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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, May 27, 2009 Basic Black by Arthur Black Watch the borders Back in the 1920's there was a debate in the Texas legislature over whether to introduce Spanish language instruction in state schools. Story goes that Miriam 'Ma' Ferguson, the first female governor of Texas, ended the debate by standing up, waving a bible and declaring "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for the children of Texas." Okay, the story is probably too good to be true, but it does resonate, especially for the several hundred million nonAmericans around the world who get to watch the ongoing antics of the Excited States of America on a daily basis. And most especially for Canadians. Try as they might (and they don't try very hard) most Americans suffer from North American tunnel vision. They simply cannot see their northern neighbours very clearly. Instead they take comfort by concocting Canadian myths. We all wear plaid. There's a Mountie on a horse outside every donut shop. We all say 'aboot' and 'hoose' for 'about' and 'house'. I have never heard a Canadian say aboot or hoose have you? Willie, the janitor on The Simpsons maybe - but not a Canuck. Americans tell themselves we 'suffer' under socialized medicine in this country and that as a result, Canadians line up around the block to see a doctor and can't get into hospitals even for urgent surgery. This from a country in which 47 million of its own citizens 18 percent of the population under 65 - have no medical insurance whatsoever. When actor Natasha Richardson died following a fall while skiing in Quebec last winter US tabloids blazed with cautionary headlines such as: SOCIALIZED MEDICINE KILLED RICHARDSON. The fact that she was walking and talking after the fall and actually refused an ambulance wasn't mentioned by American reporters. And then there's the terrorism thing. Shortly after the nine-eleven attacks, several American TV commentators, radio show hosts and newspaper headline writers reported that the hijackers had infiltrated from Canada. Well, okay... it was a confusing time and rumours ran rampant. Turned out that not one of the hijackers - zero, zilch, ninguno - had entered the US from Canada. A spokesman for the Canadian government pointed that fact out in the House of Commons a few days after the attack. Peter Mansbridge mentioned it on The National. Frank McKenna, then-Canadian Ambassador to the United States, called a press conference in Washington to correct the misapprehension. But America wasn't listening. In the ensuing eight years, Canada has been regularly and routinely bad-mouthed as a careless conduit for the nineeleven hijackers. Then-senator Hillary Clinton told reporters the terrorists had crossed from Canada into New York. Texas congressman Ruben Hinojosa assured a congressional committee that the hijackers had crossed the border "using passports that Canadians accepted as valid despite the fact that the documents were doctored." "It's something that won't go away," Bill Graham, Canada's defense minister, moaned back in 2003. "We're very resentful . . . because not one suspect had been in Canada. All had been in the U.S., training in the U.S., with valid U.S. visas." That's right, America. It was your border guards, not ours, that waved the hijackers through customs. You even went so far as to teach them how to pilot passenger jets. But it's a correction that American ears won't hear. Last month Janet Napolitano assured reporters that the nine-eleven hijackers had come through Canada. Later she said that she'd been misunderstood, but she's on tape, and the tape doesn't lie. She's the head of US Homeland Security, for cripes sake. And just days after that John McCain - who could have been the president repeated the bogus legend yet again. Ah, well. When it comes to borders Americans have always tended towards the paranoid and illogical. There is the story of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his penchant for scribbling his views in bright blue ink in the margins of memos and reports he received from underlings. Sometimes he would fill all four borders of a typewritten sheet with his observations handwritten with a fountain pen. Once an assistant made the mistake of sending him a typewritten page in which the copy ran almost to the edges of the paper, leaving Hoover very little room to write. 'WATCH THE BORDERS!' Hoover printed in angry, bright blue block letters across the top of the page. 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