Hope.
And we all got a jolt of it on Tuesday when the Democrats won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia by big fat luscious margins against Donald Trump’s Republicans.
Those whumping majorities were a breath of life for Americans and the rest of us who rage against gestures such as ICE agents in Chicago forbidding the Latino immigrants they’ve caged from taking communion during a Catholic Mass.
Donald Trump will soon send the National Guard into Memphis or into Chicago, a city where violent crime has been way down and the White House posted images headed“Chipocalypse Now,” and “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
It’s certain there will be marches, riots, arrests, blood and likely death in the weeks to come – because Chicago is not the District of Columbia, which is a government town. For Mr. Trump, Chicago is enemy territory, and it’s time to break heads the way Mayor Richard J. Daley did in 1968 when anti-Vietnam War protestors marched on the Democratic Convention.
There may be a better way.
Read on…
Jan Morris once said that Canadians could drown in niceness.
We are notorious for being polite, a view borne out by countless polls that confirm “We’re Number 1” when it comes to helping someone else actually be Number 1. When others say “Good morning” or “Hello”, we will happily say, “I’m sorry.” Indeed, so endemic is this quality that it’s spreading to citizens of other nations, and to a large sub-group of Canadians.
Donald Trump is responsible for the former, and the ideal of truth and reconciliation for the latter.
In 2003, Jean and I joined a group of 75 hikers from around the world to hike New Zealand’s Milford Track. The night before we set out, the organizers asked us all to divide up into groups of the country we were from and sing a favourite national song to the others. Ugh.
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This week thousands of Canary Islanders marched against the 18 million tourists who visit the tiny Spanish island chain each year.
One marcher said, “We’re not against tourism. But the current model is predatory.” The Spanish government also removed 60,000 Airbnb listings across the country and by 2028 Barcelona will ban Airbnb completely.
Oh…and Amsterdam has banned the construction of new hotels, except to replace closed ones, and Florence has banned key boxes and guides with loudspeakers. Athens has limited visits to the Acropolis to 20,000 a day.
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The opportunity for one of the most patriotism-shy nations on earth to gorge on that very thing begins the week of May 12. That’s when we learn which of Mark Carney’s Liberal MPs will be sworn in to what Cabinet posts.
The split second the Cabinet is announced, dozens of organizations who have been preparing their “Elbows Up” wish lists for federal funding will push “send” and shoot their proposals into the offices of the Ministers of Canadian Culture, of Sport, Innovation, Indigenous Relations, Foreign Affairs and more.
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No one knows; it’s just too early to tell.
But the fact that it’s even possible to ask the question speaks to how fast and fully Donald Trump has grabbed and bent the levers of American executive, legislative, judicial and military power to his will. Not to mention how he’s already exercised his unquenchable revenge on his enemies.
So did Hitler, but he was slower.
Read on…
Last week Louise Penny pulled the plug on her appearance at The Kennedy Center to launch her new mystery, The Grey Wolf.
Said Penny: “I’m in DC, but in the wake of Trump taking over, I have pulled out. It was, of course, going to be a career highlight. But there are things far more important than that.”
“Trump taking over” means his self-elevation to the Chair of the previously bipartisan leadership of Washington’s leading concert hall, which he engineered earlier this month. Trump promised to “make the center GREAT AGAIN,” adding “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation.”
Since then, Trump has fired the board and its CEO, Deborah Rutter, and appointed a new board who then appointed him Chair – and ticket sales have dropped by 50%.
Read on…
My $200 cheque arrived in the mail this week: a gift from Doug Ford to every adult in Ontario. I hadn’t thought much about what to do with it. Donate it to a charity? (Dozens have been asking.) Add it to the grandkids’ RESP? Buy eight $25 Tim Horton’s gift cards to give to street people for whom three hot meals a day is not a trivial gift?
But then The Saturday Morning Massacre happened and Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering America. Suddenly, every media outlet was filled with advice on how to fight back.
I remember back in 2002 when Canada’s dollar fell to an all-time low of 61 cents US, an economist said on CBC that if we all went out and spent $1,000 on a Canadian-made refrigerator or stove or TV, thousands of Canadian jobs would be saved, the dollar would instantly rise and our crisis would end.
Read on…
The Angus Reid Institute revealed last month that the percentage of us who feel “very proud” to be Canadians has fallen from 78% in 1985 to 34% in 2024.
This was before Donald Trump called for our annexation, which 94% of us don’t want and which 4 in 5 Americans say should be up to us.
It seems Canada’s flickering pride shines most brightly when it’s threatened. But what can we do to restore that pride so that it doesn’t appear only when Canada’s very existence is at stake? What can we do about our painful reluctance to beat our chests with pride at being Canadians?
Read on…
I’m the last person to want to bring bad news where it’s not welcome.
But I’m going to add to the national bonfire by pointing out a blaze whose smoke is still miles off but headed our way.
It’s the idea that very soon we’ll be living in a post-literate society.
None has ever existed before. There are, of course, pre-literate societies made up of entire communities who can neither read nor write, and there are also pre-literate people, like your two-year old cousin, who exist in literate societies like our own where 99% of Canadians can read and write.
Read on…
It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.
But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?
David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.
Read on…
They become them. It takes time to learn the skills of dictatorship, just as it does anything else. 10,000 hours hardly gets you into Dictator College. Indeed, the skill developed from constant practice in dictatorship is a rare and hard-won skill, like being a concert pianist, not the reflection of a general attitude to life, like singing in the shower.
Vladimir Putin didn’t start acting as a dictator until 2014 when he invaded Crimea. Victor Orbán became Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010, but he took five more years to build his first border fence. Even Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, who also took office in 2010, took four years to plunge his country into dictatorial chaos.
Whether Donald Trump has the discipline to move from being a caricature of a dictator to acting like one is open to question. But he has already satisfied one necessary condition of successful dictatorship by getting elected. We’ll find out next year if it’s a sufficient condition as it was with the most powerful dictator in modern history.
Read on…
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