a bang, a whimper and existential boredom seem to be the options.
Where even to begin? We live in truly apocalyptic times, which nonetheless retain an undertone of slapstick comedy. It’s “Titanic” meets “Duck Soup” by way of “Pride and Prejudice with Zombies”. Are you sitting comfortably? No?
Then you’ve got the idea.
A few years ago, while getting the hemline shortened on my handmade “Nostradamus” costume, I made the flippant prediction that, in my lifetime, we’d “see gay people in camps”. I did this to zshuzsh up my hits and create controversy, a marketing goal which unfortunately relied a little too much on anyone caring two fucks about what happens to gay people.
Flash forward, and for a while, the queer community was biting its collective Svarowski-crystaled nails, as trans persons, lucky proxies for anyone and anything queer, took the rap for every non-existent problem and myriad impending disasters that white male conservatives dreamed up while rolling their lawns. At the very least, the planet was burning up (rich people in LA also suffer, kindly note) while they encouraged us to agonize over someone being addressed by their preferred pronouns and making white toddlers feel bad about slavery.
Didn’t they? You may not recall, but I distinctly remember someone called DiSantis calling Minnie Mouse “woke”. He did! Minnie is woke because instead of feet, she has heart-shaped appendages, which might imply empathy, and just a pencil-line where her who-who should be (this is analogous to Barbie’s smooth pink anti-crotch.)
Trans people were “woke”, too, that was the point, though their genitals were, by contrast, very much present and accounted for, thank you; often in imaginative combos either man-made or gifted by Mother Nature. You see, we followed the debates (women are cowering in their public bathrooms! the point-one-five of one trans athlete in the entire continental US is destroying high school sports; grade school kids are being held against their will by diabolical woke Frankenteachers and transitioned, so that, although you may drop off Christopher Robin on Monday, you’ll be picking up little Nancy Drew on Friday, post-op. ) and we read anything and everything by philosopher Judith Butler. Throw in some waste of skin like Georgia Meloni and we had become connoisseurs of gender.
And it turns out that humans pop out exhibiting all possible physical combinations of male hormones and female hormones, dicks and vag’s, sexualities and desires and styles. Nowhere in the world is there one hundred percent anything; for sure, one hundred percent manly males and frilly females is not the norm, not even ordinary, but almost unicorny.
Right-wingers were, in fact, just keeping the engine of outrage warmed up, filling the empty hours until T-word got elected and they could highjack the lumbering Airbus of the deep state, cram it full with barely-literate, self-mutilating voters, and fly it into the twin towers of Christian nationalism and libertarianism.
We’re still in denial after three weeks that have left even non-Americans hyperventilating. Again I find myself almost admiring Trump’s genius for generating chaos and confusion, while masking serious evil intent with a persona that encourages us to dismiss him as a buffoon.
Surely we must know the score by now, we simply refuse to allow that there exist people in the world who revel in chaos for its usefulness as an invisibility cloak; that there is gaslighting glee fueling his downpour of disinformation; that he delights in the bewilderment on our faces. It doesn’t have to achieve anything but that.
Of course it makes no sense, for example, to tariff your closest trading partners and allies. It’s not about sense. You do it because you can. State Supreme Courts can pontificate about the Constitution, but SCOTUS has his back: It’s not possible for him to commit a crime while in office and performing his official duties, remember? Everything is allowed. Rule of law? You must be new here.
There’s far bigger fish to fry now that dummkopf Donald is in charge, and I do mean charge as in 25% tariffs and charge as in bulls in china shops.
Let’s make with the planning and do us a little listicle about what’s going on right now. In no particular order:
- the Pope is dying. I thought he was immortal, according to the Council of Trent or something. Shows you how much I know. Another DEI hire!
- airplanes are colliding and/or simply falling out of the sky. This was definitely caused by DEI. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who routinely turned up to work at Fox News completely blotto, and would sexually assault anything that moved, assures us, without exactly having to say so, that only white dudes like him are “qualified” for the job. (To be clear, that he was able to say this with a straight face is the qualification for his job.) He also doesn’t do “climate change crap”, so feel free to book an appointment Mondays between 9 and 11 AM during his “me-time”.
- The US, North Korea, China and Russia—Beulah, bring me my clutching pearls!—banded together at the UN and voted against a motion censuring Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, because, of course, Ukraine invaded Russia, led by that madcap Jewish Nazi, Wolodymyr Zelenskyy.
- Zelenskyy, and I said it first, the most honorable and heroic head of state in the world today, is betrayed by Trump, who parrots Putin’s talking points in a rancorous and obviously pre-planned televised ambush; that is to say, the world order of 80 years has been trashed and Alice now eats the other side of the mushroom or whatever
- the POTUS, carving up the liberal world order like a Thanksgiving turkey, sets his sights on Greenland, Canada, Panama and god knows what other territories
- the POTUS has a special friend who answers heads of state with poop emojis and who is currently in charge of everything, including the entire payments system of the Treasury, all without security clearance. Tens of thousands of government workers are summarily dismissed which is illegal, and many are offered $25,000 buyouts, which is expensive for an administration that wants to cut costs, but maybe that was Tuesday.
