A while back, we had dinner with friends who were heading to Montreal to visit their daughter, who had married a Canadian. Hania asked if the couple were thinking about returning to the States at some point (they had met in Miami). Vivian said it wasn’t likely; now that their children were both in school, they liked the safety that Canada afforded.
In the ’60s and ’70s, young Americans went to Canada to avoid the violence of a foreign war. Today, they go to Canada to avoid the violence of the United States.
I was on TV yesterday: https://www.c-span.org/video/?531964-1/falling-place
Years ago, after a remote interview with Garry Kasparov in Europe, one of Bill Maher’s guests asked: “Do you ever get the feeling that they’re playing chess and we’re playing checkers?”
The French, at least when I lived there, called Americans “les enfants du monde.”
I thought of both those comments when I heard that Time magazine’s Person of the Year was Taylor Swift.
A recent starred review in Publishers’ Weekly of a work of fiction quoted two lines from the book: The first, a racist comment from a peripheral character and the second, another character’s statement about the prevalence of racial hatred. And I wondered: Do writers win points these days simply by citing the currently approved obsessions? Wouldn’t readers be more impressed by the sharing of some telling observation from the author, a brilliant apercu perhaps, or an unusual or interesting use of language?
AARP's Movies for Grown-Ups Award for best picture went to Top Gun: Maverick, confirming what the French have always said about Americans, that we are "les enfants du monde."