Forgive me, dear God, for I need to rant, and if I stray too far from coherence, let it be read as passion, and not a higher level of idiocy than I have elsewhere shown.

In no apparent order:

We need sensitivity and courage, rather than caution and concern, about the old career path. We need passion, obsessions, and weirdness. It’s in the streets. Why isn’t it in the advertising?

Maybe because advertising, no longer driven by the passion, zeal, intuition and the expertise of individuals but by systems, process and planning, has become just another technology. And the age of technology, after all, is the age of order.

All technology demands obedience. And the reason for technology is control. It has leveled us out, dulled our How-abouts?, sanded down our What-ifs?

Agencies today are terrified of individuality because it is antithetical to systems management. Instead, some of them resort to ludicrous and bizarre furniture and interior design details to try to demonstrate that they are not only business people but wild and crazy too.

It reminds me of those early ’70s photos of University of Western Ontario business school professors, all wearing sweaters and turtlenecks and trying to look like regular folks. ‘Hey, we’re wild and crazy guys, but we have Total Quality Management.’

Another thing we have to do is laugh at our unbelievable stupidity in becoming American colonials. What’s a colonial? A colonial is one who receives her or his cultural ideas from another country which is deemed to be the centre, while letting that country use their resources, and define their rules of operation. The colonial gets to flip the hamburger.

Perhaps the lamentable B. Mulroney is the classic example of an American colonial. Drooling over Bonzo’s co-star. It’s bad enough we used to be British colonials.

Americans are a wonderful people. I like them. I just don’t want to be like them. Americans are a liberal people who are politically conservative, while Canadians are a conservative people who are politically liberal. I like our way better because (at least until the advent of Preston and his brand of wacky passion) we designed our policies to share and care rather than grab and stab.

There must have been one day, in the late ’70s, when we were neither British nor American colonials, and the feeling of having no one to copy just scared the shit out of us, especially in the big cities. I want my mommy! (Remember when it used to be spelled with a ‘u’!)

Did you catch the big gulp of intaken breath when Pierre repatriated the Constitution? Yikes, we were caught without a country to emulate. So now we’ve even developed our own ugly Canadianism, perhaps in large part a result of a wannabe malaise of big-city insecurity in our relationship with the u.s.

Especially in Toronto, we’ve become neo-colonials, unconsciously yearning to be American, lusting for the churn of Hollywood crap, even wanting to help make it, copying their attitudes, and even their uniforms.

Believe it or not, the Ontario Provincial Police now has uniforms completely copying American state troopers, right down to the Smokey the Bear hats. Those big hats are wonderfully efficient to wear in patrol cars too, seeing as they were designed to wear while riding horses. But I digress.

We have now sunk to kick-ass advertising (oh, sorry, kick-butt), showing sleazeballs hawking digital phones by demonstrating scorn for the people they hire: ‘I’d give him the job less 20K. If he doesn’t like it, he’s toast.’

Hey, it’s ok to turn off three other segments to make your point to one segment in particular. Oh, wait a minute, no, it isn’t! Just as Nike turns away from this same arrogant attitude shit because revenues dropped 60% in one quarter, our neo-colonial wannabes get that old ‘tude thing going here.

We celebrate that poor bugger Howard Stern as a great symbol of free speech, and give up trying to explain ourselves. But who can blame radio listeners? Even American kaka is better than idea-less Canadian commercial radio.

In Canada, commercial radio is a sonic wasteland. Bunches of people with licences to exploit the public airwaves. For the most part, they never create anything themselves, ignoring potential, just playing music or the banalities of some other culture’s moral or immoral punditos. Potential? Ideas? What dat?

Well, potential is how ikea bought cheap wood from us, took it to Sweden and then sold it back to us as bright, creative ideas, its stores then becoming crammed with people. Hey, and these are dreaded socialists?

Where is commercial radio’s ikea kind of thinking? It’s nowhere man. Drowning in Yankee catchup. We’ve looked south for so long now, our asses are permafrost.

Celine Dion, who, unfortunately, can sing the Mississauga phone directory with the same passion as the Ave Maria, has to appear on David Letterman before she exists. Ross Rebagliati doesn’t arrive at the finish line, he arrives at Leno’s couch.

Reminds me of this weird dream I had where a guy interviews this Canadian who has his own American to approve stuff for him. So vivid, I can hear it now:

timid interviewer: Hi there. Excuse me, I notice that you don’t do anything unless you consult that fellow next to you with the Packers jacket and brown tie, and of course, the brogues with the two-inch-thick soles.

canadian wannabe: Yes, well that’s my American.

ti: Your American?

cw: Well, you see, as a Canadian, I can’t really like anything unless it’s been used by Americans. You know, like unless someone here in Canada is accepted in the States, he doesn’t really exist. I just thought I’d jump the gun a bit by having my own personal American.

ti: So he tries stuff for you before you buy it?

cw: You bet. If he likes it, I buy it or eat it.

ti: How’s it worked so far?

cw: Pretty good, actually. So far, I’ve gained 68 pounds, just on taco dip. And of course, I’ve discovered basketball. Bobby-Joe loves it, so it must be good stuff.

ti: Why not think for yourself?

cw: Like how, man? How do I know what ball cap to wear, what football team to watch? With Bobby-Joe here, I get to say stuff like, ‘How about those Bulls?’ and important shit like that! I might even get to go to a tailgate party.

ti: Wow! So you feel liberated?

cw: You bet your ass, you commie prick.

ti: That’s amazing. You sound really confident.

cw: Don’t he mean real confident, Bobby-Joe?

bj: Right, ass-wipe.

ti: So, what’s having your own American approval person done for you?

cw: For one thing, he helps me with my pronunciation. Listen to this! Gawwhndi! Ir-hawn, Pawki-stawn, Mawrrio Le-meww, pawwsta, Nawwgano.

ti: So what’s on for tonight?

cw: We’re learning how to put on cotton sweatshirts with hoods over our football jackets to keep warm in winter. And Bobby-Joe has a neat way to put plastic bags over our feet to keep them warm. Learned it in the States, where it’s real cold. Works great. Tomorrow, we’re going to learn to pray before important football games.

And then I awoke.

Ah well, as an old Montreal copywriter, Jack Bailey, used to say about life in Canada: ‘It’s the best in the world, maybe even in the United States!’

Graham Watt believes that great advertising requires little more than courage, experience and big ideas, and that the free flow of these ideas is constricted today by systems and process. He can be reached at (514) 842-7876 or faxed at (514) 842-8554 at the Montreal office of Watt Burt Advertising. Large national accounts welcome. No experience necessary.