Judith Thompson's American Psyche

So a Canadian play about Private Lynndie England is all the rage at the Edinburgh Fringe, is it? How very surprising. (That it was written by a Canadian and that it happens to be all the rage, I mean.) It's got me all revved-up for next year's festival, for which I shall undertake to write a 43 minute, one-woman speculation—in the character of a suitably sack-clothed and manacled Condoleezza Rice—on the auto-erotic proclivities of George W. Bush ... Failing, that is, my submission of a piece called "Friendly Fired" subtitled "How a Bunch of Eskimos Ruined My Sex Life"—a 48 minuter, examining the phenomenon of male-inadequacy in the characters of John Wayne and Major Harry Schmidt (both played nude, but with very small cowboy hats where the fig leaves should be).

Canadians, of course, are much better qualified to comment on the content of the American psyche because—in spite of their not actually being American, or (as they themselves would say) of being anything like Americans—they have not been indoctrinated into the befouled and degraded American ambition ... Or, anyway, they don't carry American passports—the only thing that distinguishes them from Americans anywhere else in the world.