How to Make America Grate Again
By James Bacque
I have been asked as a Canadian to give you Americans some advice on how to get out of your present horrible dilemma. If you don’t take President Trumpet seriously he will destroy your country, and if you refuse to laugh at him, your sense of humour will die.
You have been devoted to America for far too long, ever since the late 18th century when your founding slave-owners advocating freedom and the rights of man decided in the absence of advice from the nearest Canadian, to replace the tyrannical King George and his royal palace with President George in a presidential palace. Yes, palace was your ancestors’ word for the president’s residence because the revolting colonists were still thinking royally if not loyally. Their minds were trained to see government as a King named George at the top ruling over free and equal slave-owners, so their new country–yours–would of course have a President named George who would of course live in a palace but now ruled by a freedom-loving constitution forbidding secession although they seceded from the British Empire. That the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were all ramshackle hypocrisy in the interest of white male supremacist slave-owning hypocrats meant nothing at the time but the bill for that, which fell due at Fort Sumter in 1860 has not been fully paid and the rest is now due. And President Trumpet is trying to pay it by tweets and twats.
Your ancient constitutional absurdities included a veto on the popular vote to be exercised at will by the members of the electoral college, which was or is a college without a campus, student, professoriate or endowment, and yippee, lacking exams! It was a constitutional safeguard imposed by oligarchs protecting their power against a sudden surge of democracy which they feared like communism. After a presidential election the college can vote or not as it sees fit according or not to the will of the states as measured probably, but maybe not, by the popular vote which the college is designed to frustrate if that will is proportioned like the popular vote. This creates a conundrous situation which as a Canadian I am well qualified to understand and explain to you because our nation was founded by a similar constitutional tomfoolery: “Canada was built upon a plan of Confederation which was based on completion of a railway which depended for its completion on the completion of Confederation.” Under pressure of war, we also invented the election slogan, “Conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription.” Having lived by these Canadian conundrums for many years, I can assure you they are harmless nostrums like the promises that all men make at the altar.
Your President Trumpet aka POTUS has been going around in a baseball cap which tells everyone to “Make America Great Again.” Imagine that you were a public spirited citizen on a committee trying help your country out of its serious slump: would your first thought be, let’s rent slogan-sized space on a baseball cap and screw it onto the nearest POTUS. Better yet, let’s rent the whole POTUS and teach him to say it.
In enterprising America, bad ideas like this get implemented, which shows why we cautious Canadians do not believe Americans are great and in fact never were. When was the last time you saw us make an important decision on the advice of a baseball cap? Trust me on this, no-one in Canada has ever been wheeled into the operating room for surgery by some doctor-dude in an Ace Brain Surgery cap even though up here, brain surgery is free.
But according to POTUS that slogan is necessary because of a tremendous fall in American greatness whatever that is. I say that the only reason that you Americans believe in your greatness is that every time POTUS in the ball cap appears on TV there is band of highly erect young guys in starched white pants playing something you call Hail to the Chief. Then POTUS with a slogan glued to his head emerges between heavy doors where the family has secreted him for years like some deteriorating uncle in case he drops a nuke on some furrin place to prove he is great.
This band, the anthem and all that mad ceremony are more reasons that Canadians know America is not great. You are always telling us and the world that you are the ‘leaders of the free world’ which can only be because you fear you are just ordinary dudes like the rest of us. We wince with embarrassment for our friends singing their sticky anthems with all the conviction of a beer commercial choir. And then when POTUS puts his hand over his left man-boob and that strange smug-smirk wriggles out onto his pointy-lips like a worm squirming out of an apple, we are so relieved not to be American that we don’t mind being Canadian. We’re not great but at least we’re not worm-squiggle.
For your own good, admit it: in the 18th century, when you Americans set out to be “a city on a hill shining a light unto the world” you really meant beat up the neighbours when they shot at you for stealing their farms. The way you dealt with that was by saying, “Hayull, thayum warn’t no farrums, thayum was jes punkin-woods.” So you got your share of North America by that unique combination of ignorance and violence blended in a high powered hypocritizer that POTUS thinks used to make America great. But really, it just made America grate. You set out to make America great and you failed. We sympathize because we set out to make Canada nothing much and we failed too.
It is deep and thoughtful analysis such as this that qualifies me to produce some good advice on how to make America grate again–sorry, great again. The answer is be cool, man. Act Canadian. We’re sending you some new ball caps with a new slogan SORRY EH?
And maybe you could sub-contract out your present presidential investigations the way you are subcontracting your wars to Blackwater. If you hire our famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police, all Justice Department investigations of Donald J. Trumpet would immediately be suspended since the Mounties always get their man unless he is their woman, in which case he cannot be arrested because POTUS’S personal pronouns would protected under the Jordan Peterson section of the Canadian Bill of Rights. That would definitely make America grate again.