The New Rock Stars

Trumpapalooza.

That’s what many called the unprecedented—and unusual—midterm Republican convention held over the past two days in Dallas.

And trump, who, if you believe the polling, is the most unpopular president ever at this point in his term, proclaimed that he should be on the ballot in November. To make sure he was the star of the show, he spoke on both days of the convention.

There was a lot of news coming out of the event. But the biggest announcement, delivered by the star of the show himself from the stage, was that if Republicans win both the House and the Senate in November, every American adult would receive a cheque for $5,000.

Don’t think of it as bribery to get your vote, which would be illegal. It’s a dividend, trump said, on an economy doing gangbusters.

Except the economy is not doing gangbusters. Far from it. But put that aside for a moment. And put aside the fact that paying every American adult $5,000 would add somewhere between $1.15 and $1.35 trillion directly to the national deficit. And put aside the fact that it’s essentially trump using Americans’ own money to pay them back for his political benefit.

Trump has made BS promises like this before. Remember the DOGE dividend? You know trump is lying, especially when he starts with, “I promise.” The more grandiose the promise, the bigger the lie.

Still, I’m sure some Americans are dumb enough to fall for this ruse. Like they've fallen for so many others.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the obviously corrupt scheme of a blatantly corrupt politician. It was the show, the spotlight on the main-stage headliner.

Trumpapalooza.

When I was growing up, we looked up to musicians and actors as idols. Rock stars and movie stars occupied the spotlight of our young imaginations. Usually there was the same movie that everyone was going to see and talk about. There was the same rock concert that everyone wanted a ticket for.

As rock stars became more popular, rock concerts got bigger and bigger. First they filled clubs. Then theaters. Then hockey arenas. By the end of the 1970s, they were filling football stadiums. By the 1980s, rock concerts had grown into multi-stage, multi-day extravaganzas.

Yes, there was Woodstock and the Monterey Pop Festival in the late 1960s. But Woodstock was a massive money loser, and Monterey was a nonprofit event; most of the artists weren’t even paid to perform. 

The first Lollapalooza came along in 1991 and helped establish the template for the next generation of this kind of event.

But something else happened along the way. As the concert became bigger, the event itself became the attraction. People weren’t necessarily going simply to see their favorite performer. They were going to be part of something. The focus shifted from the performer to the spectacle.

You weren’t just attending a Pearl Jam concert. You were participating in an event. And that distinction matters more than many realize.

In subsequent years, the dilution of attention away from individual performers only accelerated with new technology. Streaming services for movies and music put another nail in the coffin of the old star-making machinery as Joni Mitchell famously sang about it in Free Man in Paris.

Or has it? Maybe it just changed. Maybe the new star-making machinery is social-media-driven politics.

Trumpapalooza got me asking myself a question: Are politicians the new rock stars? Is this what trump understood before anyone else did? Is this why he seemed able to seize the moment with his shtick in a way that no one else could?

Think about his political rallies. The arena. The giant screens. The music. The merch. The chants. The performance. And finally, the headliner takes the stage and feeds the dreams of thousands of fans with what essentially amounts to a fantasy world.

Trump understood the model. The political party is becoming the record label. The campaign is becoming the tour. The rally is becoming the concert. And the politician is becoming the rock star.

The Democrats are beginning to recognize the new culture. They are looking for their own rock star. Is it Gavin Newsom? He’s got the looks and the charisma. AOC? She’s got the following and the chops, but is she singing the right song? This new kid in Texas, James Talarico, seems to have the right image?

But Democrats still don’t fully understand the model. They are looking for a the rock star. But trump understood something else.

The rock star isn’t successful because he is the best musician in the world. He is successful because he can create a connection with an audience. He can make people feel something. He can make them believe that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

And rock stars don’t deal in truth. They deal in dreams. They deal in fantasies, something to believe in. That’s why they are called fans.

And perhaps that is the most important thing trump understood about the new political culture. A politician used to be judged by his policies, his accomplishments and whether he kept his promises.

A politician-rock star is judged differently. A citizen asks, did you do what you promised? A fan asks, do you still represent the fantasy I put my faith in?

