George Carlin would approve

We truly live in the single stupidest timeline…

John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, Feb 2025

While on holiday in Toronto in 1995, I was charmed by the unfamiliar friendliness of a supermarket checkout cashier.

The spontaneity and warmth with which she struck up a conversation with me while simultaneously performing her duties with ease was not something I was accustomed to back home.

Canadians are renowned for being polite and friendly. They’re also known for being kind and ethical.

During my stay, an upcoming referendum on whether predominantly French-speaking Quebec Province should secede from the rest of Canada hogged the news. I remember thinking at the time that this desire by a section of the population was uncharacteristically impolite.

Following a narrow defeat at the polls, secessionist Quebecois Premier Jacques Parizeau promptly resigned the following day. It’s an act of humility that politicians perform increasingly less these days.

It’s said that it takes a lot to get Canadians to be impolite or rude, but US President Donald Trump’s recent threats and abusive behaviour towards them have certainly rubbed them the wrong way. In retaliation, Canadians have taken to booing the US national anthem at several sporting events.

#Breaking News: More than 200,000 Canadians sign a petition to have Trump sidekick Elon Musk’s citizenship revoked. Only 200k? Surely, you guys can do better. It’s not impolite to sign a petition.

Imagine being the guy who moved the Canucks to incivility? Wow!

That’s the least of Trump’s achievements in his first month in office, though. His ritual narcissism and god-complex has gone into overdrive.

After pissing off the Canadians on his northern border and the Mexicans on his Southern border by proposing ludicrous tariffs on imports, he proceeded to antagonize the European Union across the pond, Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine, South Africa, Palestinians and multiple Arab countries with one absurd and infantile decree after another.

Ironically, back home, Trump also managed to anger the MAGA faithful by instituting sweeping cuts to federal programs, effectively gutting the government. He appointed fellow narcissist Elon Musk to wield the axe, but over the weekend, he opted to go at it with a chainsaw in a hilarious act of self-inflicted denseness.

Meanwhile, through all this madness and almost as an afterthought, he even decided to imagine himself as a king.

Consequently, there has been a lot of ineffectual pushback. The rate at which the lunacy is being perpetrated seems to have overwhelmed everyone, supposedly by design. It might take months and years to undo some of the damage, but the effects will have far-reaching negative consequences.

At a loss for taking concrete steps to stop the Trump insanity juggernaut in its tracks, most people have taken to mocking Trump and his demented henchmen. Yesterday, an AI-generated video of Trump affectionately kissing Musk’s (two left) feet was broadcast on television screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offices.

However, a Canadian stand-up comedian in the mould of George Carlin, the “dean of counterculture,” had already encapsulated the essence of Trump nearly a decade ago in these two short clips.

Here’s a sampling of Ron’s scathing humour:

In his first year Trump’s approval rating dipped as low as 33 percent. This is supposed to be his honeymoon phase. 33 percent! Syphilis polls higher.

But none of this matters to his base because the rot goes far deeper than this bejeweled vacuous charlatan they elected who when he’s not browbeating the needy from his bully pulpit is barking a bogus promise of salvation to his legions of lost and defiantly blind disciples all praying for deliverance from their fast-food, hate-feuled, boob-tube, fake news, marginalized lives of angry alienation.

Everyone mesmerized by the myth of American exceptionalism and its attendant infantile magical belief they’ll finally get what they’ve been told they deserve regardless of living in a nation where their hope has long since been broken courtesy of a rigged system of casino crony capitalism run by the very kind of creatures who crawled from the swamp the mutant they voted for claimed he’d drained…

With nine more years of the Trump lunacy, Ron James now has a proverbial mountain of new material to perfect his satire. And now there’s also a deviant named Elon Musk added to the fray.

I hope Ron is busy making Carlin proud.