Can all the mice shed their fear and bell THIS cat? and soon?

The Wall Street Journal reporter asked a poignant question of Prime Minister, Marc Carney, in Washington yesterday…..To what extent can and do you trust that the administration is negotiating in good faith?  Or words to that effect….and Carney’s answer, ‘that will become clear’…..

The media frenzy, using detailed, precise questions looking for literal, microscopic answers in order then to parse their ‘meaning’ as if they were holding a feather up on a golf course to determine the direction of the wind, is, among other things, an exercise in self-demotion.

Even Rachel Maddow’s persistent, accurate and deep dive into the various protests around the country, while useful in the cause of potentially generating more of such protests, is another of the ‘headline’ frenzy of anxiety, skepticism, anger and disbelief.

Having twisted the media into a frenetic, obsessive-compulsive turmoil, both intellectually and professionally, trump has succeeded in capturing media time, without spending a dime. And the reporters, while anything but fake news, are impaled in the image of the uroborus snake, with its head in its tail, going round and round the same circle it has been trained and experienced to dig.

All of the media training, and all of the professional expertise and creative and courageous questioning fail in this current American political theatre.

Inductive reasoning proceeds from the fine details to a conclusion. Deductive reasoning proceeds, inversely, from the conclusion to the fine details. And, while both are necessary, in order to serve a wide and diverse audience, many of whom have either turned off or become so apathetic and hopeless they are no longer paying attention. Even the Democrats have fallen into the trap of perceiving, and strategizing around the micro-details. Last evening, on her inaugural show, The Briefing with Jen Psaki, Pete Buttigieg exhorted the Democratic party to begin to address the issues of cost of living, in order to demonstrate that the party has heard, and actually listened to the complaints and the needs of ordinary people.

Well…the literal, empirical, data compilation, necessary for a legal trial, in order to convince the judge and/or jury of the culpability of the accused, is consuming both needed energy and political capital that is needed for the larger, more existential and deepening crisis. Professors Like Ruth Ben Gihat at NYU, and Timothy Snider at Yale and Jason Stanley formerly of Yale and now of the University of Toronto need far more air time, on both sides of the 49^th parallel. Along with retired judge Michael Luttig, and emeritus professor of Law at Harvard, Lawrence Tribe, Conservative lawyer George Conway among others, need to be saturating the air waves with their substantive, principled, arguments that, taken together can and may eventually weave a net of both public opinion and activism, both political and legal, that just might be able to ensnare this orange buffoon.

The usual principle of constitutional separation of powers, underscored by the media and the courts, and historically by the Congress as well is insufficient to tackle and untie this gordion knot of an administration that defies all laws and conventions in favour of the despotic and anarchic will of the president. The media’s hourly wringing of hands, as purveyors of what is effectively a Greek tragedy of epic proportions, even incentivized by legal and historical and fascist scholars is also not adequate to the monumental, and growing task of dismantling this papier maché movie set of a government.

Ethereal, effemeral, deceitful, dishonest, destabilizing, untrustworthy, unpredictable and also lethal in so many ways, this government has, like under-sea submarines torpedoed the world economy, the world order of the past 75-80 years, and has set human lives so on edge that physical, emotional, economic, political and intellectual health and well-being, of everyone on the planet, outside of the crazed far-right thugs, ostensibly in order to provide absolute power to those very thugs.

Human health is under direct and indirect threat by the very department of Health and Human services designed and deployed to protect and enhance human health.

The oversight and substantial funding of the education of the most impoverished children in American has been eviscerated, by the very department established and deployed to sustain and support that endeavour.

The strength, stability, and sustainability of NATO, the most effective and long-lasting defense alliance in history, is being undermined both overtly and covertly, by the numbskulls appointed to lead and grow and direct the American cohort of this organization.

The specific, constitutionally-assigned powers and priorities of Congress have been trashed by the very Republican elected members of both the House and the Senate, in their headlong mass sycophantic craze, like teens rushing and trampling the stage of a rock concert, as each hollow-man/woman besought by the hysteria seeks either direct favour or the avoidance of a direct ‘political-assassination-bomb’ ordered, and then of course, denied, by the president…..whose blind insecurity tolerates nary a word, or even a scowl or frown of criticism, protest or intolerance.

If this person who has been elected to the Oval Office were a member of a family, that family would already have conducted a penetrating intervention, as if the family member needed help. If this were a chief executive of a major corporation, the board will already, long ago fired him without bonus or pension or investment certificates. If this were a professor in a respectable university, his academic credentials would long ago have been revoked, based on nothing more than plagiarism, falsifying evidence, corrupting his students and fleecing the budget of whatever department he might have worked in.

If this were a military general, doubtless, his peers and subordinates would have court-martialed him long ago, even if it took a mutiny to accomplish the removal.

If this were a commercial airline pilot, he would never have passed the flight exam, and would have been turfed from the program,….and don’t get me started on the premise of his serving as an air-trafffic controller…..Yikes!

Dave Leterman snidely notes that he would be fired if he had already been hired to manage a Dairy Queen….who can or would dispute that?

Eviction, insurrection, impeachment, Constitutional Amendment 25, street mutiny in each and every city simultaneously, nothing seems to be either capable or surmountable to finally prohibit this political, theatrical, chameleon Houdini from escaping his self-designed entrapments, and wrestling him finally into silence, impotence, the very state from which he is obsessively-compulsively racing every moment of every day….just ask his niece, if you don’t believe this scribe.

The phrase ‘belling the cat’ comes from a fable about mice who decide to attach a bell to a cat’s neck to warn them of its approach, but none of them are willing to risk the danger.

If the whole communication, legal, corporate, academic, voter army of people, institutions, banks and Wall Street, including those totally empty digital mice are not either aware or willing to shed the fear that the mice in the fable could not shed, and re-think their personal, professional and patriotic identities, in order to serve something far larger than any one of them, the united states of america (no caps because the reputation of the nation has been so besmirched, capitals are no longer warranted)…..then…..

The whole world is watching….and the whole world is already paying the devastating and potentially lethal priceS…..and there are so many ways to measure the cost of this tragedy! 

Memo to Alberta Premier from Eastern Canada....May 3, 2025

 If thousands of Canadian voters did not detect, or chose to ignore the hand, larynx, motivation and methods of the occupant of the Oval Office in the campaign of Pierre Poilievre, one can only hope that those same Canadian voters will not be unconscious and blind and deaf to the implications of the Alberta Prosperity Project’s solicitation and acquisition of thousands of signatures to enable a referendum on Alberta Separation from Canada.

Not only would a referendum favouring separation embolden the hand of the American wannabe emperor, but it would significantly erode many of the promised significant initiatives on offer from the new Canadian federal government, who, by the way, is not, in the words of Alberta Premier Smith, ‘If Ottawa has its way, Alberta would left freezing in the dark?”

