Done

It feels like a break-up -- a break-up where a ground troop invasion, drone strikes, MX missiles and nuclear detonations are possible final outcomes.

Reflecting on the unprovoked trade war the United States of America recently launched against Canada, I cannot decide which is worse: the sheer malignant arbitrariness of this heinous economic aggression, the abject stupidity of it, or the weeny-whiny reaction of American officials over Canada's response.

The worst part about all of this -- and there are about fourteen "worst parts" to all of this -- is the aggressive rumblings from America, the insults against my prime minister, against my country (51st state? "Not a real country" in the words of Elon Musk, the white South African) bends my mind uncomfortably toward generalizations, to thinking of Americans as one composite odious personage. 

Former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg who lived by the saying: 

"All I want is an unfair advantage." He was lauded in American 

business circles for this attitude

I have lived cheek-by-jowl with America nearly my entire life. I have worked in America -- about nine years in total. Some of my closest, dearest friends and family are American. These are people I love. There is no question in my mind they are as appalled as I am about what is transpiring between our countries.

What brought this into starkest focus for me, however, was an experience the other day: interviewing a public person whose work I have enjoyed for more than forty years; a guy I admire and like (and that's why I'm being vague about his identity).

It was a great interview. Not only did I get the information I sought, but my interview subject adorned it all with some really entertaining stories. I felt great at the end of our hour-long call.

As I got ready to say goodbye, I told this person how much I enjoyed the American city in which he lives, that I have always felt like it was a part of my neighbourhood.

The person I admired chuckled and said: "Well, that's good because I guess you're going to be the fifty-first state very soon!" 

He laughed like it was a great joke. The annexation of my country -- he thought the idea was hysterically funny.

I quietly choked and gaped and blinked, feeling a horrible vintage of bewilderment.

This person reiterated his joke a couple of more times. I was stunned.

It's not often that I am rendered speechless, but that's how this person's comments left me -- all the good feeling and admiration draining out of the whole experience. 

That guy became just another pixel in the composite face of America forming in my mind.

The New York Times reports today that Donald Trump believes the reasoning behind the Canada/U.S. border isn't sound. He also wants to re-examine the treaties both countries have signed regarding the way in which the Great Lakes are shared.

Given Donald's affinity for blood-drenched Russian leader Vladimir Putin, there is no question Donald's version of annexation of Canada would closely resemble Russia's attempt in the Ukraine: an ugly, heinous, hellish mess.

It is a thought that doesn't fit in my mind: there are people in America who want to do this to my country, where my family and I live, where my kids go to school, where my parents are living out their last years, where my friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens are just going about our lives.

All the usual stops and mental safeguards I normally bump up against when considering the lunacy of the United States have vanished. I know what America did in Vietnam. I know what it did in Guatemala, in Iran, in Chile, in El Salvador, in Angola, Panama, in Iraq (twice), Afghanistan. 

I've seen the documentaries Hearts & Minds and Winter Soldier and a hundred others showing America's depravity. 

To think that America's war in Vietnam occurred when there were smart people running the government. Certainly, President Lyndon Johnson was no scholar, but among other people, there was Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy at the spear tip of the Vietnam debacle. McNamara had been one of the most successful corporate executives in the country, heading Ford Motor Company, before taking up his role as senior warmonger with the government. The problem was, McNamara possessed no soul, no human compassion, and unapologetically clutched to his numbers as justification for war crimes to his dying day. McGeorge Bundy achieved a perfect score on his entrance exam to Yale University. He was regarded as a brilliant man, all the way around. In a scholarly paper arguing for America's entry into World War II, Bundy once wrote: "I believe in the dignity of the individual, in government by law, in respect for the truth, and in a good God; these beliefs are worth my life and more; they are not shared by Adolph Hitler."

And, yet, Bundy was a major architect of the Vietnam morass.

Former Sgt. William Marshall of Detroit, Michigan talking about American 

jets accidentally dropping napalm on American soldiers in Vietnam

I have read extensively about the Americans' love of waterboarding and its concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was with horror and bewilderment that I followed Russia's invasion of the Ukraine in the news. What the Russian military lacked in modern, workable equipment, competence, and logistics, they made up for with sheer barbarity.

After what I have read and seen of America and it's gore-filled foreign military adventures, I have no doubt their attempts to annex Canada would yield much the same destructive, futile results. I mean, a white South African is a central adviser to Donald, whose own cruelty needs no stoking.

