Time for a Name Change. A friend drew my attention to the headline on the front page of today's New York Daily News, "JENNINGS DIES; Famed anchor [of "ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings"] battled lung cancer". The story inside mentioned, in part:

Born and raised near Toronto, Jennings added dual U.S. citizenship in 2003. "Canada's ingrained in my soul, but this is my home," he told the Daily News.

Is there really such a thing as dual citizenship, recognized by the United States? If so, Congress had better rewrite the laws, because dual citizenship is dual loyalty is divided loyalty is potential conflict of interest is disloyalty. You want to be an American? Then renounce all foreign allegiances. If you're not willing to renounce all foreign allegiances, then you should be denied U.S. citizenship and go home!
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Why did we allow him to host U.S. election coverage, both before the elections, where he, as a foreigner, might have influenced people's perceptions and thus their votes, and after, during the election-nite coverage that is one of the ripest plums in all of American journalism? Americans are often accused of excessive nationalism, but in this matter of allowing foreigners to take the best jobs in this country and poke their nose into our politics, we seem more like colonials too timid to complain about being lorded over by foreigners.
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I saw Peter Jennings in person once, in late 1964 or early 1965, when I was working for ABC News as a clerk-messenger for a documentary unit in my first job in New York — after my actual first job ever, a couple of months at a McDonald's in my hometown of Middletown, NJ (where Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw's successor as anchor of NBC Nightly News, is from). Jennings was the new guy in national news and had been invited to stop by at the end of the nite at the company's bowling league on the Upper West Side. He apparently came at the invitation of a left-handed attorney from the legal department, a gorgeous guy with beautiful brown eyes, like the song ("Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes"), and bowled a game after our regular league play had finished.
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I was then, as now, interested in Canada as potentially a hugely important part of the United States, but Jennings never did anything to promote Canadian entry into the Union. Quite the contrary, he refused U.S. citizenship for decades, even tho he had taken a number of very good jobs away from Americans and worked for the "American" Broadcasting Company. I found that very offensive.
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Only after almost 40 years of working for ABC — a few of them spent in London (England, not Ontario), so he had an excuse for those years — Jennings finally decided to accept that he had become American, and deigned to take our miserable citizenship.
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But the Daily News says he took "dual citizenship", never relinquishing Canadian nationality. I don't know if that is possible in either Canadian or U.S. law, but it should be permissible in no nation's law. A or B, not AB, not BA: one thing or the other. Canada and the United States are barely on speaking terms today. What if things got worse and we ended up at war? Whose side would Peter Jennings have taken?
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We have the right to expect that anyone who has been granted our extremely valuable citizenship will be faithful to the United States. I don't trust any "dual national".
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Phil Hartman, the (late) comic from Saturday Night Live, was on a late-nite talk show one evening when he mentioned that he (also originally Canadian) had become a U.S. citizen, at which some applause broke out. He turned to the audience and asked if they were applauding his being a "turncoat". Odd thing to ask, no?
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Hartman's remark revealed the onus that the nationalistic Canadian upbringing has put on Canadian expatriates: they are made to feel that even if they think that joining the U.S. would be in everybody's very best interest, they are still to feel bad about even thinking such a thing, much less working to make it happen.
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Michael J. Fox is another prominent Canadian-born celebrity who spent decades here before finally taking citizenship — just in time to appear before Congress and lobby for more money for Parkinson's Disease, a malady that affects him.
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I once appeared very briefly on the old Chris Rock show on HBO, in an episode about minor political parties. When I mentioned Canada, Fox's name came up, and I criticized him for not taking U.S. citizenship. Rock then had Fox respond to that criticism. Fox practically bragged that he had been in the United States for 18 years but never taken citizenship. Within two more years, however, he had finally come over to our side. Perhaps his friends asked him, "You've been here 18 years? Why haven't you taken U.S. citizenship? You're married to an American and have American kids. You're not moving back to Canada, are you? So why aren't you a U.S. citizen?" Whether that happened or not, Michael J. Fox did become a citizen within about two years of that exchange.
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Jim Carrey has expressed the desire to take U.S. citizenship as soon as legally practical. But what about all those other Canadians who live here, the Pamela Andersons and other entertainers, the horde of Canadian reporters and anchors on U.S. television? Why are so many of the best jobs in this country given to foreigners who adamantly refuse to take U.S. citizenship?
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We need to demand more respect for our citizenship from the foreigners who come into this country for our money and other opportunities but refuse our nationality. If our citizenship isn't good enuf for you, then our money and our jobs aren't good enuf for you either. You love Canada? Go there. Live there. And stay the hell out of the United States. But if you are going to live here the rest of your life, become a citizen. To refuse our citizenship is to insult every single American.
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It's time for us to put legal and/or social pressure on long-time foreign nationals resident in the United States. Do not invite them to A-list events. Snub them at parties. Boycott their movies and the TV shows they appear on. Canuck Go Home — and take professional hockey with you!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,833.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:29 AM