There is political rhetoric, mostly exaggerated, hollow, devoid of empirical and rational evidence and argument respectively. And to some extent we have a spate of it during the course of the recent national campaign. And then there is this cancerous venom or bile, depending on your choice of metaphor from Smith. Those of us in the Eastern part of Canada have listened to western complaints of being ignored, belittled, taken-for-granted, and even feeling alienated from the major debates and decisions taken over the decades by Ottawa, whether those governments were Liberal or Conservative. There is, however, a significant and perhaps irredemiable and tectonic shift from the position of the  honourable and highly respected former premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, who is renowned for his statement, “I am a proud Albertan, but I am first a proud Canadian!” and this latest salvo from Smith.

Of course, those reading this, who support Ms Smith, will be repulsed by my omission of either a pronoun or a title of premier from her name…..and I do both deliberately. It may be the legal right and the political opportunity of the Alberta premier to engage in such reprehensible rhetoric.  It is neither the time nor the moment in history, nor the political ethos, nor the temper of the culture at a time when the national sovereignty is being rhetorically and politically and economically threatened by the American White House either to imitate or to emulate the chief antagonist of the Canadian nation.

And the Alberta Premier is both imitating and emulating that antagonist thereby fawning before him and sticking her political thumb in the eye of the newly elected Canadian Prime Minister. Identifying her province as having a significant affinity with Texas, can and will only embolden the American chief executive into thinking, and imagining that if he could ‘pick off’ Alberta, in his colonization project, he would have achieved more than he could ever have imagined. Her timing of legislation lowering the standard of numbers qualifying for referendum, for ordinary Albertans gather signatures for a petition, of course, she would argue, as has her mentor, Preston Manning, already done, is a perfect time to jump into the gap of political theatre prior to the full up-and-running operations of the federal government. National media is focused on the spectre of all of the potential head-winds facing the new Prime Minister. Grabbing headlines with Cecil B. DeMille-type epic headlines, while it may get a few ‘irate’ responses like this one, is neither the stuff of responsible leadership, nor does it attract those who expect and demand responsible leadership.

There are going to be a lot more jobs and livelihoods lost with the imposition of American-imposed illegal tariffs, and those losses are not going to be restricted to any one province or area of the federal state. Ontario already faces the move of a portion of Stellantis operations to the United States, as well as the loss, to this point, of some 740 jobs at the Oshawa General Motors plant, and some 400 from the GM CAMI Assembly Plant in Ingersoll. Who knows where the next wave of job losses will be announced, and in which province or territory they will occur.

Promising both to spread the revenue from Canadian tariffs to the displaced workers and also to work toward the goal of no single region bear the brunt of whatever implications the tariffs bring, taken together, serve as a beginning of a commitment to cushion the blow of the American political and economic behemoth, to some degree.

If the Alberta premier thinks, or believes, that, adopting a tempestuous and irascible and irate tone is a sign of the strength she believes she embodies as Premier and thereby she is strengthening her hand in negotiations with Ottawa, she has fallen into the same intimidating pose as her American hero…and the hollowness of her rhetoric, like his, is blatantly and venomously on display across the nation. Intimidation, as the American leader is learning from Mr. Carney, is never going to ‘trump’ mutual respect by adults in a formal, official and historic process of negotiations. Nor is intimidation an effective card to play if one wishes to be considered respectful, adult, mature and worthy of the time and respect to be seriously engaged.

In the school yard, the bully uses intimidation as his starting point, because, usually he is pre-adolescent, or perhaps early adolescent. And while the U.S. model of bully has had inordinate impact in intimidating his Republican colleagues in Congress, and among the Supreme Court Justices, the model of intimidation is clearly not going to have the desired impact or effect on Mr. Carney, either in Washington or in Edmonton or Ottawa.

Indigenous leaders, too, from across the province and country have condemned Smith’s new legislation for ‘stoking separatism and violating treaty commitments in the process. ‘Inviting individuals to vote on questions to take treaty land is absurd, and contrary to the nation-to-nation sacred convenants that we agreed toat the time of treaty making,’ said Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation Chief Sheldon Sunshine on Friday. (Jack Farrell, The Canadian Press, in the Glode and Mail, May 2, 2025)

The word ‘sovereignty’ is being bandied about as if it were the litmus test of a province’s or a nation’s identity….and clearly, by comparison, the threat to Canadian sovereignty from the White House has far more intensity, and far more immediacy and far more toxicity and danger than anything coming out of Ottawa relating either to Quebec or Alberta….and it does not take a rocket-scientist, or a Philadelphia lawyer to take note of that comparison.

In fact, the Alberta Premier does her case in advocating for Alberta’s respect and appropriate and legitimate place in federation by putting her provincial sovereignty adjacent to Canada’s. Even Quebec voters and the Bloc leadership, have turned their eyes southward recognizing the threat posed by America. By analogy, domestic violence is perpetrated primarily by men against women. Occasionally, however, the situation is reversed by gender, where a woman violently attacks a man. The voice of the victim, in that instance, is drowned out by the statistics and the public consciousness of the proportional dimension of the issue of domestic violence. It is not that ‘he’ in this case, should not be recognized and respected; it is just that the context, as usual, limits his ‘exposure’ and his ‘voice’ and his ‘respect’.

Context, however, is something that has seemingly been eviscerated, given the bullet-like, weaponizing of most issues into a black-and-white binary, in which public opinion seems to feel it has to take sides.

“A good first step’ is the way the Alberta Premier describes her first meeting with the new Prime Minister…and we can all hold out hope for more ‘positive’ exchanges in the near future. The overwhelming public sentiment, desire, even passion, for an adult to enter the room on the public square, however, over-shadows and hopefully erases the dominance of the zero-sum game which serves as the core strategy and tactic of the American government in its current iteration. Canada has elected a clear and unequivocal ‘adult’ (and a highly educated, sophisticated, nuanced, disciplined, and confident and open) adult at that. That is the greatest strength Mr. Carney takes with him into the Oval Office on Tuesday May 6, next week.

It is that model of the ‘adult’ in the room that Ms Smith might give thought to imitating and to emulating….it has the promise, like honey, of far more rewards than vinegar!

Another look at Schadenfreude....in the Spring of 2025

Although the word is neither new nor frequently found in the public vernacular,

Schadenfreude warrants a revisit, or even an introduction both to this scribe and any interested readers.

Britannica.com reports:

Schadenfreude, the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another’s misfortune, a German word that combines Schaden (‘damage’) and Freud (‘joy’)….(S)ome psychologists describe three categories of context for schadenfreude: justice, rivalry, and aggression. These contexts correlate with three distinct motivations: social justice, self-evaluation, and social identity. In the context of justice, people feel pleasure when they observe punishment in which someone gets what they deserve. In the context of rivalry, people feel pleasure when they compare themselves to one who suffers a negative event. In the context of aggression, a person feels pleasure when a member of an out-group, such as a rival sports team or political party, suffers a negative event, which solidifies the in-group member’s social identity….Other psychologists have described (it) with four context categories: aversion, injustice, identification and compensation. With aversion there is a feeling of dislike toward another person, and when that person experiences misfortune, one feels pleasure. With injustice, a person feels pleasure when observing a deserved punishment. With identification, a rival’s loss boosts one’s social identity. With compensation, one’s own misfortune occurs first and when another person experiences the same misfortune, one feels pleasure.

