Noam Chomsky
Mark Kingwell
Naomi Klein
Arundhati Roy
Evelyn Lau
Stephen Lewis
Robert Fisk
Margaret Somerville
Mona Eltahawy
Michael Moore
Julius Grey
Irshad Manji
Richard Rodriguez Navi Pillay
Ernesto Zedillo
Pico Iyer
Edward Said
Jean Baudrillard
Bill Moyers
Barbara Ehrenreich
Leon Wieseltier
Nayan Chanda
Charles Lewis
John Lavery
Tariq Ali
Michael Albert
Rochelle Gurstein
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
from the promised land
INTO THE WILDNERNESS
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David Solway is a Canadian poet and distinguished essayist (Random Walks). His editorials appear regularly in PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019. His latest book of essays, Crossing the Jordan, is now available.
My wife
and I have just moved to the lovely island of Kauai
in the Hawaiian archipelago, where we intend to spend
several months a year recovering from the Canadian winter
and its accompanying Kelvin-scale politics. We are gradually
getting to know the island and its people, a mixed population
of natives, expatriates, Filipinos, Japanese, and assorted
others.
The “vibe,”
as we say, is upbeat, the landscape striking in its
beauty, and the people, for the most part, are laid
back, hospitable, and not particularly political. In
the florid rhetoric of a travel book I’d been
reading, Kauai is blessed with “lush landscapes,
cascading waterfalls, pristine beaches, and [a] vibrant
cultural tapestry…where serenity and adventure
harmonize,” which is true if somewhat ornately
rendered.
I’ve
also come to appreciate the music scene, which is quite
lively, too. The bass player for The Eagles visited
the shop where I just bought two Taylor guitars plus
a keyboard for Janice. And I met the well-known Texas
guitarist Mike McLean there and picked up a few finger-and-chord
tricks from him.
If we had
residency status, we'd sell our suite and buy a house
on Hoona Road just south of the Poipu roundabout near
Spouting Horn — assuming we could afford it. The
Feng Shui is amazing. Regrettably, not being border-storming
illegals, we are bound by American law to a maximum
stay of 181 days per year. Green cards are not in the
offing, and the citizenship route, as we have been apprised,
would be difficult, lengthy, and not guaranteed.
It should
be obvious to any reasonable person that the U.S. under
a Trump administration is the place to be and a conceivable
harbinger, as one columnist believes, of an “incredible
future,” certainly in non-sanctuary states. But
not all would agree.
Recently,
we ran into a rather gregarious woman who informed us
she was a retiree from the mainland pursuing a free
and leisurely life in Hawaii, as electorally blue a
state as one could hope to find in the U.S. However,
in the wake of Donald Trump’s resounding victory,
she was now rethinking her decision and, like so many
febrile and sanctimonious American feminists, considering
moving to Canada. From her perspective, America was
clearly throwing itself into the arms of Orange Man
Bad, as cruel and barbaric a dictator as one could imagine,
Hitler redivus, maybe worse. Even Hawaii was no longer
safe. After all, Tulsi Gabbard had now converted to
the Trumpian faith, a MAGAtrocity praised by no less
an authority than Hawaii’s daily Star-Advertiser.
The blue wall is showing chinks even in Obama’s
home state.
I held my
tongue but knew how I wanted to respond, which would
not have been in caveated language. Why anyone would
want to leave the Garden Isle for terra incognita, especially
on so flimsy a pretext as untutored resentment and political
ingenuousness, struck me as the height of folly. There
is no dealing with people who insist on remaining illiterate
when parsing the real world.
This poor
lagomorph might have felt differently had she been aware
that moving to Canada meant paying $8 for a gallon of
gasoline, close to 50% higher food prices across the
board, a capital gains tax docking her investments at
67% past a certain relatively moderate limit, an utterly
useless carbon tax devastating Canadian households,
hamstringing industry and bankrupting farmers, runaway
inflation dwarfing that of other G-20 nations, and legislative
abominations snaking their way through parliament like
Bill C-63 levying fines of up to $70,000 and possible
life imprisonment for anonymously reported “hate
speech” offenses — that is, for things said
or written years ago, said or written today, or that
might be said or written in the future. Shades of "Minority
Report." One would only have to look to North Korea
or Keir Starmer’s terminal U.K. sliding into a
socialist nightmare to see the political vector on which
Canada has embarked.
One thinks
of the nonsense spewed by a dim-witted Eva Longoria,
who believes the fubar canard that “a convicted
criminal who spews so much hate could hold the highest
office” — the typical sub-cortical response
to Trump common to celebrity culture, to members of
an incestuous political cult, and to deluded ordinary
folk as well. Unlike the vast majority of her hysterical
colleagues, Longoria will, apparently, at least make
good on her promise to turn her back on America, for
which we would be grateful. Would that all such TDS
loonies and unhinged progressives follow her example,
though almost none will keep their word, alas.
Of course,
our new acquaintance wasn’t about to leave her
island sinecure. America was a country you could safely
detest while continuing to enjoy all its manifold advantages.
Others like her have adopted another tactic to express
their displeasure. Having declared their intention to
leave the country choking in their righteous dust, but
nonetheless remaining firmly cemented to the spot like
parking lot bollards, they have decided to pull a Lysistrata
stunt and withhold their sexual favors from the male
offal who voted for Trump.
We learn,
for instance, that Whoopi Goldberg — she, in Nigel
Hannaford’s phrase, of “impregnable, unresearched
ignorance” — along with many of her fellow
feminist Democrats, threatens to go on a sex strike
to protest the election of Donald Trump, which is like
threatening to no longer mix bird poop into the porridge.
As the excellent C.A. Skeet puts it, “This is
partly due to some sort of ‘punishment’
they're doling out on us (as if, had they stayed in
our lives, these psychopaths would be doing us a favor).”
FrontPage Magazine observes, “men across
America are trembling in terror.”Like
any country, America has its share of silly people and
off-the-wall imbeciles, but unlike many countries, it
also has a core of strong, sane, and resilient individuals
who are able to course-correct when they see their country
streaking for the precipice. Few nations can say the
same. Those who wish to abandon the U.S. would profit
from an extended sojourn in Canada, where they would
quickly discover that the grass is not greener on the
other side of the fence and, indeed, that there isn’t
much grass there to begin with. Now that Trump is in
power and the pestilence of wokeism appears to be receding,
the proper direction where possible is the other way
round. Were it feasible, Janice and I would happily
settle on Hoona Road.