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.