The Terror Comes to Quebec

Tags

Canada, Islam, justin trudeau, kevin o'leary, Quebec, quebec city, racism, shooting, terrorism

 

The response of Canada in general and Quebec in particular to the murder of five men and the wounding of many more in a Quebec City mosque has been deeply gratifying, and it defines the difference between this country and the United States. The violence of a self-professed white supremecitst neo-Nazi, along with his guns, is clearly very alien here – and so it should be – shocking the entire nation merely by its appearance, which is a quotidian affair down south. For the first time, Prime Minister Trudeau Le Petit proved he is not the invertebrate he has seemed to be over the past year, delivering a number of impassioned speeches – remarkably free of his usual neurotic gasps and ahs – that hit precisely the right note of unification within diversity, of a common identity despite trivial differences, of neighbourliness, mutual assistance in troubled times, and a common understanding that overrides all the hateful actions of a miniscule minority. This may well be Trudeau’s Winston-Churchill-Moment, his Finest Hour, his Blitz. Despite snide comments from the useless Opposition Party leaders, he has continued to walk the fine line between Canada’s vital trade with the US and the need to uphold and protect our values as an open and welcoming nation for refugees and immigrants, no matter where they come from or what faith they profess. Given the recent and interminable provocations from the White House, this is no easy thing for someone of such avowedly liberal inclinations. As leader of the not-always-so-liberal Liberal Party, it is a balancing-act requiring enormously deft skill. If Trudeau emerges unbloodied from his soon-to-be meeting with the new American President, and if our trading relationship is still intact — $ 2 billion crosses that border daily – then his stature will be increased manifold, the once-concealed titanium backbone visible for all to see. After the gamboling and shilly-shallying of this past year, it is remarkable to find that Le Petit has a much deeper and stronger core in him, and can at times seem to understand truly what he talks about – or maybe it is just a matter of truly caring about that of which he talks?

 

It is fortunate that the Quebec City shooter proved to be a lone wolf. Early reports had stated that there were two assailants, one with a Muslim name – a claim that Fox News was still posting three days later, 72 hours after it had been disavowed by the police here. More kudos to Trudeau for a letter from his office accusing Fox of “playing identity politics” and demanding that the post come down — which it duly did, complete with a rare apology. Trudeau termed the mosque murders “a terrorist attack”, which was true enough, but it may have made the more feeble-minded media fixate upon the usual terrorist act, which to them is so-called Islamist agents mowing down us infidels wherever we gather. It is more complicated than this, of course, but terrorism is also US drone attacks that “inadvertently” slaughter hundreds of innocent civilians. It is the invasion of sovereign states too, and the CIA financing or fomenting of rebellions against democratically-elected governments all over the globe. Since September 11^th 2001, there have been less than 50 citizens killed in the US by identifiable terrorists working on behalf of an “Islamist” organization – and those few killers were all US-born American citizens, who only imagined they were Muslims. Worldwide, the death-toll of innocents as a direct result of US covert operations is unknown – the Pentagon openly states that “we don’t do body-counts” – but it is believed to number, over the past decade, in the high six figures. So the balance of terror is well in Washington’s favour, or to its shame – and this is what principally motivates those we view, rightly or wrongly, as the Enemy. What happened in Quebec City does not therefore easily compute in the minds of all too many journalists, who are now focussing like hungry vultures on all the grief and heartbreak, as well as, with immense satisfaction, on all the national peace and love, all the weeping vigils, the flowers and gift-baskets. The term “lone wolf” equals “homicidal psychopath” – nearly impossible to predict or prevent – which means his motives are not worth seeking out, because insanity is its own impermeable motivation.

 

I cannot help thinking, however, how different the reactions of Canadians would be had the victims in Quebec been us, the white majority, and the murderers self-alleged Muslims. People forget that western Islamic communities are also much in need of support, comfort and sheer neighbourliness after such events as the Paris attacks or the Brussels bombings, when they feel most unsafe and fearful. What they most fear and feel unsafe about is what just happened in a Quebec mosque. It is good that we are finally hearing this from the lips of Canadian Muslims, many of whom now tell of more minor hate-crimes they’ve experienced, or the random hostility of strangers that makes wives, daughters and mothers afraid to walk the streets in daylight. But we must remember all of this when next we hear of Islamist terror attacks.