The link between schadenfreude and empathy is an ongoing topic of study. Psychologists note that schadenfreude occurs when empathy is absent, such as when one can dehumanize the person experiencing misfortune. With empathy, we feel bad for this person, as we would feel with our own personal misfortune. However, with dehumanization, empathy erodes and schadenfreude can more easily occur.

Intensity of schadenfreude can become extreme and problematic in people with low empathy or those with the ability to dehumanize others, the latter of which is often associated with the Dark Triad conditions of psychopathy (lack of empathy and behaviour control), narcissism, (self-centredness and arrogant thinking) and Machiavellianism (power seeking through the use of cunning and manipulation).

In a recent conversation with my wife, she asked, what seemed like an innocuous question: “Why DO people gossip?” and one answer that blurted out was ‘schadenfreude’…without thought, reflection, pause, or even a needed breath. Without reflecting on the ‘appropriateness’ or accuracy, or application of that descriptive emotion, it nevertheless continued to linger, unanswered, pondered, tossed about in hypothetical situations, some personal experiences and other questions followed.

For example: Is it schadenfreude that lies behind the kind of scurrilous gossip that, like filings to a magnet, rushes in to shame a person for any one of many misjudgments, especially about what the group or culture considers ‘immorality’?

Do we all to varying degrees, ‘belong’ to a group, society, service club, church, political party, class, corporation, or regiment (military, law enforcement, national security, news media, medical) that wraps itself in a list of coded words and behaviours as ‘standards’ that must be upheld, lest either or both the high esteem of the group or the individual’s high status within the group, be damaged, sullied, alloyed, broken, diseased, or brought into public disrepute…as considered by those ‘within’ the group and those without?

The church has focused for centuries on human, original, inevitable and inescapable evil, sin, unworthiness, ungodliness, deviation from the will of God…and to the extent, both in depth and in reach, that archetype has infused itself into the psychic soul of the West….the Christian West…The Fall of Man, as Christians have interpreted, and then taught, and then upheld through sanctions, rituals, penitentials, retribution, and the grace of God’s forgiveness, stands as both a moral and an intellectual as well as an artistic and imaginative pillar of our culture. Everyone, whether they ever refer directly or indirectly to the myth, embodies, espouses, and ‘clings’ to that archetype….naturally with varying examples of what comprises the specific ‘evil’. No one is immune from the application of this lens of evil, sin, and the shame and guilt that, like a fungus, is inextricably attached to the specific ‘fall’. And along with the ‘fall’ has come the also inescapable, inexorable, inordinate, and for many, inexplicable fury of schadenfreude.

Currently, the American media is having a feeding frenzy on schadenfreude. Musk’s experience of a drop of some 71% in Tesla stock, has millions rubbing their hands in glee, prompting headlines, to which I also applaud and cheer, inwardly. Similarly, whenever a court decision that trumps Trump is reached, I join a chorus of millions who are also joined in triumphant schadenfreude. Whenever a Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russia, I feel a slight surge of schadenfreude, at the prospect that Russia will actually be ‘harmed’ for its illegal, unjust and unprovoked war against her neighbour. If and when I see a drop in the public opinion polls of the popularity of a political party to which I am opposed, I feel a small lift of schadenfreude at their expense. I recall, years back in another life, learning of the tragic serious injury of a son of a man whose public, yet secret, shaming of this scribe went unnoticed, a feeling of saddness and empathy, and also fist-bump-inducing sigh…’is this universal justice’?

Is schadenfreude an unwritten, undocumented, legal, social, politically correct and visceral human response for which none of us is or even can be held accountable? And is that response, justified on either or both social or person legitimacy, a ‘subversive’ and ‘mercurial’ and ‘illusive’ (like an underground fire) seismic and volcanic surge of energy that, outside of the normal ‘control’ and management structures, including the law, the medical fraternity, the political establishment, the church hierarchy, and even the local coffee shop, fueling our gestalt of both human relations (war, hunger, poverty, disease, and propaganda) on the world stage, as well as in the sanctity of our own hearts?

Pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, and wrath….have been identified as the seven cardinal sins by the church. And, from this perch, it would seem that schadenfreude could very readily aned glibly and unconsciously be underneath many if not all of these. We are a competitive, somewhat aggressive, highly individualistic race striving toward some image of ‘success’ as individuals as well as nations or cultures or religions, or corporations….and we inculcate all manner of literal and metaphoric arrows into the slings of our youth, in order to ‘prepare’ them for the jungle out there.

Is schadenfreude one of the more ‘invisible’ of those arrows, that we can and do count on to ‘express’ our deepest resentments, in a pleasurable, and thereby justifiable and excusable manner, with our self-declared impunity? Furthermore, is the trump cult simply weaponizing schadenfreude, right before our eyes, as it/they both drink the kool-aid of schadenfreude and then ride the waves of its intensity with their own impunity?

It is not a taboo substance like fentanyl, or ketamine, LSD, magic mushrooms, ecstasy, methamphetamines, opioids, salvia, codeine….and for expressing it, there is or seems to be universal immunity, impunity, and social and political acceptance, even celebration of its ubiquity, especially the cover it gives to everyone. It is not a lethal, odorless, tasteless, imperceptible gas like carbon monoxide for which we have detectors, alarms and warnings. Nor is it being measured, as are carbon dioxide and methane, for their lethal infusion into the earth’s atmosphere, demonstrated in rising temperatures, rising oceanic water levels, dying species and global ‘accords’ attempting to combat their emission. Nor is it even being observed, documented and sanctioned by the very churches which have taken up inscribing and instruction and distribution of whatever moral code they deem relevant to their specific and unique deity.

Indeed, is there anyone who has ever dawned the door of a religious sanctuary who can say that s/he has never encountered a wave of schadenfreude, given the ‘fall’ of someone in their circle, a pregnant teen, a divorced wife, a fired or discontinued worker, a religious fallen on the sword of greed, or lust, or love, or envy or projected hatred? Are we living in a culture in which, finally, Pope Francis’ prayer ‘for me a sinner’ is perhaps actually being heard through ears that permit and even endorse a mirror-look into our own inner self? And does that mirror look perhaps  include the question of how we have, personally, morally, spiritually, intellectually, psychologically and especially religiously indulged in the waters of the warm pool of schadenfreude, without a single glimpse of self-criticism, knowing that such schadenfreude is such a universal experience, that no deity would deem it practical to include it in the list of cardinal sins?

