Just as I was pulling my chair up to my desk and preparing to pounce clumsily upon my keyboard and pound out something about the current Canadian election campaign, an email from an old and valued friend popped up enclosing the dumbest column from the Globe and Mail I have seen in 65 years as a frequent reader of that newspaper. By Lawrence Martin, it is entitled: “Donald Trump’s Luck Has Run Out.” I will not engage in another effort to invite Canadian readers to contemplate the fact that just because Trump repels most Canadians as a caricature of a boorish and boastful and loutish American, that does not mean that he is unlikely to be successful. A great many Canadians want the United States, if it doesn’t have a leftish and diffident president like Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama, to have in the White House someone they can disparage like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush (though Reagan, retroactively, has enjoyed grudging admiration). My problem isn’t what Canadians think of Trump, it is the stupefying purblindness of current Canadian journalistic political comment on the United States.
With only public spiritedness as my motive, and in total impartiality, for these purposes, about American political events and people, I remind readers of a few fundamental facts about the politics of our neighbour. The United States is not really the country of the American Revolutionary mythos. It became an independent country when Benjamin Franklin helped persuade the British to evict the French from Canada in the Seven Years’ War (which was started, in this continent, by an unauthorized attack by 21-year-old adjutant George Washington on the French near what is now Pittsburgh in 1753), and then persuaded the French to help the Americans evict the British from America in 1778. It was never a war for the rights of man, and Americans had no more rights after the Revolution than before, nor more than the British or several other countries, but they were a sovereign country. Unlike almost all other sovereign countries in the late 18th century, they didn’t have a language of their own, but as the opening turn in what has been a durable genius for the spectacle and for matters of image and propaganda, they claimed to be the national cradle of human liberty. America was, indeed, a land of opportunity and comparative absence of class prejudices, but the chief author of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson) who held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” was a slave-holder, and the Constitution, when it was promulgated in 1789, entrenched slavery.
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See Also:
(1) Political Realignment Is Coming to America
(3) Trump Bars Iranian Gov’t Officials & Relatives From US
(4) Fracking Ban Proposed By 2020 Dems Would Kill Millions of Jobs
(5) Sparks fly at assault-weapons ban hearing on Capitol Hill, ex-cop vows she would ‘not comply’
