Outlaws...and humans trembling with tendernesss...May 30, 2025

 Like so many others, this scribe has been rummaging around in search of an image that is most fitting and appropriate for how to depict the tragic drama unfolding in America.

Outlaw figures have been explored in many American art forms, literature, film and music. Some of the obvious and deployed themes, (reasons, justifications, motivations, and contextualizations) that have characterized this image include:

Rebellion against authority, pursuit of freedom, the good badman and the fringes of Society are some of those themes.

Often too, they have been portrayed as having a commitment to some form of honour code.

From firstdraftpro.com, we read:

These characters are rule-breakers, often living on the fringe of society…Their rebellious nature invariably stirs conflict, propelling the narrative forward. Historically, the outlaw archetype has mirrored societal attitudes towards authority and rebellion. (For writers attempting to depict outlaws, this tutorial) …Avoid making them one-dimensional rebels or glorified miscreants. Ensure they have personal stakes and growth. Don’t rely on their rebellious nature; develop their relationships, ethical dilemmas, and internal conflicts to create a well-rounded character.

The literary perspective, however, is not the perspective of the news media. They are interested in ‘what defines the news’….From dictionary.cambridge.org,

News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. News is sometimes called ‘hard news’ to differentiate it from soft media.

We cannot miss the obvious intersection of the ‘news’ treatment of outlaws with the literary treatment of outlaws, even if only one difference is considered….’ensure they have personal stakes and growth…don’t rely on their rebellious narture, develop their relationships, ethical dilemmas, and internal conflicts to create a well-rounded character.

First, the current incarnation of the American outlaw, has only a single ‘stake,’ the acquisition of whatever it takes to achieve universal fame, wealth, power, status, and growth too, is not measured in personal internal change, merely in terms of observable, measureable, dollar-documented wealth, buildings, titles, planes, and the single dimension of personal ‘world-endorsed, and world-wide-recognized status’ as ‘formidable, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent…all of this leaves any reporting confined to the stick-man, cardboard-cutout of a male, drawn in one-dimension by the chief executive himself, thereby eliminating any trait or behaviour that might hint at ‘intrinsic human value.’

So, the main-stream media are left to report, repeat, report, repeat, the same story every hour of every day, in the hope that something will interrupt the narrative….like the occasional district court judge, whose ruling will inevitably be appealed, stayed, and then we all await whatever the final outcome might be. Of course, the vagaries of applied tariffs on steroids almost universally, under false legal pretexts, (isn’t everything this outlaw does ‘under false pretexts’?) will be challenged in court, and whatever negative decision a court makes will be automatically appealed by the Oval Office, in order to continue the dance of the fanstastic, topsy-turvy, underworld of monsters and ghosts.

And while there is an ‘extreme’ oscillating pattern (theatrical, political psychological, legal, from one high Barnum and Bailey circus-like pronouncement, to one very low non-accomplishment, really another failure), there is an inescapable pseudo-drama of another artificial high, both for the protagonist as well as for the cult that is enthralled by the pseudo-drama. Some Wall Street wit has dubbed the elected president’s tariff wars in a four letter bumper sticker: TACO: Trump always chickens out.

This outlaw archetype seems to have morphed into a societal, cultural, political, and even geopolitical methamphetamine….a false, highly toxic and dangerous pseudo-chemical that induces a false ‘high as a mental state (apparently within the protagonist as well as within his acolytes and millions of adoring victims)  that can  offer neither the kind of catharsis of a Shakespearean tragedy, nor the political significance of a ‘Treaty of Versailles’ that truly commits signatories to a peace treaty….only to be abrogated decades later.

The single motive of a single man has somehow been given permission and impunity from legal restraint to enact whatever devious, heinous, nefarious, inhumane, sinister, and frozen-in-evil whims to starve millions of his own people, to destroy the traditions and the institutions that have been forged into the deep earth of the American psyche, and to wrest humanitarian aid from millions of desperate people around the world, and to bring the world economy to a screeching crash on a faux-brick wall that is composed of a single ‘human will attached to a papier maché conscience.

