It took me several months to get my eh-game down. But gradually I became used to saying zed rather than Z; I took pride in the fact that William Shatner and Jim Carrey were Canadian and that Mr. Big was a chocolate bar rather than a TV character. I embraced Tim Hortons. While I continued to make fun of the Canadians’ relentless good nature, I discovered that they did too; it was an essential aspect of their relentless good nature. I also learned that they also had suffered through strange leaders. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who headed the government for twenty-two years, conversed regularly with his mothers’ ghosts, often attended séances, and made national decisions based on reading tea leaves, shaving cream, and the responses of the three angels disguised as his dogs who offered advice by the way they wagged their tails.
All America has had to deal with were Trump/Pence, incompetent Democrats, Wrightman, and now Hunter. We should have been as lucky.
The positive news is that the resistance is securely established and has continued to expand. It is now operating in all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. We have been working from here to offer as much assistance as possible. There is much about it that I can’t disclose without risk to other people. But networks have been established and the opposition to the Hunter government continues to grow.
I do know that within the military there continues to be debate, and grumbling, about continuing to support an administration that has abrogated the Constitution. Although thus far there has been no agreement about steps to take. I can report that there has been considerable tension between the administration and the military and Hunter is aware he does not have its absolute loyalty. But he is a clever man, clever and devious. He has replaced the entire Joint Chiefs with his allies, although he has been warned that their oath is to the Constitution, not the executive branch.
The United Nations has taken tentative steps to at least discourage the Hunter government from further restricting civil liberties. (Although that’s like trying to close the barn door after the farm has been sold, knocked down, and replaced by a soccer stadium.) In protest to the recent limitations Canada has recalled its ambassador, replacing that position with a chargé d’affaires to handle legal matters. Ironically, Mexico sent additional troops to its northern border to assist Americans attempting to escape into Mexico.
The good news and the bad news are that America’s immigration problem has been curtailed if not exactly solved.
I also can report that Laura, who no longer is Laura, has become a key organizer and is moving regularly. I hear from her at odd times, and she is careful to never even hint at her location. I can tell you she looks good as a blonde, a brunette, a redhead, and with light-brown long or short hair, depending on her appearance at the time. When I think about her, when I wonder where she is and what she’s doing, for some reason I remember the beautiful final scene of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, in which Tom Joad, now a fugitive in America, sets his path: “I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there … I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”
I’ve always loved the determination, the promise, and the threat of that promise, and hold on to it still.
And Jenny. If this were a movie script the character instruction would be: (Rollie sighs deeply, caught in a flurry of confused emotions). That would be accurate. We speak regularly. I notice when I’m talking to her I find myself scratching my left palm, an old nervous habit I thought I’d left behind long ago. Our conversations are always like a mountain range in twilight; the peaks are impossible to miss, but the valleys are hidden. Maybe that’s intentional. For two people whose careers are dependent on the ability to communicate directly, we have both been utter failures.
Neither of us can ignore the possibility (she says, I say fact) that Homeland Security is physically listening to or taping these conversations. I know I don’t speak without first considering the impact of my words on her life. It’s like America has become a universal party line. (For those who don’t know, a party line was a single telephone line shared by many people that provided no privacy.) Like those nations we once fought, in schools and churches, in the entertainment world and on television, the government is listening for subversive conversation. No one really knows what is being recorded or who might listen to it or, worse, what the penalty might be. Those rumors about a subversive point system that I’d hear apparently proved accurate. It appears the National Computer Center search engines have been programmed to pick out key words or phrases, which are forwarded to the “Computer Bank of America,” a division of the NSA, where someone listens to those conversations and decides if and what actions should be taken. In most cases, each time a person is cited a point or two is added to his or her score. Ten points gets you a pleasant visit from a district officer.
The Resistance supposedly circulates a list of the latest “key” words and phrases in a weekly blast, although if that’s true I’ve never seen it. But Jenny and I avoid talking about the past as much as possible, as well as avoid talking about the future. Occasionally she’ll give me a “crème brûlée,” a sugarcoated version of some event, leaving it to me to try to figure it out. The best I can make of it is she hasn’t dated anyone else; I know I haven’t, either. It is strangely comforting to find yourself focusing on your social life in the midst of the American Apocalypse.
Through all this, I know how lucky I have been. I easily could be languishing in some form of imprisonment. I could think of many forms of torture by citing examples of American culture, but this isn’t the place for humor. I simply set out to do the right thing; I had no intention or desire to overthrow the president of the United States.
I have been welcomed here and within weeks received several job offers. For the time being, at least, I have not accepted any of them. I am freelancing, appearing semi-regularly on Canadian television to comment on events in the United States, writing a regular column, and working on this book. The CBC has been kind enough to make an office available to me. In all of those efforts I have been trying to understand exactly how this could have happened in America. It may be too late to make any difference, it may not be possible to restore our democracy, but I refuse to accept that. And remember, I’m the cynic. What I am trying to do is prevent this incalculable tragedy from being repeated elsewhere.
