STOPPING TRUMP … WITH HUMOUR
The most powerful tool against the rantings of the U.S. president may be ridicule.
Dorothy Parker, the oftenhilarious author and poet, was known to flinch when the doorbell rang at her New York apartment. She’d ask: “What fresh hell is this?”
Many people I’ve encountered on my travels the past couple of weeks are having a similar reaction to breaking news. One image circulating virally on social media this week featured the familiar BBC breaking-news logo, with the headline edited to read: “oh f--- what now.” It’s true. With every executive order rolling out of Donald Trump’s White House, and the accompanying international fallout, the news is making people angry, upset and anxious.
The choice then is either to stop following the news so closely, or to try to find something positive amid the chaos and disarray that Trump and his team seem intent on unleashing. I chose the latter this past week, and started here in Canada.
First of all, Trump is tempering hyperpartisanship in Canadian federal politics. Not all of it — the reaction to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s broken promise on electoral reform provoked some genuine, partisan outrage in the Commons, for instance.
But it’s hard not to be struck by the ways in which the government and opposition have often been working together in the face of Trump and possible, serious consequences for Canada these past couple of weeks.
Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose was down in Washington for the inauguration, doing good work for Canada — not just her party — in talking to American politicos about the importance of this country to the United States.
On the political TV shows, commentators of all political stripes were praising the ways in which the Liberal government was handling the incoming president, forging early relationships with Trump’s team and working those connections hard last weekend to sort out what the travel ban meant to Canadians with dual nationalities in the targeted countries.
On Monday, after the horrific shooting at a Ste-Foy mosque on Sunday night, Trudeau was accompanied by opposition party leaders to a vigil in Quebec City.
Debate has raged all week about whether the incident was triggered by Trump’s travel ban — or at least consistent with the surge of renewed Islamophobia that accompanied his closing of the U.S. border to travellers from Muslim countries. It certainly felt like a bad weekend for religious tolerance, in the U.S. and, regrettably, in Canada too.
Certainly Trump wasn’t far from anyone’s mind when Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard declared that “words matter,” and implored Canadians to be careful about the consequences of angry political rhetoric against minorities. Couillard’s eloquence, incidentally, has been another shining light in a brutal week. Many of the premier’s public remarks in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, notably the acknowledgement of a toxic political climate around these issues in his province over the past few years, have been worth framing — and remembering.
Trump, whether you like him or not, is reminding Canada of all the ways in which this country has potential to head down the political path of its American neighbour — and hasn’t, at least not yet. If his experiment in chaos and division fails, as many of us hope it does, his presidency will serve as an example to avoid.
So many political trends migrate northward from the United States to Canada; Trump’s brand of governance is one that should be subject to a travel ban at the Canada-U.S. border.
Still, Trump is proving to be good for journalism and comedy. U.S. news outlets are bumping up their political reporting staff to handle the constant stream of news the new president is generating. Here at my house, we’re watching more American news than ever before, and I keep hearing about Canadians buying subscriptions to U.S newspapers or websites.
And when people aren’t shaking their fists or their heads at the news coverage they’re receiving, they’re getting more than the usual share of laughs from the (frequently dull) world of politics. A whole new vein of comedy was opened up merely with the images of the Trump inauguration — doctored videos, featuring the words “Help” written inside the blue box that Melania Trump gave to the Obamas, for instance, or archly clever captions written under still photos of the event.
Comedy is even becoming a tool of the Trump resistance. Filmmaker Michael Moore urged an inauguration-eve rally to fight Trump with humour. “If you make fun of him, if you ridicule him, or if you just show that he’s not popular . . . I’m telling you, my friends, this is how he’ll implode.”
For people who are flinching these days at breaking news, a few more laughs, a smattering of reporters and Canadian political unity may be little comfort. But they’re at least a break from what Parker would have called fresh hell. sdelacourt@bell.net
In seeking hope, comedy is becoming a tool of the political resistance