So illusive and imperceptible and radioactive is this human ‘tendency’ as to be outside of the range of our capacity and our willingness even to acknowledge its hiding in the depth of our unconscious vocabulary, our attitudes, our perceptions and our conventional and normal way of living….and all of this is irrespective of our ethnicity, our education, our specific faith community, our nationality, our ideology or even our sense of our identity….No one is immune; no one has impunity, and no one can or will escape the shade that we cast upon whomever we ‘need’ (as we perceive it) to bury in our schadenfreude….and it comes in so many innocuous forms: shaming on social media, academic criticism, political campaign rhetoric, advertising verbiage, religious superiority and discipline, status claims or deficits, economic success and/or failure….and yet the outstanding feature of schadenfreude is not only it ubiquity but the impunity it brings to any and all who are ensconced in its propriety.

Really? 

Reflections on Thoreau's majority of one

 I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them.  I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbor constitutes a majority of one. (Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, Prospero Books ed., p. 288)

As a life-long progressive, sympathetic to the cause of social justice, unafraid of the ‘nanny state’ and more skeptical of the authoritarianism of the conservative right than of the argument against ‘big government,’, I open with words borrowed from Thoreau, that I, along with perhaps others, could do well to re-read, and to reflect upon. In a matter such as the abolition of slavery, even a single person who holds a position that opposes it and seeks to eliminate it, can, and even must, consider himself or herself a majority of one. And while Thoreau is a strong and authentic voice for limited government, and has, in many quarters, become a mentor for the many voices echoing the Federalist Papers, and thus not exactly a beacon for the ‘social justice side,’ nevertheless, there is something resoundingly inspiring in the disciplined discernment of ‘being more right than his neighbor’.

Of course, we all live between ethical and moral and religious opposites, the extremes of which, today, seem to be attempting, in a zero-sum game, to eliminate the other side on the political stage in America especially. Clearly in the ascendency currently, the millions of MAGA supporters believe that their leader has been ‘sent by God’ as a kind of messiah, to ‘bring about the kingdom of God here on earth now’ as they hubristically and naively and dangerously trumpet their conviction. Indeed, it is their very conviction, as an absolute imperative, in which they are impaled on their own petard. Starting on the level of attaching a religious conviction to a human being, as if he (or a ‘she’) were ‘sent by God’ is not merely inexcusable for rational and religious and historical and cognitive reasons; it betrays their very movement. And then, to pontificate that ‘others’ (whomever and whichever those may be at any given moment depending on the vagaries and whims of their messiah and his cult) must be eliminated, effectively excommunicated, to borrow a religious notion that attempts to make sacred their horrendous and heinous acts of deportation, incarceration, dismissal, firing, and the hubristic hymns of self-congratulations with every morbid headline and detail, not only sounds alarms around the globe, but also betrays their very justification. And it is not only a moral/ethical justification; it is also an economical, political, military, environmental and existential justification that they betray.

Dismissing the ‘others’ for whatever specious, distracting, irrelevant, superficial, reductionistic and unsustainable justification, displays the complete emptiness of their purpose…..it has not purpose or meaning except to justify the existence and empowerment, indeed the worship, of their “sacred” leader, who is, undoubtedly, merely a papier-mache projection of the summation of the fears, bigotries, prejudices and hatreds of the cult. Such a reiteration of the fateful and hateful river Styx, in modern face and voice, is so deeply recognized and hated by all of the ‘others’ including this scribe, as to render little to no ambiguity about what ‘side’ any ‘god’ in a religious sense, might be on.

And while there are a myriad of hurdles, obstacles, mountains and head-winds to see and walk through in order to neutralize this Stygian river of total blackness, the first step may well begin when each of us look in the mirror and utter, “I am and will continue to be a majority of ONE!” I do not have to withdraw my taxes from the national treasury, to sustain my ‘majority of one.’ It is enough to hold firm to my conviction that both the absoluteness and the tyranny of the men in charge of the hate-infested flow of this offal stench of a new Styx, render it and them, eventually, but not without serious and dangerous and existentially risky opposition, of which I and everyone else can and will be an integral part, not merely obscene, but obsolete.

A vision of death, like the vision of the one deep into the contemplation of suicide, seems, to the one holding it, to be the only option available. And a single option, for both the one contemplating suicide as well as for the MAGA cult, is life-threatening, indeed more threatening that whatever horrendous circumstances might have prompted the openness to the single option. It is not only that Putin is an existential crisis for  the Ukrainians as well as for the Europeans, (while he believes the inverse, that NATO and western security forces inside Ukraine pose an existential crisis to and for Russia; it is not only that Netanyahu considers Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and their founder and source of resources, Iran to be an existential threat to and for Israel, so too do Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah and the o consider Israel, with her nuclear weapons provided by the United States, an existential threat to their religion, and their way of life. Similarly, preying upon the exactly parallel template or archetype, the existential threat, as a raison d’etre, for political identity, has become the argument de jour on the political menu of the MAGA movement, given its beating of the drum of evil, hatred, bigotry and criminality identified with Biden, Obama, the fanatic-left judges, and anyone and everyone who opposes the presumed sanctity of the MAGA movement.

Hanging over this existentially-themed and obsessive-compulsive, political, military, economic and ethical-moral universal drama, is the one these high-decibel, lie-infested, and ego-dominated headlines and news stories ignore, fail to recognize and thereby declare immunity from, is the real existential crisis for which no one able to grab notice in the cacophony of all of these other ‘hubristic, heinous, bigoted, prejudiced and intransigent’ (and therefore absolute, in their own mind) voice). And that existential crisis is the rapidly evaporating, both literally and metaphorically, capacity of the planet to sustain life….human, animal, vegetable, oceanic, atmospheric and even potentially spiritual.

So long as we engage like drunken soldiers on the decks of a sinking ‘titanic’ in the also hubristically-founded, and metaphysically and empirically and philosophically insubstantial conviction that our ‘ship’ is unsinkable, like the men and women on the historical and literal Titanic, find ourselves hoisted on the petard of our own hubris. And while these current horrendous wars, and the rise of distrust in and respect for both individuals and institutions on which we must depend, not only for our survival but for our very healthy mental and emotional and spiritual state, swirl both about and within each of us, we fight in vain, for that touchstone that Thoreau confidently holds, as a majority of ONE…..

Even those men and women completely engrossed and even subsumed inside the debates within the various ‘opposing forces,’ state and non-state, legitimate and illegitimate, terrorist and non-terrorist, capitalist and non-capitalist, Christian and non-Christian, Muslim and non-Muslim, Jewish and non-Jewish, Western and non-Western, communist and non-communist, and thereby justifiying their work and their existence in holding fast to their respective ‘faith’…all of them remain faithless to the larger question of the fate of the planet.

