Serious - here in Canada

I have found that reading conventional news articles is somewhat lacking in their reporting of how strange the US now really is. Outlets like the New York Times dutifully report the outrageous things that Mr. Trump says. as though these were the normal way for a world leader to talk. I know the difference between reporting and opinion columns, and I admire the distinction when it is made. But are endless lawsuits, violent arrests, attacks on universities normal? I am also aware that news outlets are moderating articles and that explains why Paul Krugman and Jennifer Rubin are now writing on Substack. You cannot keep them down. Freed from scrutiny, they are posting at least once every day.

I am also paying much more attention to local news. We recently had a half hour show from CBC featuring Timothy Snyder – later clipped for TV inserts, but the full interview is much better. The local morning newspaper is full of reports about our Canadian coping in the face of ongoing threats of tariffs. Paul Krugman is right about the unseriousness at home. Jennfer Rubin is right about words that have been highjacked – like “emergency.” We are serious here in Canada – even optimistic that our new government is taking our new reality seriously.

And Snyder has been moved to explain why he moved to Canada, because resident Americans have accused him and his wife of forsaking them. He is at pains to respond to the charges on his own Substack with some fact checks:

·       Charge: He left during the Trump administration. Untrue. He left during the Biden administration and even after the move, he was frequently campaigning in the US. Have a look at the number of YouTube videos that feature him.

·       Charge: His move relates to the election. Untrue. Both he and his wife have been courted by the University of Toronto three times in the past 20 years and the third was the decisive one. People migrate. People also look for new opportunities and this move provided some good ones, including lecturing to far greater numbers of students than at Yale and influencing them. Cross border countries have an influence on the US now as they have done in the past.

·       Charge: Snyder is a coward. Fact Check. How many of his critics have visited Ukraine and put themselves in the line of fire as he has done? People need to be as courageous as they can be, wherever they are.

·       Charge: The move is not progressive enough; Fact Check: Toronto, of all the Great Lake Cities he has known since he was a child, has done the best job compared to the others. As a large public one, The University of Toronto allows him to reach more students, who are multiculturally diverse and pay lower fees. The new assignment does not negate his love of and respect for Yale. Coming to this new situation represents a positive development for an academic like him.

·       Charge: He is not engaged with America. Fact Check. Simply look at the record, much too lengthy to summarize here. Through his books and their many translations, he is known and respected as a writer and speaker in America and around the world. His books are about the present and the future of America. Both Vance and Musk have loudly criticized him.

·       Charge: Canada cannot be taken seriously. Fact Check. American provincialism and exceptionalism blind folks to the reality of other places, their characteristics and importance. But some of the countries like Canada are ones working to hold Mr. Trump back. Resistance can happen without staying. The US is too often adapting, rationalizing and buck-passing. Canada is acting and developing solidarity to deal with a crisis it did not create. You can do democracy work from anywhere and he has done so in living in many parts of the world.

The lesson. In speaking personally he says, “Stop sweeping people away that you don’t agree with.” Criticism or dismissiveness are not actions. They are exactly how authoritarianism works. Dismissiveness is Trumpism – how he came to power and how he stays in it, where all that matters is power and spectacle. Instead, work with somebody else or groups to do things, however small, to make the world better - or as the Canadian national anthem says – strong and free. Action means imperfect people working together.

Revival

The previous post reminded me of a verse of the British National Anthem – dropped some time ago, might be useful to revive.  We don’t sing the anthem very often in Canada, but I did play it for an occasion on Victoria Day. I’m not sure the original applied to either Canada or tariffs, but it still seems strangely timely - even as there has been a whiff of improvement. I like that Bob Rae made the comment that the US President’s offer on the Golden Dome could be described as a “protection racket:. Usually ambassadors don’t have to be so frank. Here is how it goes:

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter our enemies,

And make them fall!

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix,

God save us all.

Adventures with Royalty

Canada has a King. The USA has a wannabee king.

In twenty-four hours we relearned something about ourselves and our history. Even Andrew Coyne a leading columnist who is often critical of anything the government does, notes that the royal visit has given us a move away from the old definition of Dominion of Canada to Kingdom of Canada.

Americans do not get that. CNN’s commentator, Dana Bash talked about Canada as still part of the British Empire – when there has not been any such empire for a long time. Americans love the Royals in the same way that they move movie stars – as celebrities. Unless some of us read Hello among the magazines at the hairdresser, we pay less attention to the royals until we find them useful. In the last couple of days, we did. The US king could not find anything better to do after watching the Speech from the Throne than offer a bribe. Shouldn’t Americans find something wrong with that? Didn’t they impeach somebody for that once upon a time?

My first memory of the royals goes back to 1939. I am three years old and have been taken to the train station and am sitting on my father’s shoulders. A huge crowd is there. I see a man and a woman a long way away at the back of the paused train and everyone is shouting and waving. The drama of the scene with no understanding of its significance is still there. Some thirty years later, my oldest son is in a play at the National Arts Centre - James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark with the scene, “When the King came to Stratford.” The local citizens are all lined up and cheering in exactly the same way when the royal train approaches – but by accident, does not stop.

And then there were the Little Princesses, a tell-all book about Elizabeth and Margaret which we read and imagined ourselves in their roles. We cut out printed paper dolls with all kinds of fancy clothes – royal robes, tiaras. Do paper dolls still exist? When did they die?

The Royal Family faded into a Canadian background, but emerged now and then with royal weddings, baptisms and visits – and funerals. I was within feet of the Queen Mum toward the end of the last century, when she dedicated a plaque to Canadian composer, Healey Willan. He was our church organist for many decades and the only non-British composer at that point to compose a work for a royal wedding. She was also in town for the horse races as well and asked to stop on the drive to have a look at the new CN Tower. When told that they were getting behind schedule, she remarked. “Don’t worry, they can’t start anything until I get there.”