And it is for this rather complicated convergence of the literary, the journalistic, the legal, the medical and the underworld traits of a drama such as we have never fully experienced, that renders those who might be opposed, appalled, and frightened (not to mention the intimidation and lethal threats against any and all opponents), confused, dumb-founded, frustrated, stunned, scrambling and grasping at any straw that might possibly bring some relief, or at least a pause in the Chain Stokes national breathing…

And it can be missed by no amateur observer, even this one foreigner, that something akin to the death throes of a dying COPD patient is also analogous to this moment, if viewed from the perspective of an attending Emergency Room doctor.

It is almost as if by strangulation of the air waves, the universities, the media, the very truth itself, as well as of the international leaders whose pitiable pilgrimages to kiss the ring of this pseudo-pope, this kangaroo-court-king, and this emperor with no clothes has succeeded in not merely projecting emasculation on his nation and much of the world, but has also tragically and permanently divulged the self-sabotage of his own emasculation….for all of this pseudo-power, what emerges when all is said and done, is nothing less than a colossal, pitiable, helium-inflated, vacuous eunuch…envisioned so poetically by T.S. Eliot in his poem, The Hollow Men:

We are (He is) the hollow men

We are the hollow men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind against dry grass

Or rat’s feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without

   Colour

Paralysed force, gesture without

   Motion……

And while this piece is written about the plural “we”…..the danger Eliot envisions is not an exaggeration of the potential fate of America….(from the latter portion of the same poem)

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplications of a dead man’s

   Hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom

Waking alone

At this hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone…..

Humans trembling with tenderness still work and live and pray and worship and read and study and invent and produce and manage and uplift other humans trembling with tenderness across America…

And it is those humans trembling with tenderness, together, that will experience the force of their tenderness slaying this phantom dragon, eventually!

Another wake-up call to rein in the American deconstruction project 2025

 Specialization, as opposed to wokeism, can be a limiting perspective…

And a platinum example is playing out south of the 49^th parallel…

Language, tradition, history, ethics and protocols of both journalism and law have so far failed to penetrate the armour and the conscience, and the shame and the guilt and the hate of the current administration….and while the street protests are far ahead of both the administration and the public mainstream media, the language that is filling the airwaves and the print columns are like a predictable merry-go-round of the uroborus snake, cutting an ever deeper circle with it head in its tail.

What is happening, among other things, is that a social, cultural, and quasi-pseudo religious cult has taken over the American state, headed by a confirmed cult-leader, obsessively-compulsively entombed in the vagaries of his own mind. And millions of Americans are feeding off this ‘faux-food’ of lies, deceptions, perversions, distortions, anger, hate, bigotry, sexism and nativism, all wrapped up, in a phoney iteration of the American flag, the Pentagon, the deconstructist determination to “bomb” the American government. While no literal bombs are falling, metaphoric bombs are raging a scorched earth campaign on the men and women who have served their homeland in various government capacities, while institutions are being eviscerated, the MAGA cult is either openly injecting steroids into the reservoir of bile that fuels this movement, or cheering from the sidelines, in confirmation of their conviction that they vote was well placed.

Political rhetoric that uses words like reason, trust, reliability, predictability, scientific graphs and statistics of dollars, numbers of people, legalities of defiance of the courts, Congress, law suits that effectively knee-cap CBS, Harvard, Columbia, University of Michigan, and political appointments that are designed to put totally incompetent, sycophantic, and cult-addicts in charge of departments they are sworn to destroy, appears from this perch north of the 49^th parallel to be a disconnect of both the perspective of ‘the attack’ on this cult, the language deployed and the potential impact of its thrust.

What does that last sentence mean?

It means that a literal, empirical legal, political science epistemology is so many ‘feathers’ in  a gang-land war against men who are essentially anarchists. The anarchists will laugh at, tease, ignore and insult the ‘feathers’ in a derisive vocabulary of character assassination, rational and demonstrable lies, and dig deeper into the Project 2025, ‘trump-kampf’ that hangs over the roof of every government building, every religious sanctuary, and every kitchen table.

