Posted on by rjonakait

Clubbing Canada

A bit of good news. Because of our Iran war, we have not been hearing how we are going to conquer or invade or annex Canada. I am glad for the absence of this Trumpian bluster even though I can see advantages should our northern neighbors join the United States. As I summarized in my post of January 10, 2025, “We Stand on Guard for Thee”:

“Canadians, if they used their power wisely, could control the House of Representatives. If their ten provinces could come in as ten states, Canada could probably control the Senate. And their influence in the electoral college would be immense. In other words, Canadians could control the North American continent from Key West to Hudson Bay (and perhaps Greenland, too.)”

This might produce better policies on gun control, healthcare, climate change, renewable energy, and much more. I pleaded: “Please, Canada, don’t close the door to U.S. statehood. You have the potential to remake the United States into a better place. Please stand on guard for me.”

And Trump, with his sometime Canadian obsession, is not the outlier he may seem. The United States has lusted after that country before, although I doubt that our current president is aware of the history. As revolutionary fever was taking hold in the 1770s United States, American forces tried to seize Quebec in hopes of wresting it from Great Britain. The goal was to have the French-speaking residents join us in seeking independence. After some initial success, the American forces were disastrously defeated. Our Revolution largely ignored Canada after that, but many Americans remained obsessed with Canadian territory.

I vaguely knew this Revolutionary history. I knew even less about how the desire for Canadian land fueled the War of 1812. I was under the impression that a primary cause of those hostilities was the British impressment of American sailors into the foreign navy. I also knew that the British brutes burned the White House, which was later rebuilt, unfortunately, without a Big Beautiful Ballroom containing many expensive security features.

A Canadian author, Adam Shoalts, in A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land (2017), has given me a different perspective. He writes that President James Madison accompanied the declaration of war on June 18, 1812, with “brief remarks blaming his decision to launch the war on maritime shipping rights and the intolerable outrage that Canadian fur trappers were friendly with ‘Indians’ the United States wanted exterminated. But the real reasons behind the war were clear to everyone—the American desire for Canadian real estate.” This was a propitious time for the land grab Americans thought because the British, the colonial masters of Canada, “were pinned down in Europe fighting Napoleon’s armies [and] would scarcely be able to offer any help to its distant North American colonies.”

Conquest should be easy, the Americans thought. After all, they outnumbered the Canadians by twenty to one. In the first two years of the war, American forces did occupy some lands of the British colony and torched some of their towns. (The British burned Washington including the White House, the Brits said, as retaliation for those American actions.)

The major move by the United States forces, however, came as the third year of the war began. “On the night of July 3, 1814, under cover of darkness, a five thousand-strong American invasion force dipped their oars into the swift waters of the Niagara River opposite Buffalo, New York. They’d spent the winter and spring relentlessly drilling with a single purpose in mind: the final conquest of Canada.” The Americans captured a fort on the Canadian side of the river that was supposed to be the springboard for the taking of Canada.

Combined Canadian and British forces fought back, but their direct assaults bloodily failed—in one attack, they suffered a thousand casualties to one hundred for the Americans. A siege ensued. This war of attrition produced more and more casualties, and both sides were badly weakened. The news spread that Washington had been captured by British forces and that Napoleon had been defeated allowing Britain to send more troops to North America. “With the American army pinned down and demoralized at Fort Erie—a mere border fort in what was supposed to be a victorious campaign across Upper Canada—it was clear that any thought of conquering territory now had to be definitively abandoned.” The Americans retreated over the river but only after blowing up the fort.

Within two months, the U.S. and Great Britain signed a peace treaty ending the war, and even though the British controlled large swaths of American territory including a large part of Maine, the two sides agreed to the antebellum boundaries between Canada and the United States. The Canadian author Adam Shoalts concludes, “This map of the bitter battle waged here—the bloodiest of the War of 1812 and one of the bloodiest in Canadian history—is a solemn reminder that Canada’s borders were forged at a terrible cost.”

It is also a reminder that some Americans have long coveted Canadian territory, a covetousness that has not be successful.

I hope Trump doesn’t read my blog; it might whet his appetite for a Canada that was the big fish that got away. I don’t think I need worry.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Pharmaceutical companies advertise heavily on some of the television shows I watch. The ads almost always have a disclaimer or warning. There’s one in particular that I don’t understand. It’s the one that says don’t take the drug if you are allergic to it. How would you know about the allergy if you don’t take drug? And if you did take it and had an allergic reaction to it, why would you take it again?

“Have something to say; say it; and stop when you are done.” Tryon Edwards.

The history book group just read Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt by Nina Burleigh. I have read biographies of Napoleon, all decades ago, and remember little of his Egyptian foray. I did remember that he brought along scholars, savants, and that the French seized the Rosetta Stone, which ended up with the British. I did not remember, however, how much of a military fiasco the Egyptian invasion was for the French. Napoleon did not get his reputation as a great military leader from Egypt. But what surprised me most in Burleigh’s book was how much the French were decimated by the bubonic plague. I thought that the major effects of the plague were in the middle ages, but it devastated the French in Egypt from 1798 to 1800. (And while the trailer for Ridley Scott’s movie may show Napoleon firing a cannon at the pyramids, that never happened.)

