Election night: "Only America," said one funny guy on the internet, "could look at Brexit and say, hey, wait, we can do you one better." Husband fished this graphic out of the internet soup:
After both votes, various of my friends wrote or said something along the lines of "I bet now you're glad you live in Canada!" I shy away from responding because the sentiment makes me uncomfortable. I am trying to figure out why. For one thing, 'glad' isn't a word I'm using in connection with the election outcome. A further clue is that I'm more irritated hearing such comments after the US elections than I was after Brexit. Then, I could laugh along in a mournful sort of gallows-humour way. Tsk, tsk. My hackles stayed down. Why are they up now?
I guess you can take the American out of America, but not America out of the American. I've noticed before that I'm more of a patriot outside my national borders than I am within them. The Obama years have been heavenly. Flashing my US passport has been a source of pride, so different from the years of Bushes when I kept the blue cardboard cover hidden in a pocket right up to when I stepped to the immigration desk. Living in Indonesia during the Gulf War, I sometimes denied being American in situations where no proof was required. Once, I got caught. In a town I was visiting for the day, I told the driver of a sort of motorcycle rickshaw called a becak that I was Canadian. Several weeks later I went back to the same town, and heard someone calling 'Canadian! Canadian! Bu! Ma'am!' The same driver. He had spotted me getting off the intercity bus, and wanted to drive me again. I tried to recall the details of the story I'd spun for him. When first we practice to deceive, indeed.
Now is another good time to pretend to be Canadian, or at least, so says The Economist, who calls Canada the 'lonely' representative of liberty:
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http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21709305-it-uniquely-fortunate-many-waysbut-canada-still-holds-lessons-other-western |
I find that idea a little frightening, the idea of freedom pushed upward to the polar margins of the globe. A comedy radio show on CBC, 'This is That,' described Canada as 'the US in bad clothing' but I suspect it's less bad clothing and more shapeless parkas for huddling against inhospitable cold. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," sang Janis Joplin. Not that Canada is nothing, but there really are not many people here. Bearing the weight of the free world is a lot to ask of a country whose population is half that of the UK.
There is no denying, though, that, post-Harper, Canada exudes the aura of a safe haven, what with Prince Justin in charge and the national headlines quite often about rectifying, or trying to rectify, past injustices committed by immigrants against indigenes. There won't be a bricks-and-mortar border separating the US and Canada, but I hope the ideological barrier is strong enough to resist a lot of huffing and puffing from the White House. Or rather from Trump Tower.