 

 

The Islam of 99.999 percent of Muslims is a religion of peace, compassion and fraternity — period. And Muslims are, after all is said and done, only 0.3 of Canada’s population. If we took in a million more refugees – which we could do and should do – they would only amount to 0.6 of the population. Nothing.

 

 

Just as the Torah, Tanakh and the Gospels contain passages of an horrendously bloodthirty or hateful nature, so, unfortunately, does the Holy Koran. But these texts were all written by and for a nomadic and clannishly warlike peoples many hundreds of years ago – yet all orthodox believers contend that they are the words of God, and thus cannot be edited or revised. The Kabbalists, just like the Sufis and Christian mystics, have found an interpretive way around this dilemma, and it is to be hoped that the mainstream of all three monotheisms will eventually follow suit. The Koran (which means “recited verses”) is, as its name suggests, meant to be chanted aloud, not read in silence. The classical Arabic in which it was written makes a good third of the text impossible to understand with any certainty, because, at its earliest stage, the written language more closely resembles a mnemonic device to aid those chanting the suras from memory – as the faithful are urged to do, because the words are, if often opaque in meaning, surpassingly beautiful to hear. This linguistic difficulty also means that all translations are necessarily interpretations, just as all interpretations are not necessarily accurate transmissions of meaning. Any devout Muslim scanning a terrorist website – many of which are funded by the fabulously wealthy and heretical Saudi Arabian Wahhabite sect – will instantly recognize quotations taken out of context, or drawn from writings other than the Koran and posted without any ascription. But the untutored youthful rebel looking for a cause will not know this. We must now remember that the radicalized Muslim kid is no different than Alexandre Bissonette, the 27-year-old Quebec neo-Nazi shooter – except you don’t really have to sift through or take out of context anything in the rantings of Adolf Hitler to find something suitably repulsive, hateful and violent for a causus belli.

 

The Province of Quebec, where I live, seems to be embarrassed or shamed by this horrible act, and she protesteth too much methinks. Such a strong showing of many thousandsturning out in support of the Muslim community, and many politicians, both provincial and federal – including the Prime Minister – joining them, belies the fact that Quebec has a darker and uglier side. You know this is true when the Premier denies it is true – not to mention the revelation that French radio shock-jocks in the province often broadcast racist rants. I don’t listen to French radio, but obviously someone does – and not a few someones, either, if advertising incomes are to be profitable enough to warrant keeping the shouters on air. Mordechai Richler recalled seeing hotel signs in the fifties reading No Jews or Dogs, and we still often hear of defiled mosques, synagogues, religious community centres, and of desecrated Jewish cemetaries. There are no Muslim cenetaries here – yet. The simple truth is that hate-crime stats in Quebec are far higher than those for the rest of this country. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed, the Jew exists only in the mind of the anti-semite – and it follows that the Muslim only exists in the mind of the Islamophobe. This glimpse of real Quebec Muslims that we are now getting, curtesy of their immense tragedy, ought to dispel the fantasy-images based on fear and ignorance. As Premier Cuillard wishfully stated, perhaps this is a turning-point in Quebec history. But, if it is merely hinged upon the nature of another terrorist attack, perhaps it is not.

 

