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.
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.
Execrate ( ex·e·crate ) Transitive Verb
- To declare to be evil or detestable : denounce
- To detest utterly
Apt.
🙂