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%.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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…
Composing an out-of-office message used to take 30 seconds and was usually written minutes before you headed to the airport on vacation. As a friend’s OOO noted: “I am offline until Sept. 29. Off the grid. No email. No phone. No texts.”
In a very few words, this sent a big, clear message.
Now, out-of-office emails have become Rorschach Tests for our relationship to our inbox, our friends and ourselves. True, fewer of us have an office to be out of anymore. But email, far from being dead, is gobbling up the world. We now send and receive 361 billion emails every day.
My first clue that emailing was becoming a platform for pearl-clutchers and virtue-signalers came last year when I read on the bottom of a friend’s email: “I am sending this email at a time that works for me. I don’t expect you to respond to it until normal business hours, or when it suits your own work-life balance. I encourage you to make guiltless work-life choices and support flexible working.”
It’s fun and easy to mock the dervishes of politically-correct language.
But the thinking behind it masks a righteousness that would hang anyone who says ‘lumberjack’ instead of ‘woodchopper’ for fear of offending millions of marginalized female lumberjacks.
This week I stumbled across the WIPO Guidelines on Inclusive Language, issued by the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Here I learned to say “faithful dog” instead of “man’s best friend”, a “person who has had a stroke” rather than a “stroke victim”; and “a person with a drug addiction” rather than “an addict.”
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On October 5, 2017, The New York Times published shocking allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation. Four months later I hosted a RamsayTalk with the co-author of that piece, Jodi Kantor. She noted that the pendulum had already swung from silence to zero tolerance.
She told a story of a notional office party where the CFO drank too much and made an unwelcome advance to a female colleague. She complained to HR. He was immediately fired, couldn’t get a job, lost his accountant’s license and left his family and life in ruins.
Some would say he deserved all that and more.
Jodi Kantor said, before #MeToo became a movement, and long before she co-wrote She Said, and won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Weinstein story: “Likely all the woman really wanted was an apology.”
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“[Kamala Harris] was always of Indian heritage and she was always promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know: is she Indian or is she Black?”
Donald Trump asked that last Thursday to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.
His question then begs mine now: Is Donald Trump white?
He’s mixed nationality for sure, part Scottish and part German. And less than 100 years ago Germans viewed themselves as “The Master Race”.
Wikipedia’s history of the Trump family says they descended from an itinerant lawyer in Germany in 1608.
Read on…
I’ve always liked Celine Dion’s songs more than I’ve liked Celine Dion.
I’m not sure what it was: too slick, too produced, too perfect.
Then she started cancelling shows claiming she had a rare and mysterious disease. Since 2020 she’s been silent. No new songs, no new shows. Nothing. But…
Not.
Any.
More.
Her performance last Friday at the opening of the Paris Olympic Games, where she belted out Hymne à l’amour, was stunning in its own right.
But when you think how terribly sick she’s been, and still is, those four minutes singing in the rain became a global event.
It used to be that people asked: “Where were you when..?” and they would follow with some tragedy or assassination. The only good-news-version I’ve heard is: “Where were you when the astronauts landed on the moon?” But it’s not far-fetched, even when Ms. Dion’s 15-seconds of fame have already stretched to 40 years, for us to ask: “Where were you when Celine Dion sang in Paris?”
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