Men of courage, men of cowardice

It's not the critic who counts. Especially now.

What kind of adult human male or female are you in a pinch?

When the chips are down.

When the bullets are flying.

Quite evidently, the 45th and 47th President of the United States is the kind of man to take a licking and keep on ticking, to stand in proud defiance of a far-left Reddit-dwelling incel made radical by the same forces now claiming it’s best we turn down the political temperature.

By some unfathomable twist of fate, the mere twisting of one’s neck, or by the grace of God, America was rescued from the brink Saturday afternoon.

And by now, you’ve surely seen the footage.

In a real-life case study into “the Particularly Online and the Very Political don’t entirely inhabit real life,” the missus and I were strolling through a turn-of-the-century British shipyard at the mouth of the Fraser River when the news broke. Boardwalk re-enactors didn’t break kayfabe. Families posed for photos. Fishermen continued to hawk the catch of the day. Pensioners guzzled crab legs and overpriced Okanagan wines.

The world she kept on turnin’, even as the once-and-future leader of the free world was rushed to hospital after the Secret Service and local law enforcement were caught with their pants down, before fumbling through the worst exfil since Justin Trudeau thought it would be funny to throw himself down the stairs on Canadian television.

As was perhaps expected, but is no less disappointing, the pronating thumbs and clattering keyboards of the professionally aggrieved continued right along with them.

What kind of adult human male or female are you when you witness a president nearly having their head popped like a balloon by all of 1-2 centimetres?

Those who still exist in the real world, who have some degree of regulatory powers over the jet stream of neverending bullshit that runs through us each day like a dental x-ray, were able to stay grounded, and empathetic, and to compartmentalize tragedy over partisanship. There was no need to send out blathering remarks riddled with qualifiers and empty rhetoric featuring the new comms-shop buzz-term of the day: “political violence.”

And yet, the usual suspects defaulted to meek and mewling. Immediately, the tone and decorum police were out in force. Forget #45 and #47 taking an assassin’s bullet to the head, WHAT THIS REPRESENTS COULD BE SO MUCH WORSE! REPUBLICANS WILL POUNCE!

There’s a great Norm Macdonald quip for almost every occasion, but this one immediately came to mind.

The Frums and the Coynes couldn’t help themselves. Freak-left members of captured academia openly wished the bullet had found its target. The same congressmen who not weeks before attempted to roll out the red carpet for Trump’s assassination suddenly pretended to give a damn about his wellbeing.

North of the border, a bitch-made commentariat even moved on to the litigation of Pierre Poilievre’s perfectly adequate statement for being glad an active shooter was dead: a once-active shooter who inflicted mass casualties, nearly altered the fate of the Developed World, and who killed a beloved and heroic small-town fire chief.

What kind of adult human male or female are you when it comes time to focus on what matters?

The story of July 13th isn’t of men like Frum, who still wear the weight of the Iraq War like a millstone, or of men like Coyne and Arthur, who never met an evidence-free, destroy-the-proles 2020-2022 government jackboot that didn’t make their hearts go pitter-patter, it’s of heroes, present-day history, and ineffable bureaucratic failure.

Donald J. Trump was hung out to dry at the mercy of an assassin’s bullet. That he’s still here is what counts. That we find out why this was allowed to happen is even more important.

It’s a story of men as brave as Reagan, who so generously chose to signal to supporters and the world that they were O.K., to tell them not to live in fear*, even as blood ran down their cheeks. (*The complete opposite of the worldview held by Star and Globe opinion columnists.)

It’s of jiu-jitsu-champion photographers who lined up one of the shots of the century.

It’s a story of courage, not cowardice, and the ability to choose.

Now, who would you rather be?

Alexander Brown is a writer, comms director, and part-time politico living in British Columbia, Canada. To support his best-selling work, become a free or paid subscriber.