Donald's accusations that Canada isn't doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl into America reminds me of George W. Bush's allegations against Saddam Hussein, the blood-drenched dictator of Iraq (someone, for whom, I do not hold an ounce of sympathy), possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). America was desperate to pin the September 11, 2001 attacks on Iraq to justify an invasion so the U.S. could steal Iraq's oil. 

I remember Colin Powell humiliating himself at the United Nations "making America's case for war" against Iraq. There was no case.

Saddam Hussein said he did not have WMDs. America said he was lying. Saddam Hussein allowed UN weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for the weapons. When no WMDs were found, America said Saddam was hiding them. And then, making it seem as though they had no choice (when they had a multitude of other options), America moved forward with the action they planned to take from the beginning: launching a bloody, unilateral, illegal war, which made up in barbarity what it lacked in actual facts to justify it.

'Murica all the way!

Now, the surreal personage of Donald Trump leads America. 

When dealing with a superficial person, why not begin with a superficial appraisal? The man is orange. A grown man, vain as the devil himself, wears Tan-In-A-Can, as some pathetic attempt at adding pigment to his prissy pink countenance. This reminds me of a scene from the film Talk Radio, in which actor Eric Bogosian, says on the air (as a guest on an established talk show host's show) that white people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on suntan lotion each year because they actually want to be black, because they feel sexually inferior to black people, and that imitating their skin colour will make them equal. 

So it is -- the hardened racist, Donald Trump, adding colour to his colourless hide, feigning potency, asserting his dominance among gourde vegetables.

So, now, America -- a country that can't pay its bills (just ask China) -- is led by a man who has never paid his bills. The American voting public has chosen this grifter as their national symbol, their leader, mocking and denigrating every positive thing their country ever stood for in the past. And this septic goon now has his eye on my country.

Strange as it may sound, I can almost understand why the American voting public elected him twice as the president of the United States.

America refuses to deal with its traumatic past. Sure, it rhapsodizes about the great Civil War when the gallant gentleman of the South made their brave last stand to preserve their hallowed institution of slavery, but otherwise, the national narrative of the United States has been one, long disingenuous conversation. Time and again, the "official narrative" of shocking events, national tragedies, does not match the testimony of eye witnesses and researchers.

Questions were never resolved about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Malcolm X, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Robert Kennedy. To this day, the depths of the Watergate scandal have never been plumbed, much as the subject has been superficially raked-over ad nauseum. The true reasons for the American invasion of Vietnam need to be fully explored, particularly the bogus "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. The October Surprise has never been looked at in any depth. The Iran/Contra scandal remains opaque. Same with the 2,400 service men America abandoned in southeast Asia after it cut and ran from Vietnam in 1973. 

Everything unpleasant in American life is labeled a "conspiracy theory," a term thrown around with the ease and frequency of  "Communist" in 1950s America. Just because the accusation is made doesn't make it so.

The overwhelming feeling in America is that every person in authority is lying to the general public.

So, in 2016, a startlingly large segment of the American voting public said: "OK, if you're all liars, then we will elect the most bald-faced, easily-debunked, unapologetic scoundrel and liar in the land!"

Donald Trump fit that bill perfectly.

More than that, it seems to me that the American public (77 million of them, at least) have reached their final pain point with American life: the murderous game of Musical Chairs that life in the country has devolved into. Ransoming healthcare to the public. The school system that has been sliding into an abyss for decades. The school shootings. The mass shootings. Its lapdog, complacent, complicit, propagandist media.

Having reached this apex of pain and outrage, Donald's 77 million are doing what other outraged people have done in the past when they reached their pain threshold: they are burning down their own neighbourhoods. It happened in Watts in 1965. It occurred during the 1967 Detroit Riots. After Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April 1968, communities around the nation were burned to the ground. It happened again during the LA Riots of 1992.

And that's what Donald Trump supporters are doing to America in 2025, mocking the office of the presidency, smearing the government with feces, giving the middle finger to a society they believe has failed them. And in the heat of their madness, they cheer their miscreant on. 

As though to mock the pain suffered at the hands of bad bosses, the humiliation of lost jobs (which also means loss of healthcare coverage in America), Donald has given the richest man in the world a position where he can axe American jobs -- and axe them, he does, by the hundred thousand, with the indiscriminate malice of a drive-by-shooter. 

The process is framed with some meaningless language, but the upshot is that for the first time, the American voting public has chosen its tormentor, and from the depths of its self-loathing, they cheer him on. They find no fault with him. Their devotion to Dear Leader borders on suicidal.