And it is the question of being faithful or non-faithful that grips much of the rhetoric and much of the debate and the mind-set that is profiting the pharmaceuticals, the alcohol and tobacco companies, the weapon-producing oligopolies, the cyber-security behemoths, and the AI weaponization and monetizing of the oligarchs who are riding the current tide of cash….whose size and dimension, like another obliterating cloud, keeps us from seeing the underlying existential crisis again….

Like Leningin’s ants, we ‘herd’ ourselves on the right or the left, on the side of the muscular approach to Trump or the diplomatic, on the pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, on the pro-Palestine or the pro-Israeli, on the Pro-Taiwan or the pro-China side of each of our perceived conflicts….and belonging, at whatever cost, is another of the driving imperatives for each of us….an imperative that brings with it another ‘faithlessness’ to our personal, majority of ONE….that sees the values and risks, the pro and the con arguments for each of the resolutions of our shared, and converging conflicts….and, we all have the obligation to recognize and respect, to realize and to accept our individual responsibility for, not a single conflict, or its resolution, but for a state of mind that embeds, and infests its collective  mind-set of hopelessness and despair that in the convergence of these horrendous crises, we will collectively be swallowed, like the co-ed on the beach of the Dominican by the cumulative and irresistible physical and inescapable force….

And fail to realize that it is the relinquishing of the force of our majority of one that enables and permits and even enhances the vehemence and the intractability of the forces of perceived existential crises…in the plural…when, we all know that keeping it simply stupid, is our own way to perceive and to participate in our lives.

I defer from obedient obsession to a singular person, any person fully conscious that no one person warrants such obeisance. I also defer from obsessive-compulsive adherence to a single religion, knowing that each has its merits and darknesses, its truths and its lies. I also defer from obsessive-compulsive conviction in my own and any other’s absolute access and consciousness of absolute “RIGHT” and am left in between the incompleteness and the ambiguities and the immoralities and blindnesses of each of the positions, especially those adopted as absolute  by any person, religion, political party, nation or ideology.

Let’s try to begin to defer from a public media, in any and all quarters, that espouses to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…in the full knowledge that no one, and no institution, and no politician and no clergy can or does tell the whole truth. We live in and with the shades of light and darkness that surround and accompany every single person and thing….and to live in a world that denies such a foundational cornerstone, is both foolhardy and unsustainable.

Thanks to Thoreau for introducing the majority of ONE….even to a sceptic of the right’s ideology of the small government….except when it comes to their apparent obsession to impose a hygienic and clinical sterility on the culture in which we are all attempting to continue to breathe.

 

Who's ready?

 There are some obvious parallels trumpeting their existence and their similar dangers among world powers. Russia has invaded Ukraine with the intent of bringing her to her knees, if not actually prostrate before the Great Russian Bear. And while none of us would ever have dreamt, and certainly not anticipated it, The United States is enviously, deviously and brazenly threatening to ‘invade’ Canada, first in and through economic and diplomatic threats and incursions, in order to bring her bowing and scraping and begging for annexation to the Great Behemoth of the plutocracy of unfettered capitalism. To the side of this stage, in North America, the American media has noted the president has directed the Pentagon to prepare all options for the take-over of Panama, whose two port cities have just been sold to the American corporation, BlackRock, in a move than irritates, at least, China. At the same time, Greenland, just having voted for independence from Denmark, although she was declared a protectorate of the U.S. after Denmark’s occupation by Nazi Germany, during World War II, in 1940, prior to the U.S. entering the war. Following the war, the pre-war arrangement was restored.

Imperialism, whether under the banner of Russia, Israel, or the United States, or even China, (think Hong Kong and Taiwan), is nevertheless imperialism. And, in the current context, despots are the primary agents of this now galloping thrust in geopolitics.

Imperialism, by any other name is still domination, and domination is not able to be restricted or constrained by national boundaries. Just ask the hundreds of thousands of American public service workers whose jobs have been eliminated, under the pretext of waste, fraud, and corruption. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!) Or ask the millions of American government employees who now work for Cabinet Secretaries who, by their public admission, are determined to eviscerate the very departments to which they have been appointed. Their professional and personal credentials, if they have any, notwithstanding, it appears that none of them would ever have been recruited by a self-respecting corporation, or organization.

So, just as in Moscow, so in Washington, where a cluster of oligarchs sycophanticly genuflect to the emperor (who has no clothes), in order to prop up these papier-mache governments, led by cardboard cut-outs of men, whose only claim to power is their mendacious rhetoric, in support of their private-fantastical visions of utopia, all of it at the expense and destruction of what the world considered the ‘liberal world order’ of the last three-quarters of a century.

Guns and cash, in humungus proportions, however, can seduce these tyrants of their invincibility, and also their claim to self-righteousness, in pursuit of their hollow and vacuous ambitions.

In 1848, Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay entitled, Civil Disobedience, in which we find words, ideas, perceptions and attitudes that seem to have some direct application to the world we are living in in 2025.

(But) the rich man…is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the ‘means’ are increased. The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. (Thoreau, Walden and other Writings, Prospero Books, p. 291)

Of course, attempting to convince the despots and the oligarchs to read and to digest such thoughts, and to change their ways, would be analogous to strapping a single bed sheet to a mast and expecting to survive a tornado in the mid-Atlantic. Foolhardy and frivolous! It is to the rest of us, the millions of Americans, Canadians, Russians, and even Israelites, and perhaps to the people of all cultures, ethnicities, languages and religions, that the words and their import might have some chance to be considered. We live in a time when the question of money is not merely a method of keeping score, for a game of trading, exchange of baubles for furs; the archetypal god of the anima mundi is, Plutus, the personification of riches. And our herd-like adoration and adulation of any and all of his icons, has become the ‘food for which all of the Pavlovian dogs will do anything that imitates or replicates the bell, in order to grab, as greedily as possible, the money.

And, as one of the more obvious proofs that money has become our surrogate religion, we have no one, no organization, no court, and certainly no mosque, synagogue, cathedral or monastery sounding the alarm, and demanding the ‘turning of the tables’ that we so desperately need. Politics and governance, in North America, and around the world, is measured by how the government demonstrates stewardship of the public accounts. Transforming millions of individuals into entrepreneurs, via the internet, has the benefit of lifting many out of poverty, while enabling connections between consumer and artisan across the globe. Micro-loans, and the supporting tutelage to nurture the micro-businesses enhance the likelihood of their survival. It is at the ‘top end’ of the economic ladder that excessive wealth does what only excessive wealth can do, it corrupts absolutely (to borrow and amend Burke’s adage). If Thoreau’s observation that the only question the excessively rich man has to answer is how to spend it, and thus the moral ground has been taken from under his feet, it follows that we are increasingly under the thumb of precisely such men!

And as we watch their sycophantic, narcissistic, greed-based, moth-flutter to the bulb of the ‘top-dog,’ they take with them not only their insatiable appetite for more money, but also the determination to re-set the rules of the game of all political and economic ideologies, dispensing the capitalism and socialism and communism, and replacing all of them with oligarchism, a superficial mascara for tyranny.

