The Well of Nothingness

A Canadian answer to Mister Trump

The Well of Nothingness

             (I never thought that I would have to write this.)

There was once a belief (perhaps it is still floating around … somewhere) that when Donald Trump was elected president, he would be sobered by his office.  I suppose the same thing was said of Hitler when he was elected Chancellor in 1933. Both assumptions were wrongs. Egomaniacs do not get sobered by power.   They get intoxicated.  Stalin and Mao Tse Tung showed similar traits when given high office evolving into absolute paranoid ridden dictators.

In the days before his inauguration Trump stated he would slap a twenty-five tariff on Mexican and Canadian goods. In the greatest political blunder of his term as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar a Lago to dine with Trump and persuade him to change his mind; the worst thing that he could have done.

Over the past few weeks Trump had made clear that his ultimate scheme is to so cripple the Canadian economy that it will beg to become part of the United States. America will therefore gain all of Canada’s resources. The scheme is breathtaking in its stupidity.  Suppose President Xe of China levied fifty per cent tariffs on all American imports and then told President Trump (or Governor Trump) if you become part of China tariffs will be dropped. How many Americans would begin to learn Chinese?  How many would be willing to abandon their countries for a few extra dollars?

When I was a school boy on November 11 we would celebrate Remembrance Day, when the First World War ended.  Down the main street the old veterans would march, some with canes and some in wheelchairs. Joining them would be veterans of the Second World and Korea. Most of these men were not famous or powerful. Many were eking out a living on their pensions but they marched watched by respectful crowds of their countrymen. They are gone now, only a handful still surviving, but I remember them. They possessed something I have never seen in Mister Trump, something he probably does not understand.

Dignity. Trump is known as a deal maker. These men were not deal makers.  There were no deals to be made in the trenches of the Somme, or on the beaches of Normandy,or on a North Atlantic convoy.These men had been to Hell and had returned. Many of their comrades had not. Every November they would march and we would remember.

A nation is not a corporation. It is a body of people held together by memories, by a common sense of being. Trump does not know this. He lives in a deep well of nothingness, an inflated ego trying to prove his greatness by bullying a people less in number than his own.  He does not even know what greatness is.