Canada has quite a few imports to our country. There’s hockey, maple syrup, Kids In The Hall, and this guy named Jeff, a friend of my roommate who occasionally appears in my living room to sleep on my couch for several days, play Call Of Duty and challenge our dog Frye for the title of dirtiest organism in the house. All are generally harmless, but I’m leaving one important import out. Can you guess who he is?

He’s got hair so perfect it’s like a dove’s wing, every time he opens his mouth all twelve-year-old girls within fifteen miles immediately explode into seizure-like fits of epic proportions, and he’s made more money than I’ll ever see before he’s even hit puberty.

Justin Bieber is the fresh face in a long line of harmless, bubblegum pop singing teen idols that Hollywood has placed on the altar of tweendom. Before ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys there was New Kids On The Block (who inexplicably had the nerve to name their suburban-white bread hit album “Hangin’ Tough”). Before New Kids On The Block, there was Michael Jackson, and then there was David Cassidy, and the list goes on. It’s an unmistakable pattern and the template produces results.

The results are usually in the form of a seething, faceless mass of screeching preteen girls, crying and ululating and hoping desperately that their messiah will walk by so that they can demonstrate their devotion by brutally ripping his hair out by the roots, or clawing off a ragged patch of skin for a souvenir to bring home. It’s terrifying really, if I had the option, I would rather face down a couple of murderers in state prison with nothing but a toothbrush than a rabid herd of bloodthirsty tweens.

But I digress. In the past couple of days I’ve been reading a bit more about Justin Bieber than I care to admit. The phenomenon surrounding this boy is astounding.

I was impressed to learn that he actually writes (or co-writes) the majority of his songs, which sets him in a category different than your Britney Spears or your Miley Cyrus, whose songs are typically written by a combination of chain smoking forty-year-old male producers with soul patches and a nuclear-powered supercomputer built with the sole purpose of cleverly arranging the words baby, love, and yeah in the most audibly charming layout imaginable.

Something about him is different.

Setting aside the lunatic fans, there is the opposite side of the spectrum. Some people want this kid to die.

Spend more than five minutes on YouTube and you’ll ultimately come across a heated debate between “Beliebers” (no, I didn’t make that term up) and an opposing force of those types of guys who can’t get a date and instead spend most of their time on the internet criticizing movies and creating fake Facebook pages that make fun of victims of hate crimes.

You have to wonder what it is about Justin Bieber that actually inspires the impulse to spearhead a successful campaign to push “Justin Bieber Syphillis” to the top of Google Trends. In addition, countless rumors have been spread online saying that Bieber has joined a cult, or that his Mother was offered $50,000 to pose in Playboy.

Even his music videos have been hacked to direct users to websites containing adult multimedia or to fake pop-up news articles reporting his death. I wonder if it’s Bieber’s lack of breasts that may be dooming him to suffer constant defamation at the hands of ferocious Internet posters that never bothered to attack Spears or Aguilera back in the day. Is he really that threatening? Are they secretly attracted to him? I’m unable to ascertain the basis behind this vilification.

Celebrity is a gift and a stigma that I’ll never be upset to not have. Bieber is another cute kid in the long line of teen and preteen idols that stage moms and scrupulous producers have thrown to the wolves. He’s harmless, but his fame has risen him to that point where he is fair game for whoever wants to devote their affection to him, or whoever wants to set his mailbox on fire.

As a culture so in love with the theatrical and the artificial, we welcome the disposable heroes so that we can watch them from afar, criticize them, and live vicariously through them.

Bieber, in my opinion, is not among the worst of the teen idols, for one thing at least he writes his own music. That’s to be admired in a profession where everything is provided to the star. But someday he’ll be gone and another will take his place. Or maybe not, I mean. He’s so dreamy.