These men care not a wit for other people; they care even less for the health of the planet and its environmental requisites for the sustaining of human life; they care not a wit for the poor and their right to public education, effective and accessible health care, the right to free speech, access to free and objective (not despotically controlled and manipulated) public information, and the personal and private security from the ‘state’ authorities all of whom answer and bow and scrape to the equivalent of the mob boss, now governing too many jurisdictions.

Like fiscal, physical, emotional, intellectual, political and power-obsessed clones, there is a new set of terrorist-gang leaders, under the guise of ‘phony’ elections and self-appointed perpetuity.

In in deep and graphic relief, are a few, count them on our fingers, rich men who, having attained considerable wealth, have at least read and reflected on Thoreau’s counsel: to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Names like Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, (and doubtless others) shine like beacons, in an otherwise dark galaxy of men of excessive wealth. Indeed, there are also many, lesser known, and to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor perhaps with less money, who themselves are fully engaged in philanthropic ventures to help others.

Having collaborated, whether consciously or not, in the erection of this shrine to the economic gods, we are all now impaled in the implications of both its attempt to destroy what we naively considered established ‘law’ and tradition, and custom and ‘world order,’ as well as the civilizations’ need to direct its attention, ambition, vision, imagination and energy to the monumental job of turning this ‘ship’ of public convention, military nuclear subs, drones, missile, and nuclear bombs away from what appears to this scribe as a head-long addiction to ‘self-sabotage’. We can see that the moral found has been removed from under the feet of these despots leaving no hope of their metanoia away from the addiction to personal power at all costs, into some modicum of mercy, compassion and universal equality.

Trade wars, flying like drones in the shape of tariffs, are now circling the globe, with the elemental and juvenile ‘tit-for-tat’ that demonstrates the moral and political and ideational bankruptcy of these MEN. Real drones, too, are laying their devastation when and wherever they find their military target. Operated anonymously, from some computer screen, on the opposite side of the planet from their target, they provide a clinical detachment for the killers, as well as for those ordering their deployment. Save the Children, UNICEF, Doctors without Borders, War Child, Ukrainian Foundation, and the plethora of other agencies cannot and will not be able to keep pace with the human devastation, no matter now successful their fund-raising efforts turn out to be.

We are all complicit as child-killers, refugee-generators, agents of migrant-seeking desperate hordes and millions of men, women and children who are starving and dying right before our eyes, on our screens and in the depths of our hearts, whether seen or not. A headline in The Humanitarian, this week, reads:

“The data streams that underpin humanitarian response are about to collapse.” The story continues: The FEWS NET, (Famine Early Warning Systems Network is a website of information and analysis of food insecurity created in 1985 by USAID, and the US Department of State after famines in East and West Africa. This week’s story reads:

On 21 February, anyone trying to access FEWS NET found a dead webpage. The site is a critical early warning data resource, which for 40 years has informed humanitarian response to hunger crises before they escalate into famines. Now, it is an early casualty to the USAID defunding crisis and an alarming harbinger of the assault on the data infrastructure that underpins humanitarian action.

This kind of back story, naturally, will not, indeed cannot make headlines, given the cataract of bluster, blunder and bombast spewing from the MOUTH in the Oval Office. No news outlet, with the best intentions, can or will keep up with the ‘poisoning smog’ a gaseous stream of lies constructed, written and disseminated to inflate the egos of the oligarchs and to distract the millions of ‘mere minions’ all of them easily duped, as perceived, believed and enacted by the men at the top of the hierarchical pyramid.

“World War III” is a phrase being chanted both in Washington and in Moscow, almost as if the same song-and-play-book were being deployed in both capitals. And who can or will doubt it is? Just as we are all refugee-generators, and child-killers, we also have the potential and the opportunity to emulate men like Zelensky, Starmer, Macron, and hopefully Carney, the newly minted Prime Minister of Canada, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

Divesting oligarchs of their wealth, while their perceived ‘idols’ willfully protect them and their power and wealth, so long as they remain loyal, and then eviscerate them at the first sign of disloyalty, is and will be a long-range project. Removing the despots, too, will require ‘acts of nature’ of which we are only groping for hints. It is the question of mounting determined, disciplined, convicted and courageous public opposition to the rape and pillage, not only of the ‘world order’ but of the lives of innocents, seemingly for the ‘fun-of-it,’ because ‘they can,’ that looms as the call to both action and to hope, if we are to have any.

Buying Canadian products, in the face of American illegitimate and illegal tariffs, while noble and honourable, will not dent the ego or the determination of the orange balloon in Washington. Even cutting off electricity to three American states, while it has been withdrawn, will replicate a fly on the lapel of the president, brushed off and dismissed summarily, in another act of contempt, disrespect and insulting patronizing.

Even marching to the embassies, and consulates, while honourable and noble, will never penetrated the Chuvalo-thick skulls of those in either the White House or the Kremlin. Recognizing the depth, the severity and the determination of those predators and perpretators of this scourge that stretches across oceans, continents, ideologies and ethnicities, and into the depths of the human psyche, means that we all are being conscripted, whether formally or informally or voluntarily, into action. Ou uniforms are our street clothes; our weapons are our words, our feet, our phones, our laptops and our neighbours. Our mission is to bring this (these) demoniacal monsters to heel and it will take ever last one of us, if we are to be even partially successful.

Those who have been calling us to join the fight to protect the environment, are the very ones for whom all of us must take up this ‘fight’….not with military arms, not with lies and propaganda, and not with the kind of personal pursuit of glory that motivates many of the heroes of history…but with a humility, and a determination, and a creativity that defies the thumb, the heel and the intransigent ego and vacuity of the villains.

As Prime Minister Carney asked rhetorically, ‘Who’s ready?’

The depth and breadth of the crisis Canada faces...

We are not only facing a global conflict between oligarchs/tyrants/despots and democracy.

We are not only facing a global conflict between globalization and internationalism, or between internationalism and nationalism.

We are not only facing a global conflict between environmental protectionists and environmental deniers and obstructionists.

We are not only facing a world-wide conflict between advocates for DEI and dogmatic absolutist opponents of all forms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

We are not only facing a global conflict between healthy masculinity and toxic, to the point of cancerous, masculinity.

We are not only facing a global tension between macro-economics and micro-economics.

We are not only facing a global conflict between religions, primarily between Islam and Christianity and between Islam and Judaism.

We are also facing a political, economic, epistemological and philosophical and psychological and ethical conflict and profound confusion about how to imagine, design, devise and execute a transition from the ‘old world order’ to a ‘new world order.’

‘Who will have ‘power’ and how will that power be conceptualized, defined, deployed and restrained?’ is a question that underlies each and every single iteration of the conflicts going forward. Binary, zero-sum equations, while they may have applications in some specific situations, are difficult, if not impossible to transfer and transmit from personal, familial and small to medium business applications to the global theatre. In the ‘theatre’ as an archetype, the playwright deploys dialogue between the characters as the agents of his theme, to carry out a plot, to embody their respective characters and to impact the audience in any of several faces of catharsis.