French Canadiens imagine they have a long history of grievances against the English – whom they also imagine dominate federal government and are imposing multiculturalism on them – when in fact the British, after their 1759 consquest, could hardly have treated them more equitably. They kept their language, their legal system and the Catholic faith, when the norms of conquest dictated that English language and law should be imposed. No one in Britain at the time was allowed to practice Catholicism, so the Quebecois were in effect treated more liberally than British citizens. But a conquered people are never allowed to be content – it’s human nature. They complain endlessly, just as the Israelites in the Wilderness complained to Moses about everything. A largely imaginary grudge has now festered here for something short of 300 years, and it views anything deemed alien as an imposition by the despised English, who are believed to run everything with malign intentions – even though no government can be elected without the vast Quebecois vote. Despite the fact that Canada declares itself to be a multicultural country in the Charter of Rights, Quebec, which is even recognized by Ottawa as a “nation”, officially announces that it is proudly not multicultural. Everyone just shrugs: c’est les Francais. Many hardliners here, always seeking referenda to separate from Canada and be a litral sovereign nation, view such things as Indigeneous reservations and rights, as well as the current high immigration stats to be malignant impositions by the English-speaking majority, and designed to undermine or erode Quebecois values. Hardly anyone in the whole country denies their right to speak French, more or less, or pursue a unique and somewhat French-like culture, more or less. I for one find it an oasis of charm and politesse in the North American desert. But the Internet and social media are slowly eroding this from within, and young Quebecois are becoming increasingly bilingual, cognizant of their place in a still largely Anglo continent. This is bound to suffer blowback – and so it is. Just as the advent of Donald Trump is really all about a yearning for simpler, greater, whiter times, so the rise of Quebecois racism is really all about Francophile xenophobia and the pipe-dream of sovereignty – which is rapidly fading in the harsh light of a new day. But much of Quebec remains a backwater of startlingly primitive and ignorant communities, sheltered from North American realities by a media of stunningly narrow and parochial concerns. It is not unlike conditions in rural areas of the southern US states, fed on Fox Opinions and the intemperate tirades of Trump, along with the mad barrage of right-wing radio and fundamentalist Christian televangelists. Education is of course the only answer to this woeful condition, and education in Quebec – as it is in much of the US – has deteriorated into a muddle of confusion and nonsense, depriving first to sixth-graders of the bilingualism they most need and which could be most easily taught as conversation to kids of that age. Not a few here believe that this failure in the school system is designed to prevent the Quebecois from exploring the Big World, and thus retaining their Anglophobia, which will enslave them to atavistic sovereignist values and concerns. It will not and cannot work, for human beings are inevitably drawn to a critical mass – and what happened in that mosque does seem to be forming a new mass-opinion of some considerable size.

 

It is also trashing the vain hopes of Canada’s Francophobic wannabe Trump, Kevin O’Leary – who actually seems to live mostly in America. True to the idiotically insensitive form of his role-model, Kev – wealthy entrepreneur of dubious ethics, and abusive reality-TV co-host – posted online a video of himself laughing maniacally as he fired off a machine-gun in a Florida shooting range. You might say this was somewhat lacking in empathy after the Quebec slaughter – and many did say it. So many indeed that one of his lackies apologetically took down the offending video. But Kev had to lie, saying he took it down “out of respect” for the slain. Well, it was what Trump would have done, wasn’t it? What Trump wouldn’t have done, however, is run for the leadership of a party three years away from any general election. Perhaps Kev miscalculated this? In the unlikely event that he wins, he will have to spend over two years as Opposition Leader in the terminally boring House of Parliament – and show up nearly every day for even more terminally boring and stultifyingly trivial or petty debates. The media will be watching. He can’t return to his Big American Life, can he? Worse still, he can’t be sure of winning the 2019 eklection either – especially if sunny-boy Le Petit retains his backbone. Worse than that is the gambit of modelling himself after Trump, and thus being tied to the Trump fortunes – which even the most flamboyant bookmakers are currently not giving good odds on. The Puritanical dinosaur, Mike Pence, is by far the favourite in this race to avoid a  common doom. No, Kev has not thought this through at all. At what point will he say it’s all rigged? In fact it is rigged in my opinion – rigged to end in preposterous confusion whatever happens. Like the US system, ours is broken beyond repair. It’s an 18^th-century relic that belongs in a museum of governance. But you cannot replace it by running as a candidate who will dismantle government, can you? The only question worth asking is: can it be done peacefully, and then what will replace it? I suggest a look at the Vedic texts on this subject, and a study of the Torah’s social laws. Wise men always knew how best to organize and govern any society. It has been unwise men who’ve fouled the nest.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

 

Helter-Skelter

Tags

dallas snipers, racism, the police, united states of ameria, USA

 

Charles Manson sits in his cell, wherever it is, and he cackles, saying, “I told you so…”

Only in the armed madhouse of America can a madman tell you anything at all. Manson’s drug-addled vision of the race-war, one that he alone saw predicted in vague lyrics of a Beatles song, and used to justify the murderous rampage of his tiny cult, rears its ugly head again in Dallas, Texas, site of another famously newsworthy shooting. The voices of media blabber about ‘inexplicable slaughter’ and ‘the cold-blooded murder of innocent men’. A day earlier, we heard of yet another incident where it was police who were the perpetrators of a lethal rage. Too many such incidents have dotted recent broadcasts, with, too often, nothing tangible done about so-called rogue cops. The slaughters are very far from ‘inexplicable’. The prophetic voice of those first sixties Afro-American rappers, The Last Poets, is heard:

Wake up, niggers, or you’re all through…

Maybe the niggers are waking up – and what then, what next? But maybe we should all wake up.

