and the inequality index are significantly better than those of the United States. The issue of Quebec nationalism is handled peacefully and with impeccably democratic methods. Canada’s economy might earn it a place in the G-7 and in today’s G-20. It is the world’s 11th largest economy; Spain is ranked 13th.

But, sadly, Canada has the misfortune to share a border with the United States. A simple accident of geography means that, despite experiencing the same weather emergency, Canada is rendered practically invisible. And so the Spanish press — along with that of most of the world — has omitted to mention Canada in recent headlines, in a shameful display of simple-mindedness. The emergency has wreaked even greater havoc in Canada than in the United States, yet the Canadian aspect has received only minimal news coverage, if any.

What should have been the norm — publishing relevant and proportionate information on the consequences of the cold snap in Canada — was in fact the exception, such as a minor article in La Vanguardia that took up a dispatch from the EFE agency under the headline: “Canada Experiences Extreme Cold Snap with Temperatures as Low as -40 Celsius.” And it is not only the media. They (we?) are legion, those who, dazzled by the empire’s brilliance, find it normal that the television news should open with images of Fifth Avenue blanketed in snow and lashed by the wind, as if it were as nearby as the Ramblas or the Gran Vía.

It is a sorry state of affairs, but we allow ourselves to be seduced by Washington’s soft power, content to suffer its influence while we support the weight of its invisible, velvet boot. We watch U.S. films and U.S. television series, we admire U.S. celebrities, we buy U.S. electronic gadgets, we buy U.S. junk food, we identify with the American way of life. We know more about Lincoln and Custer than about Carlos III and Prim, more about Route 66 than the A-3, more about the streets of San Francisco than about the streets of Seville, and more about Spielberg than Almodóvar. We catch pneumonia when the United States has a cold, we follow its foreign policy like lapdogs, we make its enemies our own, we fight in its wars.

We deserve the servile and insignificant position we find ourselves in. And the Canadians deserve it, too; though proud of their social and political model, they accept their role as satellite without resistance.

It may be that the U.S. empire is in decline and that this century belongs to China. Maybe, as has occurred so many times with hegemonic powers, its fall will come about amid cataclysmic wars. Perhaps the colonized Europeans will suffer the consequences, too; the empire will not surrender without a fight, nor without demanding the support of its subjects.

The angel of death that heralds this eventual collapse might even arrive more surreptitiously, boring holes termite-fashion in order to undermine that soft power which is so evident in the fascination aroused by American values, in the way in which we adopt those values however uncaring they may be: the excessive competitiveness, the gun culture and the every-man-for-himself individualism.

Nonetheless, the United States will be in no imminent danger of losing its survival bid and falling victim to the historic shift that could define the 21st century if, when something similar to the next polar vortex comes along, we are as interested as we are now in what is happening in the Big Apple and continue to ignore the existence of Canada.