Essays in Idleness

We now have it straight from the lips of Michelle Obama, that anyone who does not vote for Kamala Harris is a sexist and a racist, and from Kamala Harris’s, that Donald Trump is a fascist. From me you have heard that anyone who votes Democrat (or has voted Democrat in the last sixty years) is a Woke Marxist. I prefer Republicans, and specifically two from California, and one from New York. (Nixon, Reagan, Trump.) My current pick for President of the USA is actually Trump, though I like J. D. Vance better. Trump has a basic understanding of how the world works, and appreciation of the American Constitution; he is theatrical, but sane. He appeals to me because I am pro-American, and somewhat interested in personal survival. This has nothing to do with democracy, of course.

My standards for politicians have never been very high. That means I am not opposed to them, absolutely. I do not look for the best, however, but for the least bad. I am radically opposed to those who will not tell the truth, except perhaps at gunpoint. Yet even in this stressful situation, they would probably lie, for they are, medically speaking, compulsive liars.

In Canada if not the States, our political culture was relatively sane as recently as when our prime minister was Louis St Laurent (defeated, 1957). In the United States, I would celebrate Calvin Coolidge as the least bad president in the XXth century, and mark Woodrow Wilson as the most bad. He was the first (Yankee-doodle) “Woke Marxist,” to use that expression expansively. He was, in the most poisonous sense of these words, an academic and an intellectual. But in those days the government was so constrained — by the Constitution, which did not begin to be discontinued until Lincoln — that the amount of ideology it could impose fell short of comprehensive. Nevertheless, Wilson and his batty wife did what damage they could.

Listening to the Misses Obama and Harris, one feels nostalgia for the days when the modest voter would shy from termagants and madwomen.