Here’s the formula:

Poverty=Crime=Justification for a Police State.

There is, and has been for years, a problem with the police everywhere. This problem has been exacerbated by the metamorphosis of a domestic peacekeeping body into a paramilitary wing of government, now far more relied upon than the army ever will be. As Plato observed 2,500 years ago, who guards the guardians of civil peace?

We all have our problems with the police, most us just aggravated by traffic tickets for piffling non-offenses. Yet there is still the officious attitude of officers, the pretense that not wearing a seatbelt in a 30-zone is a serious issue. And there is the question of quotas. Everyone knows quotas exist, yet their existence is denied, since it implies an impossible foreknowledge of the day’s infractions, a pre-crime prophecy. We accept these irritating tickets – the cop lurking with radar-gun by a stretch of road where everyone speeds because it’s clear or the sign isn’t obvious – we accept them like the cost of doing business, perhaps idly wondering why the cop isn’t fighting all the real crime we hear so much about. Those who try arguing with their cop soon discover who they’re dealing with, however: the foot-soldier of an organization entirely unconcerned with its own motto, Serve and Protect. They may well serve and protect someone else, but it isn’t you. The police demeanour is very much us and them, and we are the ‘them’. The major purpose of traffic offenses is fund-raising – hence the quota system. You don’t want a cop sitting by a roundabout all day and not making a dime. He or she has to seek out malefactors, and if it’s for trifles, then so be it. The reckless aggressive or hopelessly drunken driver – the only real road-menace – is unpredictable. Other drivers will eventually nail him with smart-phones. The lurking cruiser is there to persecute the relatively innocent, the man hurrying home, the woman heading to daycare before it closes. It wasn’t always like this, with everyone a potential criminal. We all break minor laws every day – jay-walking, smoking weed, turning on a prohibited right – and we do it without criminal intent, like Hilary Clinton – except now we are vulnerable to the officer with a short quota. Theoretically, the police work for us, to serve and protect us – except they don’t. They work for a paramilitary outfit increasingly independent of all civilian control, a state within the state, answerable to none but themselves.

Who becomes a police officer? We like, and are encouraged to think it is people concerned about protecting us. But experience and common-sense tell us it is mostly a certain kind of person. To simplify matters: take the high-school jock, the bully, whose glory-days are behind him, whose future no longer looks so triumphantly prepossessing. It is a thousand shades of that kind of person. It is someone who wants the protective shield of a uniform and the power it confers to provide them with the mantle of an authority they either once had as school-bully or else always felt they should have. It is not unfair to say that people attracted to the police force rarely have the mental agility to be doctors, lawyers, or practitioners of the more lofty and lucrative professions. Police-work pays relatively well. Though, and it offers far more than that. It takes a certain mentality to police our cities, a certain intractable mind-set. In my experience, decent individuals who join the force are soon relegated to desk-jobs, where a gentle, forgiving nature is acceptable. On the swarming, dangerous streets a different character is required. Sure, the job can be deadly. At any moment of any day you can be sent into a potentially frazzling lethal situation. But usually you aren’t. Usually it’s dull and quotidian, your day taken up partly by red-tape and tedious reports. But this work too requires or creates a certain type of individual. Never is it explained to them that poverty and hopelessness equal crime, and thus that they should expect this amongst a certain demographic. That demographic is, of course, mainly black, because we are still a racist society. Hence the evil of racial profiling is endemic, with few cops understanding the cause of disproportionately high crime-stats in specific areas of society.

We don’t have the problems in Canada that America faces, the scale and frequency of them, yet we do have problems, and they grow annually. The root cause of these problems is invariably the character and temperamental proclivities of police officers. In the gangs and drugs squads, you have cops who steal money and drugs, becoming indistinguishable from the criminals they pursue. On the streets you have people convinced that black men are always up to no good. What to do?