I recently wrote an article for Maclean’s, trying to sum up events, an article I believe is worth including here:
by Roland Stone, American in exile
In 2019, American scientists employed an array of telescopes to take the first photographs of a mysterious black hole. It was an extraordinary feat, comparable to photographing the date on a quarter in Los Angeles using a camera in Washington, D.C. So it remains astonishing that a nation capable of that feat could fail to see what was happening in plain sight: the theft of its most precious possession, American constitutional democracy.
Like all of you, I watched it happen. As a result of my efforts to prevent it, I am now living in exile in Canada. Since my escape from America I have spent considerable time trying to understand how it happened. And perhaps, to offer some suggestions about what happens next.
The United States had always been a noble idea, an experiment, determining if people from all the varied cultures of the world could live together in harmony and freedom. That big word, united, was often overlooked or taken for granted. It referred to an agreement between the states, and between we the people, that we would be governed by a set of laws enumerated in the Constitution.
That system of government given to us by the founders was ingenious: three co-equal branches with defined powers artfully designed to force cooperation and prevent any one of them from becoming dominant. In 1787, Benjamin Franklin described that government as “a republic,” but only, he warned, “if you can keep it.”
It worked. For more than two centuries it worked very well. The United States of America gave the world George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Lincoln, and Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. It was a nation that fought tyranny in the war to end wars, that defeated the Nazis and Communism, that invented suburbia and mass production and created the middle class. There were significant bumps along the way, and at times it was brutally unfair and unjust, but it had managed to bumble along with dents and scratches and deep chips. Until now.
Until now. Until us.
The experiment is done. Put away the incubator, it’s failed. The “arsenal of democracy” is closed. The beacon of hope is extinguished. The question that needs to be answered is how. How did we let that happen?
The answer is more complex than navigating an unlit maze, with unexpected twists and turns that intentionally lead nowhere. It’s easy, satisfying, and woefully inaccurate to blame the end of American democracy solely on Donald Trump and Michael Pence, or on Ian Wrightman and now Arthur Hunter. But that was just the last act. The demise had begun long before they arrived onstage and took advantage of the situation.
Beginning during the administration of George Washington, Congress has been steadily ceding its constitutional powers to the executive branch, most often citing an emergency situation. Those grants of power have always been temporary, just for a brief century or two. Eventually more than 700 of these so-called special powers had been granted—and until recently only one, the right given to Franklin Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor to confine Japanese American citizens to internment camps, was repealed. In essence, under certain conditions those laws gave the executive nearly dictatorial power.
Later presidents used those special powers to shape the nation’s economy, to take us to war, even to suspend other constitutional rights. And almost always with the same rationale: These actions are necessary to protect the country from those who would do us harm.
It turned out that the people who would do us harm turned out to be us. Cartoonist Walt Kelly pointed that out in his strip Pogo almost fifty years ago, when Pogo himself observes, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Americans blithely ignored history, focusing our attention and our budget on protecting the country from external enemies, while in fact the most successful attacks on government have always been internal. The Nazis were German. The Stalinists were Russian. The Maoists were Chinese. The Khmer Rouge were Cambodians. We overlooked the reality that America had been given the greatest of all geographic gifts, a vast landmass bordered on its north and south by two benign nations and on the east and west by vast oceans that made the nation almost impregnable. No enemy force was going to storm the beaches of Santa Monica or invade Baltimore’s fashionable Inner Harbor. We spent trillions of dollars preparing to defend the nation against an enemy that wasn’t coming. Our military budget was greater than the nine countries that followed us—combined. Our enemies certainly could inflict death and damage from a long distance, but they could never gain control of the country.
So how did it happen? FDR once calmed a frightened nation when he said, with great confidence, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Little did anyone realize how prescient he was, as fear became the weapon the enemies of democracy would use to destroy it. It was fear itself that we most should have feared.
Okay, fear and indifference.
In the 1980s two political operatives, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, changed the political equation. Until then Americans were passionate about politics but didn’t take winning and losing elections nearly so personally. Atwater and Ailes brilliantly made elections an emotional experience, pressing the same emotional buttons as rooting for a sports team, and voilà! a political loss had the impact of a personal rejection.