Please, while the courts will do whatever they can, (all the while over 250 judges have received pizzas delivered in the name of Daniel Anderi, the murdered son of a Judge Esther Salas, as threatening intimidation), it is not enough to rely on the courts to rein in this avalanche of societal, governmental, religious, scientific and intellectual ‘death’ that is raging across the airwaves, the social media and the classrooms in America.

There is not a single ‘aspirational vision’ that American and the world has been striving to attain, and to take steps in those directions that this administration is not prepared, funded and committed to derail. And the people responsible, as well as the institutions that supported and sustained those ethical, moral, social and cultural aspirations are falling by the wayside as the avalanche rolls over them.

Religious cults, by the definition, have a kind of power and influence that exceeds that of a political party, or even a scientific theory, or a movie script. American culture is replete with cults:

·      People’s Temple with Jim Jones

·      The Manson family

·      Heaven’s Gate and the Branch Dividians

·      Church of Scientology

Cults, by definition are considered to have religious roots, overtones, practices and leaders and yet a national administration is never considered, conceived of or perceived as a ‘religious cult’ especially as it enters office under a false rubric of Republican Party. Cult leaders customarily position themselves as absolute rulers, all-knowing, all-powerful, and highly punitive and vindictive. Followers, think those who consider the president a messiah sent by God, are often smitten, seduced, converted to the ‘faith’ of whatever the cult leader is selling.

Described as a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object, and a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs of practices regarded by others a stranger or sinister and a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing, a cult of personality surrounding a leader (Oxford)….

Although this horde cannot be considered small, (over 70M voters), the other descriptors seem to apply almost fully.

Some of the ways to identify a cult include:

ü Glorification of the leader

ü An answer for everything

ü Restrictions on travel or movement

ü Pressure to make quick decisions

ü Exploitation of members

ü Closed groups

ü Demonization of outsiders

ü Claims of divinity or special powers

ü Rejection of critical thought

ü Documented abuses

 

And members, too, display some common traits:

§  Persecution complex

§  Dependency

§  Loss of self

§  Rationalization

§  Isolation     

 (Recognizing and Combating Cults, Allen Faulton, Medium, Nov. 1, 2019)

 The conventional approaches to reducing the influence of cults is directed to those seeking to help a single person free himself or herself from the cult….Another maxim is never criticize the cult….

Oops!….well, special times require special approaches…

And while the legal and political, the law enforcement agencies have their work cut out for them, the language and perception, attitudes and clear depiction of what it is the U.S and the world is now dealing with has to be starkly stated.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church which essentially revolved around the charismatic clergy, whose words were never challenged, whose ‘success’ was measured in dollars and bums in pews, and with an overflowing sanctuary, spilling from Sunday mornings in to Sunday evenings, and even down to the town dock for public revival meetings in summer, there were a small group of men (no women)who behaved as if this leader was a messiah-clone, religiously, psychologically, and culturally.

So, perhaps, some of the words here are ‘penned’ as part of an overdue catharsis for this scribe. Nevertheless, the parade of literal and damning evidence of wrong, whether legal, moral or ethical, is likely only to embolden those engaged in the preservation of this American scourge.

And we must not permit language or formulas to prevent the ultimate ‘take-down’ of this cancer. We cannot treat it as a medical problem or a psychological problem or a media or an economic problem or a ‘fairness’ problem (we hear the argument droned on daily, hourly, that the world has been taking the United States for granted and abusing the nation for years, by ripping it off in trade practices)….

We have to see this as a social, political, intellectual and moral and ethical epidemic needing the responses of the whole world, lest it inflict its heinous thoughts and attitudes, perceptions and actions on the planet’s ecosystem, the political stability, the social and legal frameworks that protect humans removal of human rights, and institutions from their legal, moral, ethical and social responsibilities.

Even ‘beheading’ politically, legally the leader through some process such as impeachment, or constitutional removal of some sort, will only provide opportunity for other ‘heads’ to pop up in replacement. And the scourge will continue.

This is evil incarnate….and the world has been struggling to ‘minimize the impact of sheer rock-solid evil for centuries.