Policing is too vitally important a job to be left to the police, to people whose dubious calling is to boss-around, to strut  and harass. It is indeed a job we should all share, since we all share in its properly-conducted virtues and rewards. In Switzerland, everyone has to undergo military training, and to serve in the army for a few months every three years, until they are too old to be useful. A similar idea ought to be thrashed out for our police forces, with policing reduced to its essentials – no fund-raising or needless harassment – with erstwhile civilians far more capable of telling right from wrong than people trained only in spotting wrongdoing. We would avoid the officious authoritarianism as well as the knee-jerk racism, with men and women responsible for ensuring the peace is maintained because it is their own peace they’re maintaining. Such a force should not be armed either. During my childhood in England the police were not armed, and neither were the criminals – and we had one or two gun-murders a year. Even today most British police are not visibly armed, and they have to summon in a special squad of shooters if an incident with weapons arises. As a consequence the incidence of questionable police shootings is minimal if not zero. Guns provoke guns – it’s a fact. And armed police create a threatening force which elicits fear and insecurity. It also conjures up the idea of a law only enforceable by strength of arms. That is not policing; that is warfare.

In Dallas the shooter was an ex-army man – big surprise! The army is a magnet for many poor blacks, and many poor whites too. One of the dead cops had also served in Afghanistan. Military training lasts a lifetime, and a trained sniper is always a trained sniper, whether or not his civilian career has any use for sharp-shooting. With the grotesque inequality in most American cities, many an angry Afro-American is now thinking that guerrilla sniping is an ideal form of retribution; and many a cop must be feeling as nervous on patrol as the depressed people in those sweltering desolate ghettos he patrols. All struggles are class struggles, and a race-war will be a class-conflict. The path to a peaceful resolution only lies in a tearing-down of class barriers and a sharing of the immense wealth whose braggardly existence is, in itself,  the root of all discontent, all human misery.

A militarized police force thinks like an army in battle: us and the enemy. But there is no enemy in our domestic situations. There are only fellow citizens. The wretched of this earth are not an enemy, unless we make them into one. And an enemy always retaliates, always resists – often until death. The potent menace of terrorism – the suicide-bombers, the IEDs, the guerrilla attacks – ought to warn the US status quo that a poorly-armed minority can still be a devastating force. But America never seems to learn the lessons of its own history – the subject isn’t taught in those lousy schools – so I hold out little hope. Although the message is clear: black lives do matter, and they matter more than the white lives sacrificed in order that the message is heard loud and clear.

And Justin Trudeau sends 4,000 of our poor children into Latvia to fend off a million Russian soldiers for NATO. Admirable? Patriotism: it’s the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. Wake up, wiggers!

F

Paul William Roberts

The Great American Divide

Tags

Afghanistan, america, hilary, hiroshima, iran, Iraq, racism, trump, vietnam

 

During the American Civil War, when fathers fought against sons, brothers against brothers, and families against families, a profound psychic divide in US society was first concretized. By ‘psychic divide’ I mean a pronounced mental proclivity to seek out fundamental social divisions. Of course, the rich-poor division exists in all societies. But it is innate in them, an inequity that can be addressed without necessarily tearing the social fabric. In the US these divisions always threaten social strife, sometimes apocalyptically – and I use the word in its original sense of ‘a revealing’. Perhaps the earliest division was between the Puritan Fathers and a settlement of avowed hedonists who lived along the shore from them and practised free love, as well as, one assumes, free speech. Naturally, these sybarites were termed ‘demonic’ by the purist Christians. The next major division was between white European settlers and the indigenous tribes, where countless fabricated tales were told of Indian atrocities to make the white population amenable to their extermination – which, after all, was the project. There is a reason indigenous peoples are not mentioned in the republic’s foundational documents, where all men are born free and independent. The African slaves aren’t mentioned there either, and they would go on to constitute another great divide which, lamentably, still exists – black-white. Nowhere are the rancid politics of division more apparent than in the US, in Washington, where partisan rhetoric is bitter and hateful, and, although there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of policies, one party is always the Devil, the other the Lord. In Canada, and in most western democracies, there is always a race between opposing parties – and there are usually more than two of them – yet when the race is run peaceful co-existence reigns. Not so in America, where shout-shows on far-right media even skirmish with the other media that are, at best, centre-right. And perceptions always trump issues in these so-called public debates.

