It felt positively irresponsible to be enjoying the bucolic charms of the Île d'Orléans - the large island off Québec which was the first area colonized by the French - as my own land reels at the multi-flanked ambush of the trumpified Supreme Court. I suppose watching in mute horror the unfolding karma of racism and patriarchal Christian nationalism south of the border is something Canadians have long experienced... but I'm conscious also that the
Handmaid's Tale world, foreseen by a Canadian novelist, is probably not too far from what Québec's theocrats enforced until the 1960s.
Travel always relativizes one's sense of the normal and necessary, but it's nausea I'm feeling on this first trip abroad in 2.5 years, relearning that sense of distance and subjunctive possibility at this moment, learning of the near-success of one flurry of Republican coup attempts as another triumphs. And of course it is not just Americans who will suffer this putsch, as the (defunct!) policy SCOTUS chose for its shot across the bow of federal government is environmental. Woe.