If our planetary ‘theatre’ is to be imagined as one shared by each and every one extant, and also each and every one, for at least seven generations, as the indigenous cultures expects and imagines and take account for, and we are all, somehow in some way articulating a kind of script, seeking for similar and different scripts, the world stage could not be more divided into ‘camps’ or ‘battalions’ in which each of us ‘sees’ ourselves as embedded with the ‘good guys’ and in mortal and life-and-death conflict with the ‘bad guys’.

I grew up in a small town in which the protestant batallion quite literally hated and was contemptuous of the Roman Catholic battalion. Even the Northern Ireland evangelical clergy incarnated such hatred from the pulpit: ‘If you are Roman Catholic you are going to hell!” words uttered in such a bigoted and self-righteous and hubristic manner and tone that they continue to ‘ring’ in my memory six decades later.

A parallel “either-or” seems to not only cloud but actually obliterate most if not all potentially reasonable, debatable, relatable discussion of each and every issue. And, the male bullies have taken over the airwaves, while abandoning both intellect and integrity at least on the North American and European ‘sets’ of this theatre’s stage..

In the U.S. election in November 2024, the primary western bully eviscerated his female opponent with hateful, character assassinations unbecoming  even the guttural mind and tongue of the drug cartel leaders, or the mafia. Positioning rational, carefully considered platform positions, in a campaign style of uplifting, hopeful and inspiring psychology, as Kamala Harris did so eloquently, in the end bounced off the dismissive tongue and finger-tips of the orange megalomanic. And they also found no receptive soil in the hatred, vengeance, racism, misogyny, and thuggery of his cult. Indeed, his cult became empowered in their absolutism that the ’woke’ crowd have been and were continuing to destroy the nation.

Pouring all of their contempt, jealousy, bigotry, racism and anger into their self-righteous rebellion, the MAGA millions returned the orange monster to the Oval Office now surrounded and aided and abetted by an army of sycophantic bigots and thugs assigned various leadership and executive titles and role throughout the government. One man has effectively, at least for the time being, brought about a coup or overthrow of what had been the United States government for well over 200 years. He has also overthrown American friendships, alliances, treaties and commitments to the WHO, to NATO, to USAID, and to the millions of government workers serving in hundreds of departments and agencies.

That degree of devastation, however, is still not enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite for power. He seeks to invade, both economically, and if necessary militarily, Panama, Greenland, and, so far only economically, Canada. Lately there has been even talk of re-drawing the boundary between the U.S. and Canada.

At the same moment, Canada is fully engaged in a political debate, within the Liberal Party, for a new leader to replace Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and in the nation at large, over how to ‘cope’ with the ravings of this unleashed, green-broke monster of a U.S. president, along with most European nations, save and except those loyal to Putin, North Korea, Belarus….and perhaps???? The public debates of the candidates for the Liberal leadership have, very politely, rationally, calmly and credibly addressed various approaches to tariffs, sovereignty, economics, inter-provincial trade, and enhanced production capacity as well as enhanced alliances in both economic/trade matters as well as national security.

One candidate, Ms Freeland, has even gone so far as to publicly indicate an intention to invite the Secretary General of NATO to her proposed meetings on both enhanced trade and shared security arrangements with Europe. That recommendation is not only meritorious, it is singular in its taking the current situation so seriously as to invoke some anxiety among some.

From the perspective of this scribe, it is only a first step in addressing how existential to Canada, in the first instance, and to the rest of Europe and perhaps even Asia is and will continue to be this menace in the Oval Office. Catastrophizing, at this moment, is a word that needs to be erased from our public debate and perception of the situation. It is not to catastrophize to envisage a U.S. attempt to ‘take-over’ if not economically and politically, at least to continue to berate America’s closest neighbour and ally for over 200 years, (since the war of 1812) with insults to our leaders, insults to our policies (drugs pouring into the U.S. and excessive trade imbalances, as well as ‘cheating’ the U.S. by depending on national security protection).

The friendly tension between the two front-runners, Mr. Carney and Ms Freeland, over who can be, is and will be toughest in dealing with the occupant of the Oval Office, while it is the central question of the leadership vote, is hardly the principal question for the country. Liberals voting for a leader will most likely be pre-occupied with that question.

However, the context is far more complex, far more nuanced, and far more dangerous than a mere ‘personality’ or ‘character’ or resume-based assessment both of the need in a leader and for the nation to conceptualize its current reality and how to go forward. Trump reduces every issue to one of competing personalities, even Canada has been ‘unfair’ as if we were a cheater on the international stage….only a bully who does engage in and is permitted to engage in such infantile reductionisms, even uses words of such vacuity. The media, on both sides of the 49^th parallel, having never seen, contemplated or even imagined a political drama like this one to have to report on, is exaggeratedly complicit in both fawning over and headlining the trump vacuity, lies and deceptions, all of them generated as trumpet blasts to inflate his hollow ego and person….for the purpose of attaining and holding onto power. And Canadian politicians, both federal and provincial are falling over themselves either on their way to Washington or into the office of some ‘assistant to the assistant’ to the president to present a case for withdrawal of announced tariffs.

For the media, perhaps all of these ‘genuflectings’ invite support and perhaps even electoral support (last night Premier Ford of Ontario received a massive popular vote). However, taken as a scene in the larger drama, they are little more than entertaining ‘chorus’ of the potential Greek tragedy.

Hardly noticed in Canada, on the other hand, has been the quiet, serious, calm, self-possessed and confident voice of the leader of Mexico, a newly elected female who refuses to be ‘cowed’ by the orange inflated balloon. And, it is that model of counter-balancing, female leadership that Ms Freeland offers  to and for Canadians, who, perhaps for the first time since 1939, have to adopt a perspective that includes all of Europe, Ukraine especially, and our allies in the South Pacific, like Japan and South Korea.

The schmoozing of both Macron and Starmer in the Oval Office, cannot and will not be replicated by either Ms Caludia Sheinbaum, president of Mexico, a politician, scientist and academic, nor Ms Freeland, also a politician, journalist and academic. And it is not only their achievements that enables them to take a very different posture in dealing with their respective crises, while representing their nations; it is also their steel-spines that have supported and enabled them to make their way through a male-dominated political culture to their respective leadership posts.

Men, on the other hand, have operated in and with a very different masculine culture, one that has been deeply embedded in the psychic, political and social and intellectual culture for centuries. And that culture is one that the occupant of the Oval Office has and will continue to dominate through lies, deceptions, hugs, hand-shakes, smiles and bonhomie….the grease that he thinks (believes, or knows nothing else) enables him to ‘screw’ everyone he attempts to make a deal with. There will be no touching, charming, schmoozing, or de-stabilizing of Ms Freeland in the Oval Office, nor will there be with Ms Sheinbaum. And, instead of the ‘guest’ being dis-armed, it will be the host who will be dis-armed….and that needs to be the opening salvo of any healthy negotiations for Mexico and Canada, with this chauvinist pig.

