Politics & Power Quote by Margaret Atwood

America gets the grandiose delusion; Canada gets the twitchy side-eye. Atwood’s line is built like a comic diagnosis, but it’s really a geopolitical personality test. By calling U.S. “megalomania,” she compresses a whole history of manifest destiny, superpower confidence, and cultural self-importance into one punchy pathology. Then she swivels north: “paranoid schizophrenia” isn’t just fear, it’s split identity - a country perpetually hearing two voices at once, watching the border for threat while depending on the neighbor it distrusts.

The joke works because it’s not symmetrical. Megalomania is loud and expansive; paranoia is quiet and reactive. That asymmetry mirrors the relationship: the U.S. can afford to be oblivious; Canada can’t. Atwood is also needling a national myth Canadians cherish - the idea that Canadian identity is simply “not American.” Her phrase suggests that defining yourself by opposition can curdle into an anxious doubling: you want distinction, but you fear being absorbed; you want closeness (trade, media, security), but you scan for domination.

Context matters: Atwood came of age as Canadian culture was trying to assert itself against American saturation - television, publishing, politics, the gravitational pull of empire without the formal label. The provocation isn’t medical, it’s literary: exaggerate the diagnosis to make the reader admit the symptom. In two clauses she captures how power talks and how proximity listens.