That coincided perfectly with the creation of the tools they needed to spark their revolution, the home computer and the internet. There always had been a significant number of disaffected, alienated, marginalized, and seemingly forgotten people in the country, Nixon’s “silent majority.” They were angry, bitter, and fearful that the world as they knew it was being taken over by some vague “them.” These people were scattered, and until the creation of the internet, they had no way of finding one another. The internet allowed them to form into highly motivated tribes. It was not an especially large movement, not at first, but its members were zealots. Somebody finally was paying attention to them, and it felt oh so good. They recruited candidates or bent other candidates to their will, threatening them with their numbers. While they were not a majority, not nearly a majority, they turned out and they voted, while those people who so easily could have defeated them stayed home to watch TV or just didn’t feel like schlepping to the polls.
That coalition of the disaffected gained power. To do so, they adhered to the phrase credited to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and made popular by Malcolm X, “by any means necessary.” The values upon which the republic had been built—among them truth, honesty, integrity and common decency—were cast aside, and what eventually was described as the “alternative truth” became acceptable. Where necessary, the electoral system was rigged through gerrymandering or worse, voter suppression. In some states with Republican governors, it would have been easier for me to beat LeBron one-on-one, without Mighty Chair, than it was finding sufficient voting machines in minority neighborhoods. The result of all that was Donald Trump.
A quirk in the nation’s electoral system allowed the candidate who received a minority of votes cast to become president. Donald Trump was not the choice of voters, but their respect for the system allowed him to take office. That’s the way the nation crumbled. Trump was not particularly well-informed or educated. He knew little about history or science, had difficulty with simple tasks like spelling, and had not been blessed with great intelligence or creativity. He was, however, a skillful liar. His greatest assets were that he was unfettered by the truth and lacked any moral clarity. (And the assistance of Vladimir Putin and a legion of Russian hackers. Whatever debt he owed to the Russians was paid off in policy decisions that weakened not only this country but the entire Western alliance.) The “truth” became whatever served his needs at that moment and by extension the needs of the Republican Party. The few ideas he did have were not supported by the majority, so for him to succeed, it became necessary to destroy the media. To roughly paraphrase George Orwell, he who controls the media controls the present. Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future.
An essential aspect of Ailes’s strategy was to create an enemy that needed to be attacked relentlessly, causing members of the tribe to rally together against it. In Trump’s case it was both and necessary to make that enemy the media. “The duty of the journalist,” wrote the London Times in 1852, “is the same as that of the historian—to seek out the truth, above all things, and to present his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know, but the truth as near as he can attain it.”
CNN’s Jim Acosta once summed up the turpitude of the Trump administration by explaining, “Lying to the press is just another day at the office.” There was no requirement within that administration to tell the truth if the truth did not support the goals of the administration. There were no penalties for lying or cheating or even stealing.
Trump repeated his big lies about the media over and over, and in this effort he had an unshakable ally: Fox News. Roger Ailes had cynically created Fox News with only one mission: to reinforce the often-unfounded beliefs of the radical right wing, to reassure those viewers that they were right and good and even godly in their fervor and those who disagreed with that were the enemy and must be smote.
It worked too. Fox News became the go-to place for aging white America. Opinion often disguised as fact was delivered in neat packages by indistinguishably attractive blond women and big-haired men no better informed than the viewers. The truth was whatever Fox told its viewers was the truth. Russia good; the Western alliance bad. Ailes raised pandering to new heights: Right-wing media told its followers what to believe; those people repeated it and were then congratulated by the right-wing media for their insight.
Trump and Pence successfully undermined the basic structures supporting American democracy, making the whole system wobbly. They staggered to the finish line. The well-meaning administration that followed tried too hard to be too much to too many, accomplishing little other than adding to the confusion and leading directly to the election of an Independent, Ian Wrightman, whose popularity arose mostly from the fact that he wasn’t one of “them.”
Trump had set the bar lower than the finals of the world limbo championship. The American public decided that any candidate provably breathing was an acceptable improvement. What Americans craved most was normalcy. Not great promises, not stirring rhetoric—normalcy. And that was Ian Wrightman, whose greatest attribute was that he was nothing special. His choice of Artie Hunter for vice president satisfied any concerns that Wrightman might not be tough enough.
By discrediting the news media, Trump had done the heavy lifting for Wrightman. The rest was easy. The Wrightman administration parlayed that into control of social media, limiting negative commentary, then utilizing influencers and faux polls to shape public opinion. He enlisted the support of the business and advertising community by eliminating burdensome and costly regulations, thereby ensuring that supporting the administration would be the most profitable position.
The still-unanswered question is, How much of what happened was part of a greater plan? Answering that would require knowing Wrightman’s—and Hunter’s—motivations. Was this simply a power grab or did they honestly believe these steps were necessary to save the country? I am reminded of the astute explanation given by an American officer in Vietnam after the bombing of the village of Bến Tre during the Tet Offensive: “In order to save the village it became necessary to destroy it.”
