The LA Times Op Ed

Right on sched­ule (at about mid­night, PST), the LA Times put up my Op Ed. It’s a pretty dull head­line (In fact, it reminds me of some of those you see in The Onion, like Local Man Inspires 14^th Off­beat News Story ) The title I had writ­ten as a slug was The Coun­try is Always Bluer on the Other Side. Yeah, I know, too ‘clever’.

I was told that it was also picked up on the LA Times Wire, and have since found out that it has appeared on one of my favourite lib­eral news aggre­ga­tors, Com­mon Dreams. Holy cow! 4^th from the top this morn­ing, 2 away from (Oh crap!) Ralph Where-the-whole-mess-started Nader.

So, with­out fur­ther ado, I post it here, for that day when it scrolls off the cur­rent news and I may want to refer to it:

Dems in Con­trol? We’re Still Stay­ing in Canada
by David Drucker

My wife and I awoke, as usual, to NPR. Before polit­i­cal cor­re­spon­dent Mara Lias­son got to the end of her first sen­tence, I knew the news was dis­as­trous. George W. Bush had been reelected.

“Honey,” I said, “remem­ber when we talked about mov­ing to Canada?”

I’m sure a lot of other dyed-in-the-organic-wool lib­er­als mut­tered some­thing sim­i­lar that dark morn­ing in 2004, but unlike most of them, we meant it. Plan A: John Kerry wins, we build that dream ski house in Ver­mont. Plan B: Move to Van­cou­ver, Canada.

So, Plan B it was. We’d had enough of Bush, the direc­tion the United States was going, and this was the last straw. Never mind that we lived in Cam­bridge, Mass., arguably the most lib­eral city in the bluest of the blue states. We were pack­ing our bulk gra­nola into our diesel Bee­tle and head­ing out.

Eight months later, we were set­tling into a new home and jobs in British Colum­bia, when Canada had its own elec­tion. For those unfa­mil­iar with the Cana­dian sys­tem of gov­ern­ment, the prime min­is­ter is elected by par­lia­ment — not every four years but after los­ing a no-confidence vote. After a few of those there was a par­lia­men­tary elec­tion in Jan­u­ary, which led to the elec­tion of a new prime min­is­ter, Stephen Harper, of Canada’s Con­ser­v­a­tive Party.

Harper ran on cut­ting taxes and turn­ing a fed­eral child-care pro­gram into a monthly pay­ment per child. The opposition’s neg­a­tive cam­paign ads sounded eerily famil­iar: He sup­ported Bush’s war in Iraq, was against sign­ing the Kyoto envi­ron­men­tal accord and wanted to “reex­am­ine” gay mar­riage (which is legal in Canada). A shiver rip­pled down from our berets to our Birkenstocks.

Then, a few weeks ago, we awoke, as usual, to the Cana­dian Broad­cast­ing Corp. Before CBC morn­ing show host Tom Allen got to the end of his first sen­tence, I knew: Back in the United States, the Demo­c­ra­tic Party had won con­trol of the House and the Senate.

“Honey, did we make a big mistake?”

By “big mis­take,” I mean, not the kind in which you switch lines at Whole Foods and the line you’d been in sud­denly starts to move. We’re talk­ing big mis­take like sell­ing all of your stock in Ben & Jerry’s the day before Unilever buys the company.

But it turns out that Cana­dian con­ser­vatism can look awfully lib­eral. So far, Harper — derided as “Bush lite” — has, for instance, intro­duced a par­tial tax credit for monthly tran­sit passes. The Con­ser­v­a­tives have pro­posed a Clean Air Act for Canada, and although it’s not ideal, it’s still some­thing. Harper said that these new laws would “insti­tute a holis­tic approach that doesn’t treat the related issues of pol­lu­tants and green­house gas emis­sions in iso­la­tion.” When was the last time you heard any U.S. politi­cian utter the word “holistic”?

Did I men­tion uni­ver­sal health­care? Even Harper seems com­mit­ted to keep­ing that.

We’ve come to the con­clu­sion that the United States has drifted so far to the right that any self-respecting Cana­dian Con­ser­v­a­tive would be con­sid­ered a rav­ing lib­eral in Wash­ing­ton. Stephen Harper is no George W. Bush. We may not agree with him, but we don’t feel ashamed every time he opens his mouth. We might yawn, though.

So we’re stay­ing in Canada. But good luck with that new Con­gress, eh?

They cut a few items here and there, includ­ing a ‘cheap shot’ accord­ing to one edi­tor, that I took at Bush.

In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, we did, in fact, leave Boston in a Diesel Bee­tle, but there wasn’t any bulk gra­nola in it (but we have been known to eat, and even make gra­nola. Seri­ously, if you’ve never made it from scratch, it’s worth a try, at least once.) We sold the car and dropped it off in Wash­ing­ton D.C. . While Pam has been known to wear a beret (and Birken­stocks), I don’t own any (with these oddly shaped feet, fugged­aboutit!). We do lis­ten to Tom Allen, the host of Music and Com­pany, but I can’t remem­ber if it was he or Judy Mad­dren in the World Report on the hour that had the news. I guess I just wanted to give a plug to Allen, since I’m a huge fan of his show and him. Finally, I make no claims about get­ting the whole Cana­dian par­lia­men­tary sys­tem and elec­tion process 100% right. We’ve only been here a rel­a­tively short time and I’m only just start­ing to learn how it all works. I’ll get it down even­tu­ally, in prepa­ra­tion for citizenship.

My Newest Writing Assignment

I men­tioned in my last post­ing that I was work­ing on a ‘writ­ing project’. I no longer have to be vague and/or mys­te­ri­ous about it. Through a series of refer­rals (Thanks very much, Mak­taaq and Travis), I was put in touch with an edi­tor at the LA Times, who hap­pens to be an old friend of Travis.

It seems that the LA Times Edi­to­r­ial Dept. was kick­ing around the idea early last week that an Amer­i­can who had left the coun­try for Canada due in some part to the reelec­tion of Bush in 2004 might have some poten­tially humor­ous com­men­tary on the fact that that they now live in a coun­try with a Con­ser­v­a­tive Prime Min­is­ter while the US has since elected a Demo­c­ra­tic major­ity in Con­gress. So with three degrees of sep­a­ra­tion tra­versed, I offered to try to write the Op Ed, know­ing full well that if they didn’t like it, my efforts would be up on this blog and that would be that.

I gave it my best shot, spend­ing a three-day hol­i­day week­end holed up in my office at the key­board writ­ing drafts and run­ning them by friends and fam­ily (Thanks also to Pam, Sooz and Matt), try­ing to get the jokes right, and try­ing to get it down to between 500 and 800 words. (it’s always easy to write more, harder to write tighter).

The result is…tomorrow I’ll be pub­lished in the LA Times! As soon as the URL goes live, I’ll blast out an email announce­ment to every­one I know, and will copy the text to this blog, since the link will go dark after about 30 days, and I can’t very well pla­gia­rize myself.

Do I like the piece? Well, it’s prob­a­bly a bit more inten­tion­ally humor­ous than I typ­i­cally write, and there was one joke in par­tic­u­lar that was pulled by the edi­tors because it was a ‘cheap shot’. No mat­ter. Like most writ­ing projects (and I can now say this with con­vic­tion), the best part is now, when it’s over and done with. Just as I was happy a decade ago to get to say “I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple of books”, I’m also pleased that after tomor­row, I’ll be able to say “I’ve writ­ten for the LA Times”.