Wit & Attitude Quote by Irving Layton

Layton’s barb works because it flatters and insults at the same time, then yanks the rug out from under the flattery. Canadians, he suggests, define themselves through a practiced superiority complex toward the U.S. and he doesn’t even bother to dispute the contempt; he validates it, with a poet’s relish for provocation. The twist is the Dantean metaphor: yes, America is Hell, but Canada isn’t Heaven. It’s Limbo - cleaner, quieter, and still damned in its own way.

In Dante, Limbo is the first circle: not a chamber of screams but a place of absence, a dignified exile for the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans. Translating that into North American politics is Layton’s real move. He’s skewering a national identity built on negation: Canada as the country that is not American, whose moral self-image comes from proximity to the inferno rather than from its own transcendent purpose. Limbo implies safety without salvation: fewer flames, less spectacle, but also less urgency, less grandeur, less fate.

The context matters: Layton was a Jewish-Canadian modernist who distrusted pieties and liked his nationalism served with acid. Mid-century Canada was busy narrating itself as gentler, more civilized, more social-democratic - a comforting story beside American militarism and cultural loudness. Layton punctures that comfort. If Canada is Limbo, its virtue is partly bureaucratic: the afterlife of moderation, where the worst sins are avoided and the best convictions are postponed.