Jenn Writes

Tag: US

  • Word Wednesday – Losing Faith

    Word Wednesday – Losing Faith

    It’s been a week since I woke up to the news that Donald Trump had won the US Presidential Election. I’d like to say the world is the same place in the week since, but that would be a lie. There have been protests. There has been fear. There have been many bad words. There has been a President-Elect who has has zero experience in government making appointments that make supporters of BOTH parties cringe. There has not been much in the way of hope.

    For those who are about to comment “but you’re Canadian” I’d like to point out the words of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau when speaking to the Washington Press Club about Canadian-American Relations in 1969. “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is effected by every twitch and grunt.” Canadians do have more than a passing interest in American politics – and not just because this year was best symbolized by this (photoshopped) image found on Reddit a few years back.

    A mother moose lays on a lawn while two baby moose calfs rest in a wading pool. There is a van on fire in the street in front of the lawn but the moose seem unconcerned.
    Just some moose watching a van burn. From: Reddit

    I’m kind of a politics geek, or I was until this recent US election cycle. The non stop election for 18 months exhausted me and I don’t even have to deal with it on every commercial break like my American friends do. I took lots of political science courses in university – I almost double majored in history and political science back when I had the crazy idea I’d want to be a Constitutional Lawyer (before I realized how tough the job market would be for constitutional lawyers). I learned a lot about the Canadian electoral system and a lot about the American electoral system thanks to a few comparative classes I took. I understand the way the Electoral College works and though I’ve often admired the ability to directly vote for the leader of the country the way the American system allows, I have never understood why a simple majority isn’t what decides the winner. (The answer is that the US is not a direct democracy, votes don’t actually determine who becomes president which is so mind boggling to me.)

    A quick explanation of the Electoral College for those who don’t know or have forgotten. Instead of each vote directly going towards the candidate and the one with the most votes winning the presidency, the founding fathers of the US decided to make things interesting. The reasoning behind the decision was to keep power in the hands of the people and to make partisan politics less of a factor. It worked well in 1800… and even 1850. It does NOT work well in 2016. Anyway, instead of each vote directly going towards the president, they instead go to the members of the Electoral College who officially cast the 538 votes for president. Each state (and the District of Columbia) gets the number of Electoral College votes equal to their Representatives and Senators combined. It can be as few as 3 (Montana, DC, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Alaska) or as many as 55 (California). The representatives are supposed to vote the way the popular vote in that state went.  Every state other than Maine and Nebraska is all or nothing – so if 50.01 percent of the state votes one way, ALL of their electors in the electoral college are supposed to vote that way (in reality, Maine and Nebraska usually vote as a bloc too but they aren’t mandated to). So take Florida for example. It has 29 Electoral College votes – but all of them go to Donald Trump because he got a slim majority of the overall votes in the state.

    A map of the United states with numbers on each state denoting the number of electoral college votes it has
    The Electoral College votes by state.

    Right now, Donald Trump is president-elect. Nothing is official until the members of the Electoral College meet on December 19th and cast their ballots for President. There is still a scenario that has Trump not winning the presidency – if members of the Electoral College go rogue. The official term for this is going faithless – as in they have no trust in the results from their state. Some states have laws that punish electors who go faithless, usually by a fine, but others have no such rules. So in theory enough voters could go faithless in December and the result would be historic and unprecedented but more in line with the popular vote.

    At the very least it will give the pundits something to talk about for the next month.

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    Faithless (faith·less) adjective

    1. Disloyal, especially to a spouse or partner; untrustworthy.
    2. Without religious faith.
    3. (US politics) A member of the Electoral College who does not vote the way they were bound to by the state voting results.

  • Word Wednesday – I detest that!

    Word Wednesday – I detest that!

    Last year, I wrote about the Canadian General Election and how it seemed to go on forever. What I didn’t mention at the time is that our elections seem to go by in the blink of an eye when compared with our neighbours to the south. 12 weeks of election run up isn’t even close to the 60 or so weeks that the U.S. Presidential Election seems to last. I know it’s not the actual election until November, but the Primaries and all of the other things that go along with a Presidential election just never end. Even a dedicated political junkie like me is getting election fatigue.

    It’s not just the fact that the election seems to be never ending and the jokes on late night television started sounding the same about two months ago, it’s that I cannot stand one of the candidates. Naturally it’s the one who gets the lion’s share of the media coverage because the world is a cruel place sometimes. At first, sitting here in Canada, I thought that Donald Trump running for the Republican nomination was funny, a lark if you will. Now, it’s March and it’s not funny anymore. Not even close. To hear the hatred spewing forth from both the man and his supporters makes me queasy. When he was just a blowhard with a lame reality show (The Apprentice), I could (and did) choose not to watch. Now that he is running for the highest office in the United States, I can’t turn it off.

    %{include image.html url=“/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/dump-trump.png” alt=“A picture of Donald Trump with a red circle with a line through it across his face” description=“Just say no to Trump”}

    To those who say “You’re Canadian, the Presidential election doesn’t affect you” (though most of them say it far less eloquently than that), I reply that as our largest trading partner, the political state in the U.S. does affect us. In that vein, I’d like to offer the words of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau – when speaking to the Press Club in Washington DC in 1969. “Living next to you [America] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Our media is heavily influence by the United States, our economy is intertwined, and our position relative to them is unchangeable. We cannot move further away, and Trump is not a friendly or even-tempered elephant.

    It’s not just that he’s a racist and has refused to distance himself or decline the endorsement he received from a former Grand Wizard in the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) (and by the way, thanks KKK for making the word wizard a bad thing by using it in your hate-filled organization), but that’s definitely part of it. It’s not just that he is a misogynist and that I disagree completely with his views on women.  It’s not even that he regularly makes up ‘facts’ and that his supporters blindly believe him until somebody dares to question him and he claims that he was “misheard” or “misquoted” or “taken out of context”.  It’s that he’s a bully and I absolutely abhor bullies.

    I was going to use abhor as my word for today but it’s a little too popular for my liking. Then I went to detest, but it didn’t feel strong enough to express how much I loathe Trump and what he stands for. So I racked my brain and came up with Execrate – it’s a synonym of abhor, loathe, and detest but it’s a little less common and a little more fun to say. Plus execrate has a fun etymology – it comes from Latin (of course) exsecrat, which means cursed. Ex is a Latin prefix meaning not and the Latin word sacer unsurprisingly translates to sacred – so the literal translation of execrate was “to put someone under a curse” – which I find very soothing in relation to Mr. Trump (I really like the idea of putting him under a curse – maybe the Imperius curse.. hrm this has possibilities). Nowadays, execrate simply means “to utterly detest” which fits well with my feelings on the subject.

    %{include image.html url=“/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/coollogo_com-11610166.png” alt=“Stylized word Execrate” description=“Execrate”}

    Execrate ( ex·e·crate ) Transitive Verb

    1. To declare to be evil or detestable :  denounce
    2.  To detest utterly

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