Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
One thing that has become apparent from this election is that America has gone nuts. In the interest of saving what’s left of my sanity, what country do you suggest relocating to when it’s all over?
Regretfully,
Packing My Bags
Don’t take this the wrong way, but you make me sick. So if I have this straight, you and your pet pussycat, Cowardice, are punching out of our 240-year-old American experiment? Our shining city on a hill? Where we are great because we are good? Where we are a mosaic, rather than a melting pot—perhaps even a melting mosaic—yet where our diversity is our strength? Where Nationwide is on your side, and where there are some things money can’t buy, but where for everything else, there’s MasterCard? That’s a real shame. Because now, more than ever, we need capable fighters to stay in the fight. Especially after I abandon my post and get the hell out of here, since this land that I love has become “crazier than a shithouse rat,” as Tocqueville put it.
You say “when it’s all over.” Sorry, my naïve little deserter of a new friend. But it will never be over. There are plenty of pockets of sanity left. For now. But the sane people aren’t breeding fast enough to resist the coming Idiocracy. They are suffering what demographers call depopulation. And even in the unlikely event that Donald Trump doesn’t claim, after the election, that it has been massively rigged by spectral forces of his dark imaginings (he’s already put in the fix for the fix), or if Hillary Clinton doesn’t end up citing similar interference from her own imaginary friends, “the Russians” (Make the Cold War Great again!), November 8 is just the end of one very long, sordid chapter. There are plenty more sordid chapters to come. Newton had it right when he said that amped-up, morally-bereft political hacks who are in motion tend to stay in motion. (I paraphrase.) It could be years, maybe decades, before they come to rest. By then, we’ll look like a Cormac McCarthy novel. Political life and civilization itself will have been worn down to a bloody nub. The only “trade deals” we’ll have to worry about are whether you’ll trade me siphoned gas for a human flesh cutlet. The sun will go black. The rivers will run red with blood. Also, you can expect an uptick in registered independents.
But I digress. You’re looking for places to hide your face in shame. Canada is the easy answer. A whole generation of Americans sought shelter there when their number was called to fight an unwinnable war (Vietnam). Now that we’re all being called to fight an unwinnable war—against our own worst judgment and impulses—maybe our docile neighbor to the north can do the trick a second time. Canada has a lot to recommend it. It’s close, it has beautiful scenery and unparalleled northern pike fishing. And if you like prime ministers with low body mass indexes who can’t seem to stop taking their shirts off, then Canada might be the place for you to live out your days as an American-apocalypse dodger.
You should know that there are some downsides to Canada, too. It’s cold. It’s responsible for the musical stylings of Nickelback, Drake, and Michael Bublé. Perhaps most disturbing of all, lots of Canadians live there. Though since they’ve spent their entire existence living in the shadow of their louder, brasher American neighbor, many of them resent America almost as much as so many Americans, these days, seem to resent themselves. So at least you’ll feel right at home.
I will not be joining you in Canada, however. I can’t. There is much I like about Canada. I have caught their fish, and have belted back their rye. I have read their writers, like the brilliant and beautiful late naturalist Roderick Haig-Brown. (“A fisherman is always hopeful, nearly always more hopeful than he has any right to be.”) And one of my favorite Americana bands of all time was the Band, who were four-fifths Canadian. Canadians are cultural-appropriators, to be sure. But sometimes, they play our culture back to us better than we play it ourselves.
Despite my affections, however, I can no longer show my face there safely. Because shortly after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, I headed to Canada to report a story on Americans who were so distraught about the election results that they were fleeing to Canada. The Canadian piece, not one of my kindest, not only profiled American deserters, but became a case-study of Canadian penis envy. How much they hate us, yet want to be us. They denounce us, while watching all of our television shows, while seeking to emigrate, while weighing our every utterance, and taking everything we do way too seriously. As when a clownish magazine writer, such as myself, visits them, and throws them a good-natured elbow, referring to them as “North America’s attic, a mildewy recess that adds little value to the house, but serves as an excellent dead space for stashing Nazi war criminals, drawing room socialists, and hockey goons.”
As if on cue, they took offense, which next to moose-tipping and baby-seal clubbing, seems to be one of their favorite pastimes. It probably didn’t help that the piece was titled “Welcome to Canada: The Great White Waste of Time.” (I don’t write the headlines around here, folks, I merely justify them.) But I was roundly denounced by huffy Canadian editorialists. I received sacks of Canadian hate mail. A string of which came from someone purporting to be Gordon Lightfoot from Hat Box, Ontario, whom I’d name-checked in the piece. Gordo, either real or fake, admonished me to “keep in mind that I’m old enough to be your grandfather, and I still get more groupies than you. Hell, my fellow sensitive singer-songwriter Stan Rogers gets more groupies than you, and he’s both dead and Canadian.” I pride myself on my thick skin. Still, that hurt.
So I can’t, in good conscience, recommend relocating to Canada. Despite their pacifist reputation and penchant for Anne Murray records, they are a hateful, vindictive people.
Personally, I’m considering moving to China. I figure I can purchase some discounted Chairman Mao shirts on eBay from disillusioned Bernie Sanders supporters, now that Bernie himself has become a crony capitalist, throwing in with the favorite candidate of Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton. Maybe I’ll move to the countryside, become a simple peasant farmer, and pray that the Chinese government ramps up internet censorship, thus shielding me from the demented political ravings of the insane right (Breitbart.com) and the insane left (the New York Times)
Or maybe I’ll just chuck it all and move to Mexico. Like our neighbor to the north, they are close, and I hear their Mexican food is authentic. I will settle down, get a job in the Ford plant, and enjoy a government more stable than our own.
Dear Matt,
Why do you look constipated in your picture?
LJ
I’ve been eating a lot of queso, as I’m training to move to Mexico. (See above.)
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