Women, in general, have coped with such male bullshit for centuries….and both Ms Sheinbaum and Ms Freeland are unlikely exceptions to that coping. Furthermore, the aspirations, visions and inspirations of millions of young, middle-aged and even greying women can and will only be enhanced, for the benefit of everyone on the planet, with the accession to leadership, in Canada, of Ms Freeland.

We need a much broader, deeper, and more creative perception, attitude and discipline that is or will be embodied in re-treading male-leadership models at this time. Angela Merkel, former Chancellor of Germany, currently undergoing some public disrepute for her open-border policies, nevertheless, captained both the EU and Germany through her encounters with Putin, different from Shultz and Merz. It is not that women have exclusive access to creative imagination nor to steel spines; it is just in this case that Ms Freeland offers a unique combination of education, experience and gender that Canada and North America and the new world order can and will benefit from. She is much more than and different from a ‘ferocious mother’…..she is a highly educated, articulate, experienced and disciplined female, potentially facing a convicted sex abuser, liar, despot, tyrant and megalomaniac, aligned with at least one other clone in the Kremlin.

Everything has changed for Canada and the world...

 “Zelinskyy is a dictator without elections and Ukraine started the war,” words uttered both in writing and orally by the occupant of the Oval Office yesterday.

All the multiple threats of tariffs, trade war, take-overs in Greenland, Gaza and Panama, withdrawal from the Paris Environmental Accord and the WHO, the demolition of USAID, plus the evisceration of the federal government under the ruse of ‘eliminating waste, fraud and abuse,’ pale to the obvious obsequious pandering to Putin by the orange dictator of America.

For Canada, this marks a significant shift in focus from the need to address primarily, or exclusively economic and fiscal and trade issues, to a focus on geopolitics and this shift needs to be made urgently. No longer are the protocols, the language, the subtlety and the patience that characterize diplo-speak-and-act, adequate to meet the situation. World leaders are stunned and gob-smacked, off balance and nervous and they would be sleeping under a rock if they were not. Can the EU coalesce around the need to provide security troops in Ukraine, should a peace be arranged? Can the EU and Canada scramble fast enough to ramp up both security and trade agreements and deals that might give NATO some ‘oxygen’ as it gasps in the Emergency Room of geopolitics for its very existence? Can world leaders align with conviction and muscle and commitment, those who espouse, believe in and embody the basic tenets of democracy, including the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to personal security from a malignant government/state, and resistance to the oligarchical, right-wing, white supremacist and nationalist winds that are sweeping across much of the globe?

We in Canada are in the midst of two elections, the first for the provincial government of Ontario, the nation’s most populous province, the second for leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Prime Minister. It is the national debate and discussion that seems most relevant and cogent here and now.

Two candidates, Marc Carney and Chrystia Freeland currently, according to polls and Elections Canada fundraising data, lead a pack of some 5 candidates. And both the prevailing theory, and public opinion hold that Mr. Carney, the former Governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, holds a significant lead over Ms Freeland. It is his ‘resume’ that has galvanized many members of the Liberal Party, those who will cast a vote for leader. Balancing the books, splitting the operating and the capital budget, in order to achieve ‘balance’ at least in one area, is an idea at the top of the Carney list of proposals. His primary focus, and expertise, it must be acknowledged, is economics, fiscal and monetary policy. And at a time when the cost of living is paramount in the minds and pocket-books of Canadians, the perception of any likelihood of a Liberal victory in the upcoming election seems to ride on the wave of both how to “deal” with the Trump threats against trade and Canadian sovereignty (he wants our natural resources, especially water and minerals and energy), and how to fix the Canadian economy. Canadians, too, especially Liberals, it must be acknowledged, really gravitate to a ‘winner’ a kind of projection of a leader to whom we can look up and admire, as if such a personage, whether the most appropriate or not, is our choice. And rising levels of anxiety foretell a return to ‘previous, reliable and dependable’ modes of both thought and behaviour. As pollster Nik Nanos puts it, “The race is Carney’s to lose!”

In this space, contrarian views seek revisiting, reflection, and uploading. And, based on the convergence of all the ‘dots’ on the radar screen of this scribe, especially given the global rise of a less than 1% of super-rich wannabe oligarchs, and the umbilical cord to power that leaders like Putin and Trump offer, their hooks are likely to remain firmly embedded in power for some time to come. And the relation between dictators and sycophants is based on more than money; those who write cheques are symbiotically enmeshed to their tyrants in and through their acts of adoring and adulating and flattering those tyrants. Who needs whom more is a question begging both untangling and doctoral research projects.

From the perspective of a low-middle-class octogenarian, this Canadian sees Mr. Carney, with respect, as a fitting image, if not actual mirror, of the elite mentality, ideation and imagination of the elites with whom he has worked his whole life. Some might call this reverse snobbery, the lower class being resentful of the upper class. I reject this judgement in this case simply because the future of Canada in a boiling global cauldron eclipses any notions of personal animus or prejudice based on this scribes resentment of the upper class.

What Canada needs is a Liberal leader and Prime Minister who has lived in  refugee camps and has lived with complex struggle from the beginning, as well as through the halls and libraries of various universities, and in the news rooms of multiple major news organizations. The perspective attitudes, imagination and resourcefulness that can really only come from such a broad, varied and challenging life story differ significantly from those bred in the board-rooms of national banks. It is not that those who have worked in national banks are less than, from the perspective of human dignity, personal worthiness or ethics. It is more that, in this case, the sensibilities of the board-room are not congruent with the nature of the exigencies that Canada and the world face. I know, personally, neither Mr. Carney nor Ms Freeland and I have no personal need to lean to one or the other.

It is simply and exclusively a deep-seated perception and attitude that keeps repeating the notion that a popular banker, although favoured by a majority of Cabinet and members of Parliament, and certainly in possession of vastly larger contributions from a considerably larger cadre of donors, is less fitted, and paradoxically less ‘complex’ and ‘subtle’ in imagination, in sensibility and in both compassion and empathy, a discernment that unsuccessfully begs empirical proof. Intuition is guiding and directing these keys, on this very cold February morning, only a couple of weeks prior to the March 9^th voting day for Liberal Party leader.

Amid all of the roiling geopolitical currents, at root, I want a government that puts the plight of the least among us (in our neighbourhood, province, nation and globe and that includes Ukraine and Palestine!) at the top of the decision-making totem of options…and keeps its eye on the victim. While the world is trumpeting extreme macho, alpha-male sexism, ageism, racism, and exclusion, I defer to a leader whose depth of experience and perception and attitudes slightly overshadows (perhaps by 51-49) those of the leading candidate. And Ms Freeland remains my choice as my reasons continue to become more clear.