- the POTUS is, in effect, putting Project 2025’s incoherent societal blueprint in place, which we all knew he would, and it’s both more shambolic than we could ever have hoped for, and more terrifying than we dare to admit
- the POTUS has signaled that he will ignore rulings by judges, thus setting off a constitutional crisis and a hissy fit by the Justices of the SCOTUS, who cling to the long-established tradition that any constitutional crisis should be triggered by them.
- there’s an asteroid heading for Earth in 2032 with a two percent chance of impact
- toe fungus? Try this sure-fire remedy today! Oh, wait. Sorry. Distracted by targeted ads. moving along:
- around the world, childhood diseases make a resurgence: measles in Texas, also in Québec and Ontario. Measles is so contagious, twenty minutes in the same room as an infected person almost guarantees transmission. The return of measles is attributed to weakened immune systems post-pandemic, and vaccination avoidance.
- Robert F Kennedy, Jr., a whack-job gravel-voiced promoter of the untruth that vaccinations cause autism, that cod liver oil cures measles, and much other quackery, is put in charge of Health and Human Services. Before his nomination is even confirmed, a spokesperson writes to the FDA asking it to revoke approval of the polio vaccine
- my home province of Ontario, Canada, has just re-elected the most corrupt politician in living memory, despite his documented history of grift, cruelty, and full-bore idiocy. Stay tuned.
- Justin Trudeau, not a chip off the old block, more like a splinter, has resigned, ending a period where Canada inched forward towards more justice for more people and initiating a period of uncertainty just when we need leadership. I’m speculating when I say that he resigned at least in part from weariness of the constant carping of aggrieved white males, the cohort that repeats slurs and innuendo until they become accepted wisdom. Only now, in the last days of his long tenure, and as he forcefully pushes back against the Trump tariffs, are Canadians realizing how much we have maligned Justin, how much we have taken his leadership for granted.
- the new leader of the Liberal Party, therefore new PM-designate, is Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, a progressive who has never held elected office. He is remembered as the “adult in the room” by those who experienced his style during 2008 financial crisis and later during Brexit. Canadians already are thrilled by his take-no-prisoners rhetoric around the trade war; he just might be the perfect man for the moment. He was elected by an 85% majority of his party yesterday, Sunday, 9th March. To the execrable, back-stabbing Chrystia Freeland, trailing in single digits, who threw Trudeau right under the bus with a snarky resignation letter issued publicly, I will blow what may sound like a kiss.
- And, as expected, and an issue I take personally, trans identity is not just under attack: with a few strokes of the pen, actually, with an executive order on day one, it is erased.
- I quote from the White House website when I share the following: “The President will establish male and female as biological reality”. Quite a nifty accomplishment, almost god-like, with the slight hitch that no one in the world, including trans people, were or are doubting that male and female are biological realities. It’s those who fall between those two poles who require the understanding, the medical care, the psychological counseling, the puberty blockers and the nuanced thinking that the Trump-Vance administration is incapable of providing. This all pivots nicely to queer people in general.
- government departments are being undone, defunded, closed, and the workers fired, despite the courts’ insistence that protocols must be followed, money allocated by Congress must be spent, and the Constitution can’t be unilaterally altered. Democrats carp about procedure, not totally remembering that flouting procedure is the whole point.
- On a lighter note, did you know that Over 9,500 Ontario Homeowners Helped Increase Their Property Value In Under 6 Hours with a simple gutter upgrade?
Damn! Targeted ads again! Sorry. That just slipped out.
The Trumpian strategy, if this seething pot of malice can be called such, is craziness normalized, and such big portions. Preposterous statements are all that we have to contemplate, nonsense becomes the discourse.
Shall we annex Canada? Invade Greenland? Claim the Panama Canal? Dismantle the Department of Education? Stop food reaching starving children worldwide? What if Gaza were cleansed of Palestinians and made into a luxury resort? Can Trump simply rewrite birthright citizenship out of the Constitution? Why did Ukraine invade Russia, how hated is Zelenskyy by his people, why is he so ungrateful?
Reduced to functional morons by the leaders’ barrage of untruths, we collapse into stultified, sulky denial. We cannot think, we cannot resist. The Democrats forget that cries of “that’s not allowed!” or “that’s unconstitutional!” carry no weight with MAGA. The sole measure of what’s possible and what’s right is what Trump decides to do. Insistence on proper protocol, offering nothing tangible, no substance, just bolsters Trump’s popularity, because he alone is the solution in search of a problem; and slowly, too slowly, Americans realize that the problem is them.
Trump 2.0 is about retribution. Don’t say he can’t do that. He’s doing it. Nothing he does in office can be considered criminal, remember? The Supreme Court said so.
Drill, baby. Drill!
There is a strange, disturbed negative feedback loop happening between Canada and the US right now; particularly between the US and Ontario, as our own Doug Ford, “the People’s Premier”, himself a bargain-basement version of a MAGA acolyte, elbows his way to the front of the line to position himself as Canada’s number one, tough-guy champion out of all the provincial premiers.