A citizen changes his mind when the facts change. A fan changes the facts to preserve his faith in their idol.

That is the danger of turning politics into entertainment. Entertainment requires fans. Democracy requires citizens. Citizens evaluate. Fans cheer.

And trump may have understood before everyone else that, in the age of social media, the politician who can become the biggest star can also become the most powerful politician.

Trumpapalooza, this bizarre mid-term event with fantasy promises wasn’t just a political convention. It was an example of what American politics has become.

China

My big brother has become a big fan of China. He lives in the U.S.

It started after a business trip. He imports a product from China that is made for his company, like so many American companies. He visited to meet with his manufacturer and talk about a new product they were developing.

He was impressed by what he saw. Huge modern cities. Well-run transportation. Clean public spaces. Automation everywhere. Courteous, disciplined, hard-working people providing efficient service. No apparent crime.

He came home to see dirty cities with people living on the street. Infrastructure in disrepair. Rude people, seemingly angry and complaining about everything.

Last week he texted me that the SWAT team had surrounded the residential building next to his. It was on the local news. A man had apparently murdered his girlfriend and was now armed and holed up in his apartment. The police managed to extract him with tear gas.

China, he said, is at least twenty years ahead of the West right now. It's the future.

If that's the case, then why are so many people leaving the country? And why are they still clambering to come to the West?

He said that's a lie. Most people who leave China go back. They are flooding back in the hundreds of thousands.

I doubted it, so to verify, I asked Chat. According to the most recent statistics, China is experiencing negative net migration—that is, outflow vastly outpaces inflow. Recent UN-based estimates put net migration at roughly minus 319,000 in 2024. 2025 statistics seem to indicate that the trend is slowing, but it's still negative in the hundreds of thousands.

Anecdotally, my brother's contention sounded plausible to me because one of my Chinese work colleagues recently moved back after working with our company for eight years. She was being groomed to take over as the Controller, so her decision came as a surprise. But her circumstances seemed unique. Her family owned a successful manufacturing company in China, and her father had recently struggled with serious illness. There was no one else in the family who could help run the business, thanks to China's one-child policy from two decades ago.

Over the years, this colleague and I had many conversations about China, and she was a staunch defender. I always understood her attitude as more an expression of pride in her heritage and culture than an argument about the relative merits of Chinese society and politics.

I have worked with many Chinese colleagues for a long time. They are typically young women who came to Canada to get an education, found work, usually in the accounting department, and stayed. I enjoy talking to them about why they came to Canada and chose to stay, especially considering the weather here.

It always starts with education. That doesn't mean China doesn't have great schools. It's through an education visa that these migrants gain access to potential residency. So they are coming for the quality of life, not just the education.

I've heard several reasons for coming: to get away from an overbearing, demanding family; to get away from congested cities; because Canada has lots of space, lots of clean water, and lots of clean air; for the adventure and sense of personal liberty.

I rarely hear economic reasons, because most of these migrants come from relatively well-off families. If they can afford to come here for an education, it signifies that they already have means.

I never hear about politics. And from that I conclude that either it doesn't play a part in their decision or, more likely to my mind, they are simply conditioned not to talk about politics.

One time, my colleague and I were talking about her use of WeChat, which is China's main social media platform, sometimes likened to their version of Facebook. But WeChat is much more than Facebook. It's not just a way for people to stay in contact with their old high-school chums. It's also a banking system, a mobile payment app, and even provides access to government programs.

I argued that WeChat was more like a government surveillance system and a mechanism for social control than a communications platform. I asked her, "Can you criticize Xi on WeChat?"

She answered, "Why would I want to criticize Xi?"

When I told this story to my pro-China brother, he defended her answer. He said that I had a blind spot because I was indoctrinated to believe that criticizing the government represented an important value. "You don't understand," he said, "because of your conditioning."

I suppose he's right about that. I can't help but think that criticizing the powerful, holding them to account for the power we give them, is important.

"If you understood her point of view, you'd see that she trusts the government to have the public good in mind, because that's the basis of their system. And it's working well. She sees no reason to criticize the government."

"Is it that she sees no reason to criticize because it's working, or because it's futile, and potentially dangerous, to criticize?"

