Every woman I know hates Leah McLaren.

It has been eight years since the Globe and Mail started publishing weekly the work of the now 32 year-old columnist, first in the Facts and Arguments section and now firmly, fittingly, in Style.  The vitriol has not abated.  Reviewing her first novel in 2006, Ryan Bigge, a freelance writer, wrote that The Continuity Girl “illuminates the limitations of my thesaurus. Uber-lousy? Fifth-rate? Super-bad? ... Even the German word SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene, which roughly translates into ‘putrid garbage typewriter prose,’ fails to convey the stench of this slush pile.”1

Why does McLaren provoke such loathing amongst Canadian women?  The short answer is that she is a wannabe, the girl in high school whose striving for queen status ensures she never reaches the throne.  Yet in her striving, Leah roots out our anxieties about American pop culture: we fear it, long for it, and know we’re too square to do it right.  Leah is Carrie Bradshaw with less sex and less city -- and therefore ridiculous.

McLaren does not bow to Canadian delicacy: like a tornado she whirls through topics, sucking light-as-air Britney in with weightier items like Andrea Dworkin.  As her notoriety and job security have grown, her columns have increasingly yielded to anecdote.  She writes about a cross-border shopping adventure (they wouldn’t take her Canadian cash!), her love of vegan food and aversion to vegans, the process of recovering from her “cottage lobotomy.”  The lady Canuck is meant to relate.

In a September column about a charity golf tournament, McLaren hangs out in

"a total load of horse crap.  And in this case the crap is premium - delivered, fresh and steaming straight from [automotive parts magnate] Frank Stronach's thoroughbred stables just over the hill from where I am, for the first time in my life, attempting to drive a golf ball, in front of a crowd of about 200 spectators on the exclusive and ultraplush Magna International private golf course.

Why am I doing this? It's for charity, of course."

Leah’s romp through Stronach’s world exasperates.  In a balletic spin, McLaren manages to be at once the girl next door and a star philanthropist by focusing on one point: herself.  She continues,

"Why else would I agree to humiliate myself on a sunny September day if there wasn't going to be money in it for my chosen charity, a shelter for at-risk teenage mothers? ... The next thing you know, you're standing on a knob of grass with a club in your hand having your photo taken with Annika Sorenstam, who is, according to my sporty sources, one of the best female golfers in the world."

Well, golly gee, how did that happen?  Thank goodness for those sporty sources, or Leah would be in quite a pickle!  Never fear, our bubble gum gumshoe will cut through all the rumours to deliver the real dirt (or crap).

Concluding his review, Bigge writes that “for those who wish [McLaren] would disappear, the solution is simple: Stop reading her SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene, stop talking about her between sips at the water cooler, and she will soon shrivel into nothingness. It's that simple.”

He is, of course, correct.  Leah has attained an infamy that is, for the Canadian arts and letters crowd, at Paris Hilton levels.  Like Hilton, McLaren would just go away if we ignored her.  But we don’t, and she won’t -- and there’s reason to keep her around.

McLaren says it herself in an August, 2001 column defending the tabloids: “I'd much rather read a frothy feature speculating on whether or not Liz Taylor is actually dating Jeff Goldblum (insanely, yes!), than the deadly and, at this point, less relevant, results of the APEC inquiry. Moreover, I'd rather fry my own face in a pan and eat it than sit across a dinner table from someone who felt differently.”

Leah’s writing sizzles.  Like a focus-grouped Hollywood movie, McLaren includes just enough explosions, just enough sexy to make us shift a little in our seats.  It is the slickness, the bravado, the self-absorption that entertains even as it repels.  There’s no telling what wonkiness will splutter out next.  Infuriating, entrancing, the worse it gets, the better.

She continues in the tabloid piece,

"I have no time for people who won't admit that popular culture is part of culture, who drink their twig tea and whine that the massive influence of pop and the tabloidization of social discourse is, in and of itself, a bad thing.

Canada, you may have noticed, is rife with such narrow-brained twaddlers.  You know the type I mean, the sort of person who makes a big show of sniffing in schoolmarmish horror at any mention of Britney Spears."

She’s right.  We are a nation of schoolmarms.  We’ll never have Paris (Hilton or France).  We’ll always have Anne of Green Gables.

At the same time, McLaren overlooks the complexity of the Canadian push-pull with pop.  What scares us -- what Leah mines -- is what lies underneath all that is true-north-strong-and-free, in our subconscious and our geography.  It is the seamy, steamy, bursting mass of America.

She writes, “low-brow discourse isn't simply a regrettable offshoot of our culture -- it is our culture, and ought to be treated accordingly.”  However, in Canada, it is not our culture.  In the United States, “low-brow” is a homegrown product, a nation-building rebellion against European haughtiness.  In Hollywood cinema and rock n’ roll, American citizens and critics found their separateness.

We have no such enfranchising narrative in Canada: no Andy Warhols, no Tom Wolfes, no jazz.  Hollywood North is literally a cheap imitation of the original.  This is because mass culture never  offered us emancipation from our rulers.  Quite the opposite.  In Canada (and farther-flung nations), American pop colonized.  The ethos of a McLaren-type is not simply an affront to the establishment, as Warhol was in the 1960s: it is a front in the war on cultural sovereignty.  No wonder we despise the serious way McLaren probes the shallow: we have identity politics to work out!

Yet as much as we try to block it -- to relegate Fox News to satellite TV, to fill the airwaves with CanCon -- we love the imported stuff: The Simpsons on the CBC and Mama Mia! sold out in Toronto.  We love it even if it is a low budget repackaging of an American brand, such as the shameful Canada’s Next Top Model.  We love it as a nation of immigrants must love all American stories: for the liberation they offer from tradition.

Even if our lady Canuck finds solipsism where a Yankee broad sees individuality, both may discover in McLaren a kind of freedom: from rules and good taste, from an overabundance of modesty, sensitivity, and “twig tea”.  If Leah has committed any great crime, it is to play spin the bottle with her older, more experienced neighbour.  To kiss and tell (and tell) all the uncouth, unCanadian details.  The sad truth is that up here we are all high school wannabes in schoolmarms’ clothing, and this frozen tundra can’t give us the sin to satisfy.  So every Saturday morning we read McLaren’s column, we rant, and we crave that bad boy kiss which only American trash can bestow.

1. It should be noted that in 2001, McLaren called Bigge a Lurper, which she defined as a hanger-on who “hates other people for having the many things he lacks - success, confidence, fame, money, sex, charm, recognition, art, conversational ease, style, respect, drugs, a sense of wonder. His world view is governed by paranoid conspiracy theories. He wants desperately to be on (what he sees as) ‘the inside’ and yet angrily guards (what he sees as) his superior position on ‘the outside.’”  Nice.

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