How to vaccinate against Trumpitis? Don’t vote Scheer
Careful how you vote in Canada’s federal election on Monday, especially if you’re young and female. You are vulnerable. Think strategically.
Do you need to be reminded that Trumpism is catching and that Canadians might need to be revaccinated against this nasty virus? Margaret Atwood reminded you this week: “Vote for the party that knows there really is a climate crisis, that has even a semi-viable plan and that might actually win in your riding.”
I do not like Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s having failed to tell us that he is an American citizen too. He has refused to explain how he manages to enter the U.S. on a passport he claimed has lapsed. I do not like Conservative voters booing reporters. All credit to Scheer for looking genuinely pained and objecting to it, but the tactic comes from Trump rallies.
I do not like anonymous anti-Trudeau hashtag campaigns on Twitter and mainstream media questions at press conferences about false stories about the PM based on invented rumours.
No, the Liberals do not plan to legalize hard drugs. The Conservatives are lying about this in ads targeted at voters in Chinese-Canadian neighbourhoods, “yet another example of Conservatives copying the American right-wing playbook,” as the Liberal party described it.
Speaking of which, I do not like to see Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau wearing a bulletproof vest at a rally while surrounded by heavily armed RCMP officers. This is not the Canadian way. Sometimes milder cases of Trumpism (Trepsis? Treasles?) show up in Canada. Worse ones have followed and that includes Scheer’s worrying campaign appearance at the U.S. border. But Trump’s behaviour worsens daily in the reality show he calls a presidency. If I even mention his latest act of global vandalism — the betrayal of Kurds in Syria, Ukraine quid pro quo — I date myself.
We need a prime minister who can cope with this unravelling man. Without question that is Trudeau, but I’m not optimistic about his chances of keeping Trump civil or even tolerable. If this election goes wrong — I refer to a Conservative majority — a prime minister Scheer will let us slide fully into the destructive and ultimately tragic American orbit. This time, we’ll be unable to swing away again.
In Ontario, we’re already living in Fordland and it isn’t pleasant. It feels chaotic and excessively harsh at a time when people, especially our betrayed younger generations, already fear for their jobs, salaries and place in the world.
And we’re back to the Kevlar vest. I recall then-privy council clerk Michael Wernick saying out loud that he worried that someone in this election campaign would get shot. Anyone reading online knows it’s plausible. What if there were a mass shooting, a terrorist attack or an assassination? It is not the Canadian way. What do Americans do better than anyone else? Violence. Drowning in their own guns, they have regular massacres — in schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, concerts — their manner of speaking is violent and their approach to negotiation is the shootout, followed by bombs bursting in air.
The notorious gruesome meme video of a fake President Donald Trump slaughtering the people he hates — politicians, journalists, media sites, women, including various people of colour and of course Jews — is both standard stuff and a classic.
It was shown this month at a three-day conference for Trump fans at the Trump National Doral Miami where, shamefully, the G7 summit will be held next year.
It’s a collection of memes — pieces of culture like photos, videos or chunks of text — assembled to make a hideous point.
It is Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” put to music on video. Hofstadter wrote in 1963 of “the enemy … he controls the press; he directs the public mind through ‘managed news’, he has unlimited funds.” That’s Trump’s “fake news” conspiracy.
In the video, media conspire in the Church of Fake News, Trump’s tag for factual news that reflects badly on him. A film clip of a massacre in 2014’s “Kingsman: The Secret Service” follows with actors’ heads replaced by photos of Trump’s targets, including journalists, Democrats and women. “Trump” kills by the dozen. CNN is impaled through the neck and brain on a pole.
Americans are angry, as De Tocqueville wrote in 1833, and always have been. In a society built on self-interest but aimed at equality, people who don’t become rich “swell to the height of fury” and, as the essayist Pankaj Mishra explains, “yearn for a strongman.”
Now America has one. I’m not worried that Canada will vote for a tyrant. I’m worried that we’ll elect a patsy, a handmaid, and who fits the description better than Scheer?
In Canada we seek peace, order and good government. It’s the opposite of what good Americans are enduring right now and I sorrow for them. I hope I don’t have to sorrow for Canadians on Monday.