And in that, the orange blowhard is pretty much world class.
When I read the news from North America and Europe at six in the morning, I see these certain headlines sticking out of the whole muddle. The irrational, crazy, unbelievable sentences straight from a blowhard’s mouth, hoisted onto the front page by the world press. The uttered lunacies are too attractive for click rates and subscription sales to be ignored. Normal is boring, sex, crime, and madness are the bestsellers.
There sits an old man at his desk, in front of an opened folder. He squeaks out a kind of scribble onto the official paper with a giant felt pen. This is supposedly an Executive Order, that is, an instruction from the President. Instruction? That’s not a law, more like a wish list from the top office holder.
And the headline? Lake Ontario is, as of now, called Lake America.
This instruction has two effects. The signing, staged as a video production, leaves the world in disbelieving amazement. US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum is supposed to, no, must change all official registries and maps. Lake Ontario no longer exists on the United Maps of America. There is only Lake America. Full stop.
And Canada? Prime Minister Mark Carney officially delivers a little history lesson, aimed specifically at the President of Lake America. Yes, in simple words.
Ontario is a word from Iroquois and means “lake of glittering water.” The birth of Lake Ontario began about 12,000 years ago, when the glaciers kindly retreated after the end of the last ice age. What remained was a huge gouged-out basin, filled with meltwater. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples like the Haudenosaunee have lived along the shores of Lake Ontario.
Enough of the history lesson. Back to the real question: What is the man actually distracting from?
First I ask myself: What does this man want to distract Americans and the rest of the world from? Ah yes, from those infamous Epstein files, with the blacked-out names in the nearly three million unpublished documents. I thought: at least the girls’ names are protected. Then the correction: No. It’s the perpetrators who are protected. The victims stand there with their full names.
I’m a little afraid to read or hear these stories of violated and abused girls, that is, children. Reading Virginia Roberts Giuffre, I can only bear about half an hour at a time. Then I’m ashamed to be an old white man.
The distraction works as long as the targeted minds and media follow along in Pavlovian fashion. I want to know what’s in these secret Epstein files. And so does the broad public, but above all the victims of the crimes. They want the civilised instrument of justice to function and be applied.
The more a blowhard flings around “unprecedented” things, the more interesting the Epstein reading becomes. No manoeuvre is too costly for the man, so long as the distraction succeeds. The war with Iran, the threat to declare Canada the 51st state of America, annexing Greenland, and so on. The main thing is that the public’s gaze leaves the Epstein files and turns to “more important” matters.
Even the best distraction has an expiry date. When reality reaches into citizens’ wallets with gas prices, inflation, high costs of living, then being becomes conscious. Hard-earned but too few dollars speak their own language: it’s not enough anymore. But people have had enough. With broken promises, untenable conditions, and fear of the future. Distraction doesn’t really work anymore there.
Tomorrow I’ll distract myself and drive to the Beaches on the glittering shore of Lake Ontario. You bet.