The children of Queen Elizabeth grew up like many of their contemporaries, with missteps and failed marriages. A young Prince Charles seemed to be perpetually in waiting. Over time, though he has seemed to suit the moment. Making a transatlantic journey in the midst of weekly Cancer treatment is no small commitment.

 We enjoyed watching carefully staged activities – a hastily created farmer’s market rather than the ByWard Market to allow lots of space for exposure to more people, with handshakes and chats. Canadians, new and old travelled great distances to be able to see him. A few Americans travelled in as well. The new prime minister never looked so happy about it all.

So where are we now?

·       We think your president gets more ridiculous by the day. That would matter a lot less if you had not given him extraordinary power to wreck your world and a wider one. What made it possible for you to be so unwilling to question that? You did have the courage to impeach him twice not so long ago.

·       We have a new sense of national identity – less than perfect because many of our young and middle aged, like yours, have not studied their own history. For older ones like me, we have absorbed our constitutional monarchy without knowing it, but it has re-emerged in a clever way.

·       We are in for interesting times here with a minority government that has nevertheless made an impact and got us all interested in politics again. We hope for more civility with a new speaker of the House of Parliament.

·       We leave you to work on all those problems at home – retribution, lack of respect for the rule of law, cutting at the heart of preeminence in education, corruption, cronyism, oligarchy. We are watching CNN and even PBS less. While we generally support the latter, Canadians cannot be expected to bail it out since we did not elect the president who wants to demolish it. We hope you are up to all of this.

Difference

It says something about the world now, when in close to my ninth decade, I am multi-tasking and watching the swearing in of our new federal cabinet.  It’s means “I swear” in the sense of loyalty to the government headed by a King who does not live here and is represented by another person our Governor General – whose ancestry is Inuit. Americans would understand that as Eskimo. It makes me so aware of our differences from our neighbours to the south. In spite of spell-check I spell :neighbours: in the Canadian and British way.

The ceremony on national TV started by showing cabinet members and friends arriving at Government House, the residence of the Governor General, on a pleasant May morning. The top row of chairs on the right of the ballroom were reserved for guests that included three past governor-generals and a former prime minister. A few rows back were a provincial premier (the equivalent of an actual US Governor) and a First Nations chief in ceremonial head dress. The new Prime Minister’s wife and two daughters chatted with animation the other guests.

Then the official party entered, followed by the members of the new cabinet.  They were not there because of being either billionaires of friends of the leader – or probably both. Their selection depended on first being elected as a member of Parliament, chosen by the people in their constituency. They come from several provinces and territories and part of the challenge for a prime minister and his advisors is to choose among them – with a balance of geography, gender and experience.  A number of them are first time members.

The first thing that happened was a greeting and prayer by a member of our First Nations – holding an Eagle feather and a wheel, representing the four directions of the universe. The prayer was in Algonquin with many repetitions of thanks and welcome.

It was not the only words in another language. Those being sworn in made their promises in English and French, both our official languages. Many could have added other languages from their own diverse cultures. While we have much in common with our southern neighbours, we really are different. Threatening and demeaning us hasn’t worked the way the American leader intended. It has given a better reminder to at least one person writing this of who we are.

If I may . . .

If I may. . .

This great phrase to break in to a talker was used by our new Canadian Prime Minister to set the record straight when the US president started his now familiar suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state. “If I may” is a polite way to get a word in edgewise and correct someone who won’t stop talking nonsense.

At least that suggestion is one that can be quickly dismissed. “Never say never” from one got a visible sotto voce “Never!” from the other. But a more recent suggestion was so wacky that it stayed in my mind.  That’s an example of how the constant flow of news blurs anything important and makes all information equally questionable. If everything is suspect, who cares?  It is rightly moving toward what author Timothy Snyder calls the politics of eternity.

The wacky one was a response to the fact that all those new tariffs might produce hardships and the American people would have to lower their expectations.  Girls would have to make do with three dolls, not thirty They would have to settle for five pencils instead of two hundred and fifty.

The president’s household growing up must have been an unusual one at Christmas if these were typical seasonal gifts at either end of the scale. But we adults can settle for the five pencils. If I were back in the USA now, where I lived happily in New York City in the early sixties, this is how I might use them to talk to myself and to others.

Pencil #1. Write to my congressman/woman and ask each to vote against proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. American oligarchs are doing just fine already.

Pencil #2. Write to the law firms that oppose the presidential attempts to suppress their rightful role of defending the law and congratulate them.

Pencil #3, Write down five ways that I am going to lessen the influence of social media; These might include

Insist on knowing the source of the information. Look to the right and avoid Google AI on any screen,

Leave social media with more ads than posts from people I know.

Stop “liking” anything if I am still on social media. Watch how this confuses the algorithms and they start complaining and making suggestions.

Go outside.

Talk to a real person and make eye contact.

Pencil #4.  Fill out a request at the library for some real history books and share the suggestions with others. Look to authors like Margaret MacMillan on world wars or this article from The Atlantic. Here is her snippet of warning in a recent article,

“As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today’s world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and “the weak suffer what they must.”

You could also try many of the books of Jill LePore or Timothy Snyder.

Pencil #5.  Sit down for 30-60 minutes and write down what five key values matter most for you. If you can’t structure some possibilities, go to Google or Pinterest. Here is an outline somebody made into a quilt.

 It’s rather good today that the book on the top of the non-fiction best seller list here in Canada is written by the new Prime Minister, Mark Carney.  It is called Value(s).  Its argument in a nutshell is that financial value has to include social values and morality. He gives himself a challenge by including the last chapter with the title, Humility. If we are going to live in a free society, we have to take responsibility both individually and collectively. It’s a choice.