I’ve never told this story, but after my participation in the release of the Detroit Massacre video, I received a phone call from a source high up in the administration. It was meant to be a warning to ease up my criticism of the administration. “You may not think so, but we’re saving this country,” this source told me. “Look at the polls, people love the president.” When I questioned that, this person continued, “People want order and we’re giving it to them. Let me ask you, you think the former Yugos wouldn’t give anything to have Tito back? Ask the Iraqis what they’d give to have things the way they were when Saddam was in charge. Those people would kill…” That source caught him- or herself, but insisted, “We’re doing what has to be done to keep this country together.”
Maybe it doesn’t matter if this was part of some greater plan or simply a response to opportunity. Maybe it isn’t necessary to answer that question. We’re here now. Whatever their motivations, Wrightman and Hunter could not have accomplished any of it without a willing collaborator, the American people. The American people allowed this to happen. No one can dispute that.
For the American people, the problem with saving democracy was that it simply was not particularly entertaining; it wasn’t nearly as exciting as Call of Duty VIII, as intriguing as The Voice, or as suspenseful as 24. Maybe if some entrepreneur had packed it into a video game, say The Last Flagman: Showdown for Freedom or a multipart saga that Netflix could produce, it might have attracted sufficient attention. But that didn’t happen.
Americans had more important concerns than worrying about politics. Too many people were struggling to pay the rent or to buy a third TV and a thinner cell phone to pay attention to all that bickering. A 2017 Freedom Forum Institute poll found that almost 40 percent of Americans couldn’t name a single right protected by the First Amendment; so protecting, among other things, the freedom to criticize the government ranked well below “visiting Disneyland and meeting Mickey” on many Americans’ bucket list.
While millions of Americans did try to make a stand against looming tyranny, the majority believed that they were gaining vital protection in exchange for rights they barely used. It was a trade they were willing to make. As Wrightman explained in his second State of the Union address, “My greatest obligation as your president, as is guaranteed to every American by the Declaration of Independence, is to protect your unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If it should become necessary to temporarily suspend lesser rights to protect more precious rights, I give you my solemn word, for the benefit of future generations of Americans, we will do exactly that.”
Or as late-night host Jimmy Jackson interpreted it, “Give up the right to complain in exchange for security? Can I make that same deal with my wife?”
Most Americans agreed it was a great deal. The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase benign neglect to describe a philosophy which postulates that leaving something alone will be more beneficial than focusing attention to it. This was far more sinister; it might better be termed active neglect. Americans made a choice, deciding that “You the government…” was preferable to “We the people,” telling the government, essentially, you got my back.
In return, the American people asked one compelling question: Can we get fries with that?
That’s a joke, the American people did not want fries with that. They wanted a Happy calorie-free meal, enjoyed in peace. And so they made a choice. If there is an indictment to be made, here it is: The American people didn’t simply let this happen, they wanted it to happen. Congress might also have risen up to defend and save democracy, to stand strong against this coup, but then it wouldn’t have been Congress. Instead it followed the will of the people who had elected them. The people wanted Congress to do nothing, which coincidently was its area of expertise. Fortunately, this was a situation in which Congress had substantial experience; it had been surrendering its powers to the executive branch long before any citizen thought of it. History had seen this before, as Edward Gibbon wrote in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government.”
The result of this docile acquiescence was that Wrightman and Hunter successfully consolidated their power. Their takeover was complete. Only once before in American history had Benjamin Franklin’s warning, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately,” been more appropriate. When he said it, he meant it literally; history had made it figurative, a plea for unity; and now it was both literal and figurative. Americans actually are at the end of the rope.
As a practical matter, daily life in America has not been fundamentally changed, as long as you support the government. The vast majority of people still get up in the morning, go to work, and come home to their family at night. The economy is struggling, as the rest of the world has been very cautious to negotiate trade agreements; although that probably will change soon, as China has already praised the “new continuity and stability President Hunter has brought to the American government.” There are people there for whom life actually has gotten considerably better; the nation has been hammered back together in a way that has not been possible for decades. The years of raucous dissent are done. The screaming at one another is done. Mostly now, America resembles the legendary Frankenstein, an assortment of ill-fitting pieces stitched together but somehow breathing and walking.
The word democracy is derived from the Greek dēmokratiā, meaning dēmos (people) and kratos (rule). The people rule. If you know that, it is accurate to say that democracy in America is in a coma, if not brain dead. It has been suffering from many years of abuse and neglect. Says the cynic, there is little hope for recovery.
The United States of America was a promise made to all the peoples of the world that there was a place where the greatest ideals of man could be realized; it was always slightly over the horizon, just beyond reach, a dream more than a reality, but a place worth striving to find.
Sorry. Better luck next time.
That’s it. Here I am, still sitting in front of my laptop. I got it all down so no one will forget how it happened there. The rest, of course, is up to you.*