Uriel Abulof, in Psychology Today, in  piece entitled, ‘What makes evil and how do we defeat it?’, October 27, 2023, writes:

But what is evil? My working definition of evil is simple enough. Evil means treating humans as things. Evil means seeing and treating people as obstacles to be removed or assets to be abused for one’s benefit or pleasure (Kant’s self-conceit)/Either way, evil treats humans as things to be discarded. The implication is clear and troubling enough: We all harbor evil. This ‘banality of evil’ drives some to resigned nihilism; we’re all bad; nothing matters. But it should motivate us in the opposite direction to be involved, to think things through, to devise our own conscience, individual and public and to act accordingly.

When we treat evil, we tread with caution. The more we think in dichotomous go(0)d-(d)evil, the more we become prone to becoming evil ourselves. To state the obvious, if fighting monsters means becoming one, and defeating evil means becoming evil, we fought for naught…..

Realizing morality though a non-binary lens reveals a paradox; a main impediment to defeating evil if believing it exists—and can be defeated. Like pure righteousness, omnibenevolence, pure evil—the uppercase Evil—is a Metaphysical construct. Actual human beings are not Evil, and thus, unlike mortal people, Evil can never be killed or defeated.

Even early in this piece, political rhetoric on steroids, metaphors of epidemic, scourge, cancer, are inflated in order to prompt some wake-up among those honourable and reasonable men and women who seem quite comfortable sleeping through or walking away from their/our shared responsibility to bring this administration to heel. They are not designed or delivered to eradicate Evil.

Memo to North American media news rooms, editors and publishers, May 20, 2025

 As the adage puts it, the world has changed….and not for ‘the better’….and the old journalism will only inescapably and inevitably fall into the trap of the basic principles, practices and perceptions that were applicable, and taught as ‘essential’ to all those who have already graduated from Journalism schools.

A glaring example comes from the well-researched and credible and authoritative book on the ‘Biden cover-up by Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios.

Arguing that the media was lied to by the Biden White house, to protect the former President from having to acknowledge publicly his state of physical and cognitive health, is a premise that few can or will dispute. And, from the perspective of the history of the United States, there might well have been a different result from the election of 2024, had Kamala Harris been afforded the normal, requisite time to mount a successful campaign against the eventual winner.

However, even from a perch north of the 49^th parallel, no matter which American network one chooses, and no matter what time of day or night, the copy and the interviews are totally and ponderously, as well as almost excitedly, filled to overflowing with trump----whatever…..He has effectively, and single-handedly, taken over the American airwaves, and the editorial justification has to be something like, ‘he is the president, and the president has to be covered because whatever he says or does is historic.’

And while there is legitimacy to that argument and position, and editorial lens, there is another perspective that warrants a very different perspective. Rachel Maddow, for example, spends most of her Monday night broadcasts documenting the millions of Americans who are protesting daily in every state, against the president and his administration. And while highly honourable and justified, and a worthy beginning of support for the national project to depose this president and his admisistration, it is only a small first step.

Here are some thoughts, albeit somewhat pretentious coming as they do from a Canadian who should never offer suggestions to any of the behemoths of the American journalism enterprise, that might offer a ‘northern’ and somewhat ‘colder; and ‘detached’ perspective on the current existential crisis….and it is a crisis not only for American but for the whole world:

Proposed from the perspective of this ‘moment’ is both an existential crisis, and also an epic opportunity to ‘broaden and deepen’ the American audience not only to the details of what has constituted news (high interest man-biting-dog ironies, and lawyers chasing ambulances, and fires, floods and hurricanes and droughts) to a more insightful, research-based, and digested and curated language and packaging (program design and delivery)….

These ideas, which would require considerable adjustment both to the operating premises of the journalistic fraternity and sorority, and would begin to move the American perspective from the ‘micro-facts to the macro-meanings, elevate the local and regional to the national consciousness, integrate the world into the American ‘screens’ as well as into the American consciousness and perspective, and begin to move the culture away from the fixated addiction and obsession with all things economic, fiscal, monetary, financial and corporatist…as well as parochial, divisive, zero-sum-competitive, and both literal and empirical….into a more imaginative, more speculative, more tolerant and collaborative, as well as more conscious of the relative significance of the American weaknesses and blindnesses, as well as the American leadership….and not exclusively that of the current president and administration.

