Greenland, Panama, Canada: my views
The Column: 01.31.25
I just spent a few days in Texas and had a great time — me, an old Diversity-Elitist-Iniquity Democrat, enjoying the state that gave us Ted Cruz. But it’s true. It was very congenial. I am on a new career as America’s Oldest Still-Standing Comedian and I didn’t talk politics and neither did the people I talked to. It’s easy not to, especially for us on the losing side. I’m a northerner and I believe in government because it plows the roads when it snows, and up north we don’t cancel school just because snow is forecast, which they do in Florida. This is one reason more mathematicians come from the Upper Mississippi than from Tallahassee. I also feel that when all the undocumented migrants are deported, our young college grads who majored in English aren’t going to like working in slaughterhouses or cleaning hotel rooms and we’ll find bone chips in the chicken and we’ll sleep in beds other people slept in and we’ll just have to get used to it.
I met a good many Baptists in Lubbock and Arlington and the lovely city of New Braunfels and didn’t talk politics except that I got the audience to sing “America” about freedom ringing from every mountainside. I didn’t see signs of decline in Texas nor people rejoicing at the beginning of a new golden age, but maybe I was looking in the wrong places.
I didn’t bring up the subject of Canada being the 51st state because frankly I don’t think it is. For one thing, their French is better than ours and also there is no South up North and without the South, without New Orleans jazz and Delta blues and bluegrass and Black gospel quartets and corrupt governors, men passing a bottle of bourbon around, strip-mall evangelists hollering about hellfire and the Antichrist, there is no America as we know it. Canadian culture is of very limited range. It is missing the apocalyptic. Canada has never elected a prime minister who talked about Canadian carnage and illegal migrant Americans invading the country and who claimed to be the greatest leader in Canadian history, whom God had chosen to bring about a new golden age. That’s not them, that’s us.
The Trumps think of Canada as an extension of the USA because, being real estate tycoons, they don’t know about geography, except for Queens, Long Island, and Manhattan. And they have little experience with snow, DJT having had a limo driver since age five. He never had to stand in a blizzard by a highway waiting for the bus. The reason you never see a photo of little Donald in a classroom with other children is that one doesn’t exist: he had tutors. That is why he capitalizes so many words that don’t need capitalization.
So when he talks about annexing Canada and taking Greenland and going to war for the Panama Canal, he is slightly off the mark and someone needs to point this out.
You take over Greenland, you’re going to be dealing with the Greenlandic language which comes in three discrete dialects, Kalaallisut, Tunumiit, and Inuktun, each with a few thousand speakers who are devoted to their tongue. You get involved with those people, you’ll be walking around with a Greenlandic app on your iPhone and even so you’ll be misunderstood. We’d be wise to skip this.
A war in the Gulf of America to liberate the Canal would threaten the cruise industry and also shut down the Canal itself, which would immediately raise prices on consumer goods from China.
But the real threat is a Canadian invasion.
Our northern border is the least defended border in the world — some places in North Dakota and Minnesota, only a single strand of barbed wire marks it. Coyotes cross it daily, deer, bears. Canadian Mounties on snowmobiles could come sweeping across and get to Iowa before anybody would realize it and their advantage over American troops is obvious. A disproportionate number of American enlisted men and women are from southern states and have never gone into combat in cold weather. Iraq and Vietnam were hard enough, but a war in Wisconsin in February would be big big trouble.
I like the idea of knocking down windmills and drilling for oil in Yellowstone and Kash Patel will be the Greatest FBI Director in American History (move over, J. Edgar Hoover), but I’d leave Canada to itself.
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I lost my father in a plane crash in 1969. I can testify that losing someone you love in that kind of tragedy leaves a special kind of heartache that lingers. The immediate raw aftermath of getting that news is overwhelming-body and soul.
I caught the clips of Trump’s commentaries, placing blame based on the nonsense that takes up his air space. But it was his flippant reply to a reporter when asked if he would visit the crash site-…”you want me to go swimming?”-that revealed and confirmed the callous and hollow heart that beats in this man. He is a despicable excuse for a human being.
Trying to catch up on a backlog of reading, today I just read a lovely piece from the October 2024 Atlantic magazine by Wright Thompson about some Mississippi history. In it he quotes Malcolm X saying that everything south of Canada is Mississippi. Thump and his vile mob are proving that to be a truism in brazen, unashamed ways, none more than today thump blaming that horrible crash on DEI, on Biden, on Obama.
Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, etc. have all given the country, all of us, wonderful things - writers, foods, music - but they have also inflicted on all the rest of us thump, cruz, wee puppet mike johnson, foghorn leghorn Louisiana Kennedy, and the whole long list of that ilk. It remains to be seen how history will show us which kind of impact will be most lasting, the former or the latter, but with each passing day, it's looking like the mobsters and gangsters have landed on the con-game that is more lucrative than their depraved minds could have imagined and they are looting and stealing and overthrowing as fast and thoroughly as they can. That will be tough for writers, foods and music to overcome, but maybe.....
I don't think the victory song will be "America" much longer, but I'm voting for the late, great and much missed national poet-troubadour John Prine's song, "Some People Ain't Human" as the national anti-anthem.