And now this self-pitying horde of willfully ignorant people cheer Donald as he trains his muddled sights on Canada, which hasn't caused the United States one bit of bother since the War of 1812. Certainly, the fragile American ego cannot handle someone disagreeing with it -- and Canada has, at times, disagreed with some of America's bloodier, more egregious foreign military adventures -- but aside from those isolated incidents we have been an agreeable neighbour.

With his followers believing he is playing 5D chess, Donald hit Canadian goods with exorbitant tariffs. In the ongoing tragicomedy of American political life, part of Donald's shifting rationale for this was that previous agreement between Canada and the U.S. was a horrendous "deal" shamelessly slanted toward Canada's benefit -- of course, omitting the fact that he, Donald Trump, negotiated this deal in his previous term as American president.

So, on Tuesday of this week, Donald slapped tariffs on Canadian goods. 

The Canadian response was more than a little heartening to Canadians. Our leaders who are so often the source of dismay, disappointment, and dyspepsia, rose to the occasion -- in shocking fashion.

So shocking, in fact, the Americans are now playing the victim. You know, how they did in Vietnam? In Iraq. In Afghanistan. The poor, aggrieved self-proclaimed Super Power, the only nation to use nuclear weapons against other human beings, perpetrators of countless unjustified horrors -- they... they are the precious defenseless little lambs be assailed by a brute.

That is the Americans' ultimate weapon: their complete and utter lack of reason, their contempt for reality, their undying devotion to "moving the goal posts," their disingenuousness, their gaslighting, their disdain for the truth, for what is right, for what is just. 

It's not enough that they burn down their own neighbourhood, they now want to burn down ours.

I am very pleased and proud to say, my interpretation of Canada's response to America has been: 

Go fuck yourselves!

I get it, the American people are in extreme existential pain. They live in a Second World country that keeps telling them its the greatest nation in the history of all creation. I have watched their decline for decades. American life has curdled for a great number of its citizens. Just look -- the CEO of a healthcare company was gunned down on a New York City sidewalk in December last year (shot in the back no less) and the overwhelming response from the American public was one of cheers, lauding the murderer, calling for his freedom. This is what life in America has devolved into. It is only human nature wanting to strike back at the authors of their misery.

Donald is their Molotov cocktail.

Amid this sprawling debacle, the quietest villains are very nearly the worst: the Democratic Party in the United States.

The Democratic Party has been an absolute enigma to me ever since I began following news closely, during the 1992 presidential election that elevated Bill Clinton to the White House. 

The Democrats are duly sanctimonious, they furrow their brows at most of the right times, they some skill in making sounds that mimic compassion. They talk a good game. But I have never seen a group of seemingly intelligent people so consistently self-sabotage themselves. They often suffer from High Road Hypoxia as the Republicans spin circles around them. These limousine liberals simply do not have the courage of their convictions. 

Just think of it -- Donald Trump is very likely the last American president of 85-year-old Nancy Pelosi will ever know. At least her stock portfolio has benefited so greatly from insider trading.

So, we're left with this horrible stalemate, at the moment. I'm left with a feeling that two timelines in the multiverse are colliding, like those merging galaxies photographed by the Webb telescope. To think the American government is ruled by people who admire Nazis...

Actually, not so surprising when one considers another aspect of American history that Americans refuse to look at -- the time Prescott Bush, father of president George H.W. Bush and grandfather to president George W. Bush, approached Retired Major General Smedley Butler (who was at that time the most decorated soldier in U.S. history) with his wealthy cronies in 1933 asking for his help in overthrowing the government of president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Major General Butler did the right thing, strung those traitors along and then revealed the plot -- only to be vilified, himself, and watched the seditionists continue with their lives unbothered by consequences.

The strangest part of this nightmare is the unity it has wrought in Canada. "Elbows up" is the rallying cry, and our complacency and reliance on the United States is being re-examined with an eye toward making major changes.

My hope lies in the tremendous, demonstrated incompetence of Donald Trump. My hope lies in the obvious hubris of Elon Musk. Anything Donald Trump has ever been associated with during his entire misbegotten life has failed. Among other low lights of his business career, he has squandered away a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars inherited from his father and bankrupted two casinos in Atlantic City.

More concretely, my hope lies in the intelligence, resourcefulness, patriotism, and resilience of Canadians. We do not back down from bullies. We've never sought to be the toughest kid on the block, but it would most certainly be a mistake to underestimate us and our love for Canada. It took no time at all for several American officials to be knocked back on their heels by Canada's response to their economic aggression. This is how we do.