The intersection of a broad range of both ideas and information is one of the most potentially potent arrows in the quiver of the American people, and taking both the focus and the conversation, and the thinking away from the current Oval Office, while not ignoring how damaging ignorance to those scurrilous and heinous motives and initiatives continue to be, is one available avenue for public ‘orientation’ to take advantage of this conundrum.

More specific suggestions:

Is there a way to precis, edit, curate, and simply ‘bullet’ the trump-tsunami, into a once-a-day 30-minute package, that both reduces his personal domination of your media, while also conveying the essential and invasive components and implications of his admittedly ‘deconstruction’ of the nation state. And such a 30-minute package could be followed by another 30-minute package of responsible, and even balanced critique and review of the initial package.

Such a 60-minute ‘duet’ could be scheduled at a time when it would bring in both the projected largest Neilson ratings as well as the maximum advertising revenue.The rest of the cable news networks’ airtime could then be dedicated to the news of the world, embracing details from the major capitals of the world, the latest new-worthy evidence of the state of the global environment and any new protective and preventive interventions as well as any new evidence of growing risk and danger, the state of race relations with details from every state in the union, the detailed risks and accomplishments of the individual state boards of education and their students’ and teachers’ achievements, as well as new risks such as ‘safety and security risks to both students and teachers, the implications of judicial entropy from both the state and national levels, the best reviews of the latest movies and both television and stage productions, the latest fashions in home design, male and female wardrobe changes, and a scholarly examination of the gestalt of American cultural, not only from the perspective of law enforcement challenges, specific horrific incidents, and the economic trend-marks such as the job reports, the GDP, inflation news and market analysis.

In Canada, too, the fixation on the ‘trump’ ubiquity and cancerous implications needs to be moderated by reducing the size and the frequency of the editorial prescriptions of trumpicity. And such reductions can only come from the news editors and directors and the executives that continue to be beholden to both journalistic models that do not ‘fit’ these circumstances, and also the advertisers’ cheques on which networks continue to depend.

Trimming the verbal, exposure, dominance ‘wings’ of this current malevolent and nefarious monster, is neither an easy nor a matter that can be left to chance, nor to his monumental and scurrilous 24-7-365 rants.

When the words, ‘we are all in this together’ are uttered, the news media has to hear them as directly and indirectly applying to their megaphones….and rather than insult, expose and litigate all of the malfeasance, trim its volume, its ubiquity, its supremacy and its cancerous impact…..

In the long run, all national media outlets, especially those dedicated to ‘all news’ will find both their ratings their revenue dropping as they continue to saturate their air-time with trump….and, while there will be a transitional, adjustment period of shifting away from trump-every-hour-every-moment-every-day,  the long-term impact and goal is to right the ship both of ‘state’ and the media whose interests have to be calculated in the best interest of the long-term-survival of the public square.

This is not an argument, as it will inevitably be considered, to constrict the ‘freedom of speech’ one of the idols at which the administration worships, unless and until that speech is determined to be offensive, and even dangerous to the national interest…..it is a memo to engage in the universal process that haunts every single self-respecting  citizen in North American to respond to the question:

What can I do to help eviscerate, eliminate, remove, and get past this cancerous scourge of both man and administration that has taken over our shared public air space….and threatens not only the global environment but also the relationships of decent, self-respecting and law-abiding citizens everywhere.

Thanks Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, but more thanks to Robert Reich, and people like Paul Krugman, Ruth ben Ghiat, Timothy Snyder….and others who can be given as much air time as they can accommodate….this is an information as well as an indoctrination and propaganda war and we have to bring our best and brightest minds and facilities to the fight each and every day, until this dark and life-threatening cloud lifts.

And for those like Michael Smerconish who persist in ‘covering both sides,’ while arguably not ‘trumping’ for trump, he and others are nevertheless giving the man and his administration more positive air time than is appropriate, necessary and judicial at this time….the rules of journalism have to adapt to the new circumstances.

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!