He cleverly catapulted himself into orbit, taking advantage of the power vacuum that Trudeau’s resignation has presented, and is clearly chomping at the bit to follow the yellow brick road to the PM’s office. I’m convinced that the general US public is under the impression that he’s the Prime Minister. I almost fall prey to the delusion myself. You see? Another boiling pot of malice, just flavored with cheese curds and gravy.
I have to hand it to him: in the current atmosphere in which Canadians feel anxious and under threat, Doug has held his ground and projected strength. I can’t fault his messaging. It’s just that his stance is so clearly performative, so very much a job interview; and he is a loose cannon, running dangerously unchecked with anti-US rhetoric—which, frankly, most Canadians, including me, are slurping up like ambrosia—and setting the tone in a way that Mark Carney will surely have to rein in.
Still, and I’m so glad that polite bit is out of the way, Doug Ford is a loathsome liar, a grifter, and a sleazebag with a firm ideology and limited brain cells. It is quite galling to hear him blather about the average Ontarian’s financial peril, when he has not hesitated to put in place draconian cuts, ignore the desperate situation with affordable housing, throw public money at pet projects that benefit only his pocket.
In a province which desperately needs funding for, say, health care, he offers as policy one-dollar beer and liquor in grocery stores. Seizing an opportunity to award contracts to his developer friends, he takes a beloved Toronto lakeside park, Ontario Place, rips up 850 mature trees, tears down the iconic architecture, pours sewage into the shallows and hands a billions-of-dollars contract to Therme, an Austrian company that will build a ludicrously out of scale eleven-storey luxury spa on the grounds. Examining the contract, we find that two billion dollars of public money will subsidize the venture, when he promised that not a penny of public money would be spent.
When crowded emergency waiting rooms are the subject, Doug explains that we are the cause, because—wait for it—we should be going to our family doctors. Except that there are no family doctors for us to go to, because of no funding. Oh, well!
Checking his “Stick it to Toronto” dossier, he decides that the current state of horrendous driving gridlock in and around the city is not because there are too many cars. It’s due to: bicycles, no wait, cyclists. This is his bargain-basement culture war. And the solution? Pass legislation requiring that every municipality in Ontario (but really Toronto, nowhere else even thinks about cycling) seek approval from his provincial government for any bike lanes they want to implement.
No more “woke” municipalities deciding what’s best for them. And as I walk down Sherbourne Street at three AM, I note that there’s hardly any cars. Same with Carlton Street, even Yonge. To think we built all these roads for cars, and they’re never filled to capacity 24/7! I must make a note to write an outraged letter to the National Post, wait till my letter is published, then wrap some fish and chips in it.
And the existing bike lanes in Toronto, creating a safe network for cyclists along the major roads? The bike lanes lauded by the businesses that line the route, having seen their businesses grow; the bike lanes approved by the emergency services who claim no negative effects? Screw the studies (bike lanes are the most studied and reported on and debated issue for literally decades). Their results must be wrong, because Doug Ford himself has seen the gridlock. These two kilometres of bike lanes, which somehow cast their evil, woke car gridlock city-wide on hundreds of kilometres of car-clogged roads, are being torn up and returned to their previous state of car-gridlock.
Here’s the kicker: the new legislation specifies that, if you are a cyclist who’s injured as you attempt to share the roadway with cars, you cannot sue the province of Ontario.
But, awesome as that is, it’s not everything. Doug plans to build (“this is happening!”) an underground highway beneath a fifty-five kilometre stretch of the existing Highway 401, a fantasmic boondoggle straight out of H G Wells that would exceed the capabilities of any tunnel-boring machine that exists. Projected price tag: one hundred and thirty-five billion USD. (That is, if US dollars still exist after the trade war and subsequent global depression, and we don’t end up just exchanging ropes of Cracker Jack as fiat currency.)
Every study in the world indicates that, surprise, the way forward is to limit car use and maximize public transit; every five-year-old could work out the concept of induced demand: build more roads to ease gridlock, and they will quickly fill up with traffic, leaving you right where you started.
Civil engineers by the cartload scoff at this white-elephant fantasy, but, in Fordnation, the car is supreme.
He is expert at deploying Ministerial Zoning Orders, which bypass any objections, studies or planning and allow his pet projects to be rammed through (i.e. pay-offs to developers.) When the law is against him, he rules by decree. Heard that before?
A former drug dealer, with his deceased brother, Rob, former mayor of Toronto, he ran for office as being “for the people”, for “common sense”, i.e., austerity, but also fueled by hatred of what Toronto did to Rob (laughed him out of countenance, until Rob’s death from cancer). He doesn’t care about bike lanes. He cares, quite transparently and openly, about sticking it to Toronto.
A premier who knows what’s best. Who alone can solve the problem of not having a luxury megaspa instead of a park. Who hates those “empty” bike lanes. Who knows that closing safe-injection sites is in the best interest of no one who injects drugs. He alone can fix it!
Sound familiar, yet a bit flat, a bit low-key? That’s Canada for ya. Always the bridesmaid, never the autocrat-in-waiting. The superhero who’s always Clark Kent.
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