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And we need to stand on guard for thee. On Monday, in the aftermath of Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, Ford told reporters he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s previous threats to turn our great country into America’s 51st state: “It’s not going to frighten me.” But should it? Should we all be frightened after this weekend? Maduro was captured in a military assault that took less time than it takes to make lasagna from scratch. Trump has abandoned his dream of getting the Nobel Peace Prize. He is now on a war footing and there are many spoils in Ontario. I’m certain lunatics such as Pam Bondi or Kash Patel are searching for a pretext to arrest Ford. Was it illegal under the WTO for Ford to remove all American liquor bottles from the LCBO? Does the muddled privatization of Ontario’s recycling program pose an existential risk to Michigan landfills? Does Ford’s ongoing war of words with the president qualify as an actual act of war? Should Toronto be renamed Trumponto? Trump is preoccupied in the Caribbean right now. But we know he has the attention span of a fruit fly. Eventually, someone in his inner circle will casually say, “Why don’t we capture that Doug Ford guy and take over Ontario’s automotive, machinery, minerals and food sectors?” Compared to Venezuela, this mission will be called Operation Absolute Breeze. The Pentagon won’t need to send bombers or Delta Force soldiers. The Salvation Army could probably nab Ford outside a Home Depot and take him to Rikers Island where Kristi Noem in a stolen OPP uniform will ask through glitter lips, “Why did you run that ad? Big mistake.” After this weekend, Canada needs to recalibrate our threat matrix to the south. America has gone from a neighbour we could ask for a cup of sugar to someone peering into our windows at 3 a.m. while casing the joint for valuables that can be pawned in crypto. Doug Ford needs to be careful when he enters and exits Queen’s Park this year. America is in a hostile takeover mood and we are in plain sight.
I am not left. I am not right. I am a traveler, which is a dangerous position in a country that prefers uniforms. I came to this conclusion the way Oppenheimer did—not by choosing a side, but by standing too close to the machinery and watching what it actually does when it’s turned on.
The Western Hemisphere does not need more punishment. It has had centuries of that. What it lacks is charity—the inconvenient, unprofitable kind that requires looking people in the eye instead of filing them into categories. Sin is easy to identify. Mercy is harder to administer.
My family line runs straight through the slave-holding corridor of Missouri, a geographical scar that never healed. My great-great-grandmother was an in-law cousin of Bloody Bill Anderson, a fact that sits in the family tree like unexploded ordnance. Everyone has seen the movie version of that war, but the real one never ended. It just learned how to dress better. Statues go up. Statues come down. The argument stays put.
The same people shouting about greatness now were whispering about secession thirty-five years ago. It’s the same sentence with different punctuation.
I once worked for an antiquarian book dealer who had gone to school with the wife of a man high up in American psychological warfare. That is not a metaphor. Men really do stare at goats. They also stare at nations and try to convince them of things that aren’t true, often with academic confidence.
Someone once called me a skinhead. I replied “redskin,” an old Berlin term for a communist skinhead—a linguistic false flag if there ever was one. I dislike fascists on principle, but I’ve noticed they are diligent readers. Mussolini kept The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon on his nightstand, the way other men keep a Bible. Different scriptures. Same hunger for certainty.
Poor Doug Ford, premier of Ontario—brother now gone, past full of bad decisions. He sold hash in high school and would have been someone I listened to metal records with back when my idea of cool was narrow and loud. History has a sense of humor that borders on cruel.
There is an old book called The Ugly American. It was about Americans damaging the world by trying to dominate it after the Second World War. What we are seeing now is worse. The damage has folded inward. America First doesn’t explode—it collapses. It becomes a gravity well, sucking everything into itself, dragging us backward into a deep past where thieves wear crowns and call it order.
That’s not ideology. That’s physics.
