“We freely admit this isn’t the freshest topic under the sun,” offers Maclean’s publisher and editor-in-chief Ken Whyte by way of introducing The New Yorker’s contributing writers Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik, who flew back to the land in which they were both raised to debate before 750 people at Convocation Hall on Sunday afternoon on the scintillating topic, “Canada: Nation or Notion?”
“And we’re not sure if we made any progress form day to day, year to year, in answering the question.”
This indeed sounds like Maclean’s brought to life, with moderation from the weekly magazine’s National editor, Andrew Coyne. Putting two shining examples of journalists who’d have been unlikely to scrape out a living in the Canadian media as the kind of personalities they are — as opposed to Coyne, whose mastery of tedious political science has kept him gainfully employed — is a novel way of trying to draw an illusory link between Eustace Tilley and Ted Rogers.
Earlier the same day, the news broke that 111 staffers were being cut from Newsweek, a signal that a mass-appeal glossy dedicated to summing up the events of the past seven days wasn’t a sustainable business — just a month after Newsweek editor Jon Meacham was pleading with Columbia journalism school students to heed a little bit of attention to his efforts rather than The Economist.
Maclean’s has sorta aspired to be something different in the three years since Rogers recruited Whyte to salvage their waiting-room staple, with help from countless other refugees from Conrad Black’s incarnation of the National Post. And maybe it is more like The Economist — if Economist writers were overcome by an egotistical tumor — or Sassy meets The New Republic meets… EnRoute?
Look, whatever it is, it’s not The New Yorker — for one thing, The New Yorker’s website is designed in a way that makes it possible to read the stories that are posted. Maclean’s also lacks a budget for cartoons, opting instead to dedicate its pages to Rebecca Eckler complaining about being ripped off for the movie Knocked Up, followed by her account of infiltrating a gang of online tormentors.
Just in case you were wondering why neither of the star debaters still live here.
Malcolm Gladwell was born in England, but raised among the Mennonites in Elmira, Ontario (as his father taught at the University of Waterloo), then spent the early 1980s getting his history degree at U of T. Ditching this town to write about science for The Washington Post, the New Yorker staff job he scored in 1996 led him to write the biggest non-fiction book of this century, The Tipping Point — which has surpassed “nauseous” as the most nauseatingly misinterpreted term.
A follow-up in 2005, Blink, helped to send his speaking fees into the stratosphere — and, best as anyone can guess, Gladwell’s next one will deal with debunking the education system. But the Malcolm backlash has been in full effect for 2008. Clive Thompson laboriously asked “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” in the pages of Fast Company. Jeff Bercovici, blogger for Portfolio — which shares ownership with The New Yorker — forced Gladwell to admit fudging a fact in a recent story.
Gladwell, in real life, looks like someone whose feelings are capable of being hurt by this sort of heckling — the loose-curled Afro wasn’t so much cultivated to make him look like a nutty professor as furnish his thin frame with a physical presence.
Adam Gopnik might share the same basic job description and Canadian citizenship as Gladwell, but he’s disliked for entirely different reasons. “He is avidly talented and spongily absorbent, an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much,” is how James Wolcott summed up Gopnik’s paradoxes.
While his contributions to The New Yorker since 1986 haven’t been entirely about himself, Gopnik’s books Paris to the Moon and Through the Children’s Gate have reflected his penchant for what’s aptly described as “upper-middlebrow self-satisfied intellectual douchebaggery.” Yet, in the process, he’s elevated the standards for those slice-of-life columnists — writing about his wife and kids, his psychiatrist, and riding the bus in NYC with manic avuncularity. Born in Philadelphia, he was raised in Montreal, and is a graduate of McGill.
Neither would be on this stage if they didn’t make the decision to break away.
TONSIL HOCKEY AFTERNOON IN CANADA
The pair have shared a stage before — debating health care in 2000, even though Gladwell hastens to point out he changed his mind on his criticism of the Canadian system. In October, they exchanged words on whether the Ivy League should be abolished — Gopnik argued for no, but admits he honestly didn’t care.
Canada’s continued existence, on the other hand, is important to Maclean’s — and for the sake of a rebroadcast of the debate on the CBC's Ideas on April 7 — but for a live audience in Toronto? Maybe to front-row sitters Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Saul but, otherwise, the topic was probably a turn-off to those journalism groupies and wannabe writers who’d eagerly hear tales of this pair’s workplace. Plus, the $30 ticket went for half the price to Maclean’s subscribers.
“Adam’s arguments are effective,” Gladwell deadpanned about his own switching of perspectives on socialized medicine. “But they work very slowly.” He insists that Canada remains the most Unitarian of nations — one that is forever wrestling with its faith.
“I want to talk about what it means to be small,” Gopnik emerges from behind his lectern, and his lack of height is compensated with the neurotic urge to never leave any dead air in the argument: “India doesn’t have ‘Why India?’ debates, France doesn’t have ‘Why France?’ debates, America doesn’t have ‘Why America’ debates — to be honest, other countries have ‘Why America’ debates.
“Our size is not in fact the problem,” he says. “Our size is, in fact, the solution.”
Gladwell counters with a heap of prepared analogies. “I’m going to point out ‘x’ by discussing ‘y,'” he smirks. “Because, after all, that is my only rhetorical move.
“Power is not a function of size — that’s the old rules. It’s a function of freedom. And being small makes us free.”
Gopnik, between sips from his Druxy’s teacup, again: “As you can see, I’m predisposed by nature to think that small is beautiful.” He listens to the CBC compulsively on the internet, he compulsively follows the Montreal Canadiens. He’s here, he’s not here. Always, and forever.
Could it be because such compulsive characters are frowned upon around here?
“I don’t think Canada works because small is beautiful,” says Gladwell. “I think it works because plural is possible.”
Gopnik breaks into even more pronounced alliteration: America? “Flags and fears.” Canada? “Hopes, and — holidays!”
“That sounds like the runner-up in a Club Med campaign,” says Gladwell — either that, he figures, or the United Church. “And, if that’s all that it is, then why shouldn’t we all live in New York?”
Gladwell evokes the example of Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian who went to the United States “to make a quick buck and marry a rich girl” then came back.
Andrew Coyne, inherently more dapper than the relatively disheveled ex-pat debaters, can only turn on the indifference. To him, our weakness isn’t our strength, or strength isn’t our weakness — rather, our weakness is our weakness.
With plenty of his own opinions to throw into the fray — between fielding a live question from the ex-Governor-General and reading others — Gladwell asks Coyne, “Do you want to switch places?”
And, lastly, it comes around to what an audience member terms “The Michael Ignatieff Question.” Namely, what’s it going to take for these writers to return?
Adam Gopnik, shorter: “One sign of an un-provincial country is that it encourages its young people to go elsewhere in the world — in order to find out what it’s like.”
Malcolm Gladwell, scrawnier: “When I was in university I had a poster of Ronald Reagan in my room. I was the type of person that, in order for Canada to retain its identity — I needed to leave. When I’m ready to conform … I’ll come back.
“The word that is missing in discussions of Canadian identity is excitement.”
And, with that, Gopnik was declared the winner by virtue of louder applause.
Five words that clearly won’t work on the Maclean’s crowd: “It’s not you, it’s me.”
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