Bill Taylor is often whimsical in his lockdown notes from Toronto. Today, glancing to the south at what passes in Washington, DC for statesmanship, he is angry and apprehensive ....
Baleful notes from the trenches:
Early morning routine:
Wake, yawn, check for trouble breathing and/or dry cough, heave sigh of relief, knock on wood, count blessings.
With apologies to my friends who live there, one of those blessings is that my home is no longer in the United States.
I spent almost nine years in New York and Philadelphia. I married an American. I worked there, I bought a house there, I was putting down roots and counting off the months to when I’d be eligible for citizenship.
But then the paper I was on folded and the job situation was dire. At the same time, Lesley, who worked for United Press International, was offered a transfer to Toronto.
Moving here and becoming a Canadian citizen are two of the best things I’ve ever done.
It’s unsettling now to watch a nation that I used to love but have come to fear edging closer to what seems sometimes as if it could turn into a civil war.
It’s unsettling to have to wonder, if that came about, which side their own mad-king president would be on.
It’s unsettling to share a border with them.
Pierre Trudeau said once that living next to the United States was “like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast… one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
The elephant isn’t all that friendly any more and certainly not even-tempered.
Donald Trump has embarked on an outlandishly zigzag rampage towards opening the country up again, cavorting contemptuously in the face of health experts’ warnings that this could turn a disaster into an outright catastrophe.
He’s being opposed by some states, I’m not sure how many, whose governors want their people to stay in isolation. For them, a lengthy but finite term of economic woe beats Armageddon.
In the states that are lifting restrictions, some city mayors – including Atlanta, Georgia – are fighting to keep their communities locked down.
Meanwhile, egged on by Trump’s tweets, bands of citizens, some heavily armed – “the guns aren’t loaded, » they disingenuously insist – have been taking to the streets and even sometimes blocking access to hospitals.
They want the right to go bowling, have their hair done or, in Georgia at least, get a tattoo. I guess they imagine that’s laid down in the Constitution – the right to bear arms and the right to have bare arms inked.
I don’t remember where I first heard them referred to as the Flu Klux Klan but never was anything more apt.
I read one heartbreaking Facebook comment calling the situation “surreal… I live in Texas and I’m more scared of my own country than the virus right now because the White House ignores science and the virus doesn’t care ».
Isaac Asimov said in a 1980 Newsweek column: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
More recently, Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, blames Trump for turning the US into a Third World country, perhaps on track towards another Great Depression.
North of the border, we can only watch in dread dismay. And hope that the border stays closed for as long as it has to.
Nothing personal. But the elephant has gone rogue. And the virus doesn’t care.
Recent Comments