Greenland, Panama, Canada: my views

I just spent a few days in Texas and had a great time — me, an old Diversity-Elitist-Iniquity Democrat, enjoying the state that gave us Ted Cruz. But it’s true. It was very congenial. I am on a new career as America’s Oldest Still-Standing Comedian and I didn’t talk politics and neither did the people I talked to. It’s easy not to, especially for us on the losing side. I’m a northerner and I believe in government because it plows the roads when it snows, and up north we don’t cancel school just because snow is forecast, which they do in Florida. This is one reason more mathematicians come from the Upper Mississippi than from Tallahassee. I also feel that when all the undocumented migrants are deported, our young college grads who majored in English aren’t going to like working in slaughterhouses or cleaning hotel rooms and we’ll find bone chips in the chicken and we’ll sleep in beds other people slept in and we’ll just have to get used to it.

I met a good many Baptists in Lubbock and Arlington and the lovely city of New Braunfels and didn’t talk politics except that I got the audience to sing “America” about freedom ringing from every mountainside. I didn’t see signs of decline in Texas nor people rejoicing at the beginning of a new golden age, but maybe I was looking in the wrong places.

I didn’t bring up the subject of Canada being the 51^st state because frankly I don’t think it is. For one thing, their French is better than ours and also there is no South up North and without the South, without New Orleans jazz and Delta blues and bluegrass and Black gospel quartets and corrupt governors, men passing a bottle of bourbon around, strip-mall evangelists hollering about hellfire and the Antichrist, there is no America as we know it. Canadian culture is of very limited range. It is missing the apocalyptic. Canada has never elected a prime minister who talked about Canadian carnage and illegal migrant Americans invading the country and who claimed to be the greatest leader in Canadian history, whom God had chosen to bring about a new golden age. That’s not them, that’s us.

The Trumps think of Canada as an extension of the USA because, being real estate tycoons, they don’t know about geography, except for Queens, Long Island, and Manhattan. And they have little experience with snow, DJT having had a limo driver since age five. He never had to stand in a blizzard by a highway waiting for the bus. The reason you never see a photo of little Donald in a classroom with other children is that one doesn’t exist: he had tutors. That is why he capitalizes so many words that don’t need capitalization.

So when he talks about annexing Canada and taking Greenland and going to war for the Panama Canal, he is slightly off the mark and someone needs to point this out.

You take over Greenland, you’re going to be dealing with the Greenlandic language which comes in three discrete dialects, Kalaallisut, Tunumiit, and Inuktun, each with a few thousand speakers who are devoted to their tongue. You get involved with those people, you’ll be walking around with a Greenlandic app on your iPhone and even so you’ll be misunderstood. We’d be wise to skip this.

A war in the Gulf of America to liberate the Canal would threaten the cruise industry and also shut down the Canal itself, which would immediately raise prices on consumer goods from China.

But the real threat is a Canadian invasion.

Our northern border is the least defended border in the world — some places in North Dakota and Minnesota, only a single strand of barbed wire marks it. Coyotes cross it daily, deer, bears. Canadian Mounties on snowmobiles could come sweeping across and get to Iowa before anybody would realize it and their advantage over American troops is obvious. A disproportionate number of American enlisted men and women are from southern states and have never gone into combat in cold weather. Iraq and Vietnam were hard enough, but a war in Wisconsin in February would be big big trouble.

I like the idea of knocking down windmills and drilling for oil in Yellowstone and Kash Patel will be the Greatest FBI Director in American History (move over, J. Edgar Hoover), but I’d leave Canada to itself.

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