Leaders replaced by cartoons
In less than two months either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will ostensibly be the most powerful person on the globe.
No matter how this shakes out, history will be made in the form of the first female president of the United States or the loosest of cannons. I don’t envy the American people their choices.
Maybe America needs to be Trumped. Say what you may about Donald J. Trump, he is probably the least politically correct man on the planet and as long as he surrounds himself with non-partisan policy advisers and a very good chief of defence staff he might just do what he say’s he’s going to.
I find myself wishing we had someone at the helm that knows a threat when he sees it.
Justin Trudeau’s father did. When the FLQ crisis erupted in 1970 Pierre Trudeau proclaimed the War Measures Act, our equivalent of martial law, in the city of Montreal.
What we need is another Sir John A. Macdonald at the helm. The old tippler knew how precarious sleeping next to an elephant that might roll over is, and it worried him. His adversary, Abraham Lincoln, had his hands full dealing with the Confederacy but Macdonald felt once the American Civil War was concluded a victorious Union army of a million men and more would be left with little to do but garrison the south. If the south won, well, they would be too depleted to form much of an immediate threat. In fact the wily Scot may have secretly hoped for such an outcome since Great Britain, and therefore ourselves, loosely supported Jeff Davis.
Sadly we are clueless as usual to Yankee machinations and could well wind up in the soup. The world I was born into ended on 9/11. Where are the Winston Churchills or John Kennedys, Louis St. Laurents or Lester Pearsons? Statesmen have been replaced by cartoons and the spectre of a loopy, trigger happy finger on the nuclear button.
If it wasn’t such an awful premise the whole episode might be written off as one of history’s more twisted jokes. The core issues, which will have a permanent effect on the way the world works, have been reduced to whose health is better, who has a bigger plane (thankfully one of the candidates is female so that rules out anatomical comparison) and who has the best formula for border defence.
That last one has me worried. For more than a century and a half we crowed about the longest undefended border in the world. Big mistake.
The Americans long considered anything north of the 49th parallel to be unlivable, full of snow, “Eskimos” and polar bears, all subject to the Queen of England. They are more enlightened now and have upgraded their views to include vast deposits of oil, minerals and, above all, fresh water.
If we are not very mindful of what has been up to now a vague nibbling fear in the Canadian psyche, we could count ourselves the 51st state.
While Trump rants against illegal immigrants entering his country he has caused a stampede of the same into ours via tunnels under that undefended border. Infiltration is the first step towards invasion.
Stand on guard for thee.