For Canada Day (July 1) I attended a music festival with a small fireworks show in downtown Kitchener. The show featured Canadian acts, two of which I suspected were not Canadian acts. Those two bands were Treble Charger and Hollerado.
It was because of these two bands biggest hits that I suspected they were American. Those hits are American Psycho by Treble Charger and Americanarama by Hollerado. Besides the titles, Hollerado rhymes with Colorado and Americanarama mentions Philadelphia a bunch of times as well as mentioning New York.
But a quick check today on Wikipedia, revealed that both bands are Canadian. Treble Charger is from the Canadian side of Sault Ste. Marie and Hollerado is from Ottawa. So I have to ask myself what is with the American names?
Then I thought, what if they’re both double dipping, playing shows in Canada on July 1 and then maybe crossing the border and playing American shows on July 4, or Independence Day? What a sinister plan! To double dip while playing on the patriotic emotions of two countries.
Of course they might be using the word America in the Greater America sense. Indeed that reminds me of one of my pet peeves. The United States of America has usurped the use of America and American and uses it solely to represent itself. This is patently unfair to the rest of the Americas.
Treble Charger and Hollerado might be trying to unite the Americas by their choice of titles and lyrics. And Hollerado’s Americanarama includes Philadelphia and New York in its definition of America (really Greater America). What a bridge building definition.
And that pet peeve of mine? Now I have the word tools I’ve craved. I live in Greater America and am a Greater American.
So we Greater Americans, when at an international destination (or anywhere nationality comes up) can wait for the Yankees to identify themselves as American. Then we will identify ourselves as Greater Americans. The Yankee will try to trump this by saying, “Well actually I’m a greatest American.”
“We can say that, too, but actually it’s a biased term. Saying I’m a Greater American is unbiased and dispassionate. Greater America is both more populous and larger than America. These are facts. You are an American and I am a Greater American.”
If enough Yankees continue to lose this fight, perhaps they will willingly come up with a different name for their national identity.
