Canada Is Not For Sale vs. Make America Great Again

What's in a hat?

I recently read a moving description of how art functions:

Artists get to the truth or discover new ideas long before anyone else, because art is intuitive and works on a visceral level.

I generally agree with this sentiment and believe that the best art—the best movies and books, for example—express their ideas through form rather than content. It is not about what they say but how they say it, which allows art to communicate on a level beyond the conscious or the literal. This is why sincere, visual art that resorts to slogans or literal messages can often be ineffective, as it tells us how it should be interpreted rather than simply showing us something to look at; the content of the art acts as a substitute for a lack of formal quality, which often leads to moralizing, didactic art that fails to convey its message, or even contradicts itself. The best art must be experienced because its “message,” if we can call it that, is so bound up in its form that to interpret it and analyze it is to fundamentally distort it.

You might expect, then, that I read the above description in relation to a film or a poem, but you would be wrong. It was about a new hat that has suddenly become popular in Canada. I’ve seen the hat twice in public and a third time in a picture of Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who’s started wearing it in press conferences and television appearances. The hat is blue in color and has white lettering on the front reading “CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE,” a style clearly reminiscent of Donald Trump’s red “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hat. Returning to the quote, which the hat’s creator used as a way of explaining its appeal, one wonders what the “intuitive” message that operates on a “visceral level” is. Surely not the idea that “CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE,” because this message is clearly stated on the hat for anyone to see. This is the content of the hat—what is being said—but what about the form, the way in which the message is expressed?

The makers of the hat say that the inspiration for it came while watching Ford in a Fox News interview during which he was asked about Trump’s desire to annex Canada and make it the “51^st state.” They wanted a way to respond to this threat and created the hat, which then found its way to Doug Ford, leading to its popularity. Now people are purchasing the hat as a way to express their Canadian pride and defend Canadian independence. However, one also wonders what it means for an expression of Canadian nationalism to take the particular form of a Trumpian piece of propaganda—a baseball cap with a message in capital letters. Is this an effective way to deliver a message of Canadian sovereignty, or is it ineffective, or worse, contradictory?

One would imagine that in attempting to differentiate Canada from the United States, one would search for a Canadian form to express a Canadian message. In other words, the differentiation would be made aesthetically as well as literally. Yet Ford’s hat is strikingly similar to Trump’s. The most obvious similarity is that they are both baseball caps, which before a few years ago would have been extremely odd to see on a politician. Now it is normalized. Seeing the hat on a politician otherwise dressed in a suit and tie is bizarre, but its effect, to my mind, is to signal that the politician is not a remote, exalted figure—in other words, not an elite—but a “man of the people.” The hat signifies a commonness that we might associate with an old-fashioned ball player or a truck driver, while also giving one’s political supporters, or “base,” an easy way to show their support in the same way one might wear a hat of their favorite baseball team.

The other similarity is the presence of a bombastic message in capital letters. Lest there should be any confusion as to the message the hat wishes to send, it’s spelled out. The same article in which art is described as “intuitive” and “visceral” also mentions that the Canadian hat features “a Canadian-designed typeface,” but one wonders what this means when the font looks to be exactly the same as the one on a MAGA hat. Indeed, in effectively copying the form of the MAGA hat, Ford and the Canadians wearing the blue hats send the implicit message that Canada is, perhaps, quite similar to the United States, despite what the text of the hat says.

If form is content and content is form, if the medium through which something is expressed inextricably shapes that message, then using a baseball hat to convey a political message—a form pioneered by Trump—can only express one thing. When the company behind the hat says that “art is intuitive and works on a visceral level,” they don’t realize that they’ve failed to understand their own intuitive message, and that their hats, despite their intention, implicitly signal support for Trump and the United States. Baseball, the only major sport where hats are worn, is “America’s pastime,” not Canada’s. The most effective way for Canada to defend itself, then, would be to embrace its own style of politics rather than imitating Trump’s.

In recent days, a new message has emerged: “Elbows Up.” This is a phrase associated with Canadian hockey legend Gordie Howe, used to explain how one should defend oneself when scrapping for a puck in the corners of the ice rink. Mike Meyers—an artist—mouthed the phrase while raising his elbow at the end of Saturday Night Live last week. He was also wearing a “CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE” shirt (not a hat), but it’s the hockey phrase that seems to have resonated with people. In Justin Trudeau’s final speech as Prime Minister, delivered the day after the SNL episode, he also used the phrase. If politics must make use of propaganda and if these messages must be delivered aesthetically in order to be effective—something I reluctantly accept—then “Elbows Up” should be the message uniting Canadians. It’s about hockey (Canada’s game); it can be expressed via the physical gesture of raising one’s elbows instead of words; and it is intuitive rather than literal. Just don’t put it on a hat.