Terence Gower: Reviews of Enemies and Rascals – so the US liberal was born evil? | | Art

FForgive me if you have heard this before. The United States of America wants to add Canada. It starts with an invitation to Canadians to join the Greatest Party on Earth but soon turns aggressive and strict. Canada, apathetic and confused, stands for itself. The battle is approaching.

But this is not about Donald Trump and the threats to torture Canada that he has been making since the beginning of his second term. Except, of course, it is, even if he is not named in the Canadian artist Terence Gower’s Artangel Commission Enemies and Rascals – very cruel even Trump is. Mr. Gower set the tone inside the Neogothic Victorian library to go back to the first time the US moved into Canada – in 1775-76 during the American War of Independence. George Washington – only known as “Virginia plantation owner” and Benjamin Franklin (“the printer”) are some of the founders of the US whose quotes make them sound like traitors who want to take over Canada, especially the Indians.

It’s a sad picture of the lack of hope or love that the US is now promoting around the world as it prepares to celebrate the 250th Independence Day. You wander among the empty metal shelves in a dark, dark place where 18th century diplomatic letters, government announcements and leaflets are spoken by actors. Here it is, more and more evidence that the US liberal was born evil – that it has always been the worst poison in human history, corrupt, corrupt and tyrannical, whose destiny was to produce President Donald J Trump.

This pessimistic vision of a non-adult America has strange bedfellows: the great 18th-century novelist Samuel Johnson is heard pointing out that the American colonists who clamored for freedom were slave owners. Meanwhile, quoted sources say that although the British in the 1700s left large lands in the hands of the Indians, the brutal US revolutionaries did not wait to take them over. To the most well-known sin of the American Revolution in 1776 – its failure to extend its promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to enslaved Africans – Gower adds pre-existing imperialism and the old Trumpet.

But if you’re expecting another Hamilton, delivering a dirty lowdown on the US 250 with style and panache, forget it. This has become the most boring podcast in the world. Despite its obvious relevance to current US-Canada relations, it covers every bite in repeating the source material without interpretation, discussion or commentary. In a real history podcast you can argue about what happened between the US and the British colony in the north in the 1770s, why, and what it means, maybe some jokes. Here you are simply overwhelmed by the text.

After a while, the sound goes quiet and you hear a strong north wind, maybe even a hurricane starting to blow. Then back to the declaration of the source material. But there is not enough poetry or mystery in these sets of words. Calling it art seems like a cheap excuse because it’s nothing better: there are no characters to engage with so it doesn’t work as a play, and the soundscape is restricted, so it’s not music. This time, like history, which seems to want to be, it is thin and damaged. Instead it has the appearance not of history, but of conspiracy theory – the US, disclosed sources will say, always harbors the embryo of a modern-day tyrant.

Trying to reduce the US story to a single thread from the Quebec battle to Trump v Carney does not explain much of the past 250 years. By criticizing the US and all its activities, Gower comes close to glorifying the British Empire: the British are beginning to sound more civilized and liberal than Washington and the evil Franklin – a false illusion.

The American Revolution gave rise to the ideas of civil liberties that inspired the French Revolution and the struggle for democracy in the 19th century in Europe and America: you cannot deny its positive influence without saying clearly that we will all be better off living under monarchies, aristocracies or kings. This is what takes 250 years seems to be on purpose or by accident.

The US has a lot of people. Racism, slavery, economic imperialism, war and Trump, and rock’n’roll, the civil rights movement, Gloria Steinem, Jackson Pollock. There has been much longer and sometimes a quarter of a thousand years of hope than you will find among these dead shelves.