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.” George Eliot.

In the “Is This Supposed to Be Good News?” Deparment: When tiny trash-can-looking containers were found in a local park, the word quickly went out that they had contained fentanyl. The authorities sprang into action and had a lab test them. The police reassured the nervous moms and reported that none of the containers had even traces of fentanyl. The police, apparently trying to be reassuring, said that the containers were just regular crack vials.

“If nobody ever said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth.” Alan Herbert.

I missed the holiday again. November 25 is Evacuation Day, or least it used to be in New York City. The British occupied New York City for most of the Revolutionary War. They finally left on November 25, 1783, with a British flag nailed atop a pole. The first attempts to lower the offending cloth failed because the British had greased the flagpole. The American flag only replaced it after cleats were nailed into the pole. Evacuation Day became a New York City holiday, but it ended in 1916 as World War I made the U.S. especially close allies with the British and officials tried to erase ancient enmities. I think it would be nice to bring back the holiday, not because I care to commemorate again the Revolution or its end. Instead, various restrictive parking regulations get suspended in this city on holidays, and I am always in favor of that.

A wise person said: “It is easier to look wise than to talk wisely.”

I was paying for the cookie (or was it more than one?) at the fancy muffin and cookie place. Two teenaged girls poked their heads in. One asked, “Do you have vegan stuff?” The man sorting out my change replied, “No. Sorry.” The other girl persisted, “No vegan at all?” “No, sorry.” They huffed out. When I left a few moments later, I said, “No reason to be sorry.” With a gorgeous smile, he concluded, “I agree with you.”

Posted on by rjonakait

PlaceMap

          The colorful, plastic-coated placemat I often eat from at first looks as if it should have an ad for a tree stump removal business in one corner, a maze to be traced with a crayon, another ad for a gun shop, and a Bible verse in the center, but this placemat was not pilfered from my local diner. I bought it at the wonderful Roadside America, a miniature village housed in an old dancehall off a Pennsylvania interstate. The tourist attraction was then for sale, and now, sadly, closed. When I was there, it looked as if it needed all the support it could get, so I decided I would buy something from the gift shop. I had trouble selecting among the sparse and tired-looking wares. I finally decided on a couple of “Painless Learning Placemats.”

          One has a Mercator projection of the earth in black and white with all the country boundaries inked in but no labels on one side, and on the other has the same map with the countries colored with one of four colors and each nation labeled. (Apparently the placemat’s designer wished to give another example of the famous four-color map theorem that says no more than four colors are needed to color the regions of a map so no two adjacent regions have the same color. Go ahead. Try coloring in a map and see if this is right. The theorem has a controversial proof, but we can leave that for another day.)

          I could use this table covering to improve my knowledge. I might test myself by trying to remember what countries border Burkina Faso or whether St. Lucia is north or south of St. Kitts or Barbados, but I have not done that. My ignorance has remained even though I have been looking at this map-placemat for several years.

What mostly draws my attention to the placemat are not the continental countries, but the little specks of land dotted in the oceans. These islands fascinate me. This may have come about by the boyish, romantic imaginations of what life was like for the exiles and castaways marooned on remote islands. Of course, there was Napoleon and his first exile on Elba. I learned early the famous palindrome “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” but I had little idea where it was. I knew that Napoleon escaped this island and led armies once more, which all seemed wildly adventurous. I knew that later he was again exiled, this time to St. Helena, which was chosen because its remoteness made escape much harder. From my placemat map I now see that St. Helena is in the South Atlantic about halfway between Brazil and Angola. Yep: it would be a long swim to Paris.

          When I thought of Napoleon’s exiles, I assumed that the emperor had the run of Elba or St. Helena and was not confined to a prison such as on Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. The image of Napoleon at St. Helena did not conjure up thoughts of Dreyfuss, Papillon, or the Bird Man but of Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked castaway on an island off the Venezuela coast. Well…it did until I tried to read Daniel Defoe’s book. I was expecting an adventure story along the lines of the Count of Monte Cristo (fun read). Instead, I encountered ponderous prose trying to make theological points, which I think boiled down to “it is good to be a Christian,” although it was never clear what the book meant by “Christian.” Before reading Robinson Crusoe, I thought that the book was primarily about the relationship between the castaway and Friday, and I kept awaiting the native’s appearance in hopes that the prose would become readable. I was disappointed. (What does it say about Crusoe and Defoe that Robinson can’t bother to learn or use “Friday’s” actual name?)

          A real-life inspiration for Robinson Crusoe was Alexander Selkirk, who was a castaway in the uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands for four years in early 1700s. This archipelago has three main islands, now named Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk, and Santa Clara. When I first read about Selkirk, it intrigued me that there were places on this earth that had no humans. But as I thought further, I was amazed that some dots of land in thousands of miles of ocean were inhabited. How did that come about? Of course, many of these specks on my map have had inhabitants for a long time, and many of these islands were known to and fascinate me—Hawaii, Tahiti, Pitcairn, Easter, Wake, Midway, Shetland, Faroe, Galapagos Islands—but it is all those islands I had never heard of that have been intriguing me.

(continued December 1)