One of the great unsolved riddles of American social history is the issue of why the working-class invariably votes against its own best interests by casting a ballot for the Republicans. Theoretically at least, the Democrats are more concerned with workers and the middle-class, and certainly don’t advocate tax cuts for corporations or the super-rich – although the party behaves differently when in power. As Noam Chomsky has observed, it is not difficult to win a US election: you simply promise what everyone wants – subsidized education and health-care. The working-class majority, however, votes emotionally along carefully delineated lines of division, including black-white, Christian-or not, salt of the earth-toff, pro-or-anti-immigrant, gay-straight, liberal-conservative, and, ironically, rich-poor. Sadly, it usually counts for more that a candidate seems like ‘the kinda guy you can have a beer with’ than he does the kinda guy who can intelligently run a country. And, although you could probably have a beer with Donald Trump – not necessarily an enjoyable one – you actually couldn’t have had one with George W. Bush, unless it was de-alcoholised. Again, the perception not the reality rules. Why? It is tempting to conclude that the lumpen proletariat is stupid, easily led by the nose. Yet why can’t a left-wing candidate lead them? It is, I think, the us-and-them divide, where ‘us’ means good old-time religion, traditional values, no blacks, no Jews, no immigrants, and ‘them’ means the opposite, a psychic break-up of the Union by the advocacy of change. It is no wonder that politicians are increasingly exploiting this polarised view of society. ‘Change’ has often been an appealing slogan, yet change is not really what 100 million citizens seem to want. What they do want is a politician who’s not a politician.

The politics of division do not stop at home either. US Foreign Policy deals only in angels and demons. Starting with the Axis Powers, and moving on through communism, the Axis of Evil, Islamic extremism, drug lords, and now Isis and terrorism in general, the attitude is not rational and certainly not open to diplomacy or debate. They’re always the Devil, we’re always the Lord. It is often said in war that you become like your enemy, and America has come to bear an eerie resemblance to totalitarian states, to a drug lord, and to international terrorism of the state-sponsored variety. For example, we now find that the CIA was responsible for the arrest of Nelson Mandela in South Africa – because he was a suspected communist. The us-and-them divide controls and directs such erroneous thinking. There is now a foreign minister in Israel who has threatened to blow up Egypt’s Aswan Dam, and to ‘flatten Gaza like a soccer-field’. We are outraged, no? Yet we are scarcely bothered by infinitely worse US aggression and mayhem in countless other countries – why? Because almost all western media play along with the American version of divide and conquer: we can do no harm, they can do no good. It is insidious, and only the few independent media, like the BBC and CBC, stand between us and the deluge of warped thinking.

Of course, nowhere has the Great American Divide been more apparent than in the current and catastrophic race to the next White House. There have been some pretty repulsive presidential candidates, but I can think of none so flamboyantly revolting than Donald Trump – but I don’t like Hilary much either. At best, she’d be dirty business as usual. They’re both up against an avowed socialist who, I fear, knows little about economics. Indeed, they’re all big on denunciatory rhetoric, and fanciful promises, or threats, but almost invisibly small on policies. When Trump says he’s going to make America great again, does he mean greater than it is with him in it? When, in fact, was America ‘great’? Hiroshima? Civil Rights? The Cold War? Korea? Vietnam? South and Central America? The useless War on Drugs? Iran? Afghanistan? Iraq? And now the Syrian vacillation? Forgive me, but I don’t perceive much greatness. I do, however, see divisive politics opening up a chasm amounting to a Cold, possibly Hot, Civil War. One is forced to wonder if there’s a way out of this dilemma. You can lead a cowboy’s horse to water but you can’t make the rider think. It’s not as if the Internet isn’t choc-a-bloc with insightful articles revealing the real issues at stake.

When I was in Iraq, writing for Harper’s magazine, I witnessed new levels of cunning in military intelligence. I wasn’t embedded, and you had to get permission from the army authorities to travel here or there. I was never refused, but the BBC and many national newspapers had a dreadful time. I realised that the Pentagon didn’t care what a few hundred thousand Harper’s­-reading intellectuals got to think about the war, but they cared tremendously what millions of BBC-watchers or New York Times-readers got to think – and this they monitored carefully. It does not augur well for the health of a society that nearly half of its members base their voting decisions on slogans and not the intricacy of issues. Trump supporters have said that there is nothing he could do to change their minds about voting for him. Nothing? Well, the good news is that he won’t win, and the bad news is that Hilary will. Where will this leave America? It will leave a gaping wound in which the divide between have-brains and don’t-care-to- think has never been more apparent, and will not easily be healed. It is not even really a question of education. No society has been able to deal effectively with those elements which simply don’t wish to participate in the advantages a democratic government offers them. In Canada we have the Hell’s Angels; in America you’ve got 100 million Trump supporters. Welcome to the Grand Canyon…

 

 Paul William Roberts