Three Hundred and Fifteenth Entry, Coronavirus Poetry Diary
written in response to Politico, Feb. 6 news : Ottawa truckers' freedom convoy galvanizes far-right worldwide: Leading Republicans, right-wing influencers and white supremacist groups have jumped at the chance to promote the standoff in Ottawa to a global audience.
"freedom" truckers
steeped in TrumpTalk
echo slogans --
arms linked, young women chant
make Canada boring again!
FYI: FYI: What started as a rally of Canadian truckers angry at cross-border vaccine mandates has fast become a magnet for far-right grievances around the world (Politico, Feb. 6 news). And for more, see The New York Times, Feb 15 news: "Emergency Law Invoked As Canadians Mull Identity"
Added: Three Hundred and Sixteenth Entry
long Covid
the smoker's voice rasps
everything’s just fine
L5, make Canada boring again!, this seemingly self-depreciating slogan means we're NOT raucous Americans. For more, see "The Devils We Know: Us and Them in America's Raucous Political Culture," written by James A. Morone, John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University.
ReplyDeleteBelow is a relevant excerpt from The New York Times, Feb 15 news: "Emergency Law Invoked As Canadians Mull Identity"
The unrest seems a rebuff to the cherished mythology imposed on Canada’s citizens from abroad and held by many Canadians themselves as moderate, rule-following, levelheaded — and just plain nice.
“It feels like a national nervous breakdown,” said Susan Delacourt, a veteran Canadian political columnist from Ottawa who like many of her fellow citizens is wondering what exactly is happening to her country right now.
populism isn’t totally alien to the country, points out Janice Stein, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. A populist, the brother of the Ontario Premier Doug Ford, was once mayor of the country’s biggest city, Toronto, and for years, the Reform party rallied around a sense of Western alienation and socially conservative values.
“There’s a worrying tendency in Canada to define everything pushing against our founding myth as an import from the United States,” Stein said. “We have mythologized our niceness: ‘We are not polarized like France and Britain, and the only major democratic country in which the center has held is Canada, and that’s because we’re so nice and so caring to each other.’”