One year into Trump 2.0

Jim Withers

J.D. Salinger had a knack for coming up with arresting titles: The Catcher in the Rye; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; A Perfect Day for Bananafish; For Esmé – with Love and Squalor. All intriguing. So, too, is Just Before the War with the Eskimos, a Salinger short story which appeared in the New Yorker in 1948 and as part of his Nine Stories collection.

That title always intrigued me. Why would anyone want to fight the Inuit? It wasn’t really a thing – until now, when Trump seems bent on redefining the term “cold war.”

Salinger’s story had nothing to do with Greenland, nor did it give any hint that a day would come when a U.S. president would be so narcissistic that – like a dog urinating on a hydrant – he’d try to put his mark on EVERYTHING, from a gaudy Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom dwarfing the White House to renaming the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf of America). Part of his reason for annexing Greenland, he explained to the Norwegian PM, was the Nobel committee’s failure to give him its Peace Prize.

Only one year into Trump 2.0, even the tumultuous 1960s pale in comparison to what we’re facing. It’s time for those who believe in democracy and basic human decency to show their solidarity with Greenland and Denmark. In the long run, appeasing the bully always backfires.

“Bon courage,” as we say in Québec.