Oct 29 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — The buffoonish hamming, the slapstick vulgarity, the imbecilic racism, the bunko set pieces, the cartoonish misogyny, the elaborate dupery, the unseemly honeytraps … with such outrageous antics happening in the most powerful office in the world, politics, as has been noted, can be hard to mock these days. Sacha Baron Cohen, the British actor and […]
Oct 22 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — There is no cliché about Canada’s relationship with the United States more over-flogged than the famous Pierre Trudeau quote about how living next to America is like sleeping with an elephant. I’ve used it myself more than once—go ahead, Google it. But because it lends itself so well to Trumpification based on a number of […]
Oct 14 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Policy Magazine — It hasn’t come up yet in this presidential election cycle, possibly because the answer seems so overwhelmingly self-evident, but it’s status as a quadrennial ritual is so baked into US political culture that, in the West Wing episode in which it figures prominently, it enters the action as simply, “The Question”. The Question is, “Why […]
Oct 8 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — During the last two major global clashes between democracy and totalitarianism—unleashed by the rise of fascism that produced the Second World War and of communism that produced the Cold War—ideology was at the core of the battle, at least in theory. The process of seducing human beings as adherents until the obliteration of democracy makes […]
Sep 30 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Policy Magazine — In classic narrative warfare fashion, Donald Trump treated Tuesday night’s presidential debate in Cleveland not as a debate, but as an odious psychological warfare assault on his own country. By refusing to engage in anything other than lies, insults and bullying, Trump was expressing his contempt for not only the forum in which he was […]
Sep 20 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Policy Magazine — There are few testaments to the Shakespearean reversals of political life more eloquent than the fact that, if someone had told you in 1984 that by 2000, Brian Mulroney would be on good terms with his erstwhile political opponent John Turner and no longer speaking to his old friend Lucien Bouchard, you’d have said they […]
Sep 10 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — Nineteen years ago this week, two passenger jets loaded with hostages to history, self-styled martyrs, and weaponized jet fuel hit the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan, marking the unofficial dawn of the new millennium. In “Where were you?” terms, watching New York and America live through the shock and aftershocks of 9/11 from […]
Sep 8 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Policy Magazine — We’ve all seen governance and human rights norms incrementally weakened or obliterated recently to meet totalitarian standards rationalized by China’s geopolitical ascendancy but benefiting quite a few other interests. The latest instrument of this trend is “coercive diplomacy”, the diplomatic version of “illiberal democracy” — also oxymoronic, contagious and euphemistically designed to cover a multitude […]
Sep 3 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — In “The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour work week,” a major essay in the Financial Times recently, anthropologist James Suzman soothingly offered an evolutionary rationale for a re-think about the nature of employment, framing the discussion as one about leisure time. “For more than 95 per cent of Homo sapiens’ history, people enjoyed more leisure […]
Aug 13 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — Years ago, when I first lived in Washington, D.C., the city was so paralyzed by snow one January Saturday that friends who came for lunch stayed five days. I wrote a column about how a hostile power could simply wait for what, in Canada, would be a good ski day to invade and hang an […]
Aug 10 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Policy Magazine — On March 8, 2000, then-President Bill Clinton delivered his most persuasive pitch to Washington’s foreign policy elite, Congress and the international community on the merits of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). With a key vote looming, the case was made in a speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies […]
Aug 6 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — If Godwin’s law has been among the many casualties of reality-show fascism, it is quickly being replaced by the rule that, in any debate about China, the spectre of McCarthyism will be deployed—invariably by China—to chill criticism. “Current U.S. policy toward China is based on strategic misjudgments that lack factual evidence, and is full of […]
Jul 6 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Policy Magazine — There are few prerogatives of prime ministerial or presidential power that are more creative than the ability to change a life and perhaps the course of history by appointing the right person to the right job. There’s an element of matchmaking to it, of major-league coaching and of Hollywood casting. For high-stakes titles, such as […]
Jun 19 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Policy Magazine — As the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th has given birth to a modern uprising for racial justice, one peculiarly antideluvian notion has spannered the spokes of the constructive public dialogue we all knew would be forthcoming as we white people rose to the occasion and began engaging in the uncomfortable conversations […]
Jun 18 2020 — Lisa Van Dusen — Hill Times — If Donald Trump were not worried about the supernatural status of some of his most potent opposition these days, surely he wouldn’t have stood in front of St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square on June 1 wagging a bible like some kind of medicine show huckster. You don’t have to believe in a higher power […]