My take-away from my conversation with my brother is concern for the future of democracy.

I'm having more and more conversations with people who have lost confidence in what democracy represents—in terms of freedom, values, prosperity and security. The collapse is primarily happening in the United States, which drags the rest of the world down with it.

And China is the winner. With every American failure, it looks better and better. Even to a person like my brother, who is educated, has a BA in political science, and understands what's at stake.

To me that's the scariest part.

You’re Gettin Old

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

You’re gettin old and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you're old.

You’re gettin poor and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re poor.

You’re gettin dumb and you don’t even notice (x 3) 

Then one day you’re dumb.

You’re gettin bald and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re bald.

You’re gettin fat and you don’t even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re fat.

You're gettin ugly and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you’re fat.

You’re gettin old and you don't even notice (x 3)

Then one day you're old.

Susan Moss z'l 1968-2026

Susan Moss was a stubborn woman. She was also cranky, sardonic, uncompromising, funny and totally lovable in her Susan Moss sort of way. Pretty much everyone who knew Susan loved Susan, and that's a lot of people. But most of all Susan was very very talented and committed to her art. She was the preeminent photographer of the Montreal music scene for the past three decades.

Susan passed away yesterday at the age of 58. She'd been diagnosed about a month ago with metastatic pancreatic cancer, and decided she was going out on her own terms - exactly how she did everything in her life - with MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying).

The Gazette's obituary calls Susan a "Montreal music scene legend." She was certainly that. To me she was my closest friend David's little sister, who I knew probably since she was about 10 years old. When we were growing up I can remember her older brother complaining about how Susan drove the family crazy with her stubbornness. 

As far as I can tell she never changed. And I mean that in the best way possible. 

The last time I saw Susan was at David's 60th birthday party, almost two years ago. The whole family was there and the warmth and love in the room was overwhelming. Before that it was at a Joe Jackson concert a few years earlier. It had been a long time since I saw Susan and I was almost as excited to spot her next to the stage with her camera, as I was to see Joe and his band on stage. By that time Susan's legendary status was firmly established. 

I haven't been a big concertgoer since getting married and having kids. And it was at concerts you were guaranteed to bump into Susan. I went mainstream. Susan never did, and never could. It just wasn't her.

It was that single-minded, uncompromising nature that drove Susan to perfect her craft. She loved what she did and loved being around the ragtag community that grew around the music scene, along the Main (Saint-Laurent Boulevard). I'm not sure 'ragtag' is the right word. But there's no doubt Susan was attracted to the edgier side, the artists and barflies who challenged convention. Musician Patrick Watson is quoted in the Gazette as saying "She’s very rock ‘n’ roll... She’s gritty, very punk rock but elegant. She’s part of everything that embodies this city, part of the city history.” 

I'm not sure 'elegant' is the right word, it's not what comes to my mind when I think of Susan. The words that do come to mind that go with 'punk rock' are 'honesty' and 'integrity'. Susan embodied that. 

I might speculate about her interest in musicians. I would have loved to ask her about it, as you would any artist about their subject matter. What fascinated her about it. Whether it was the spectacle of the show, or the persona of the performer. The fact that, like her, musicians have individual visions and refuse to conform.

It can't be overstated how much she loved what she did, and there was no compromising that. As it should be. 

Her untimely death comes as a devastating blow to family and friends. She told the Gazette in her final interview, “Other people are like, ‘I want to live to 100.’ Why? That sounds awful. Retirement didn’t seem that fun to me.”

Susan had fun. A lot of it. A 'ridiculous amount', she said. She considered herself incredibly lucky to have lived her dream. We can find some solace in that.

Canada On The Same Side As Iran?

It’s not a nuclear Iran. It’s not a nuclear North Korea. It’s not a globally dominant China.

The thing we have to worry about most in the world today is that not enough people take the United States seriously anymore.

And I don’t mean its military or economic power. I mean its word.

The ultimate source of power and authority is your word. And trump has debased and squandered that power for the United States. When your words carry weight, you don’t have to rely on missiles and sanctions to get people to listen.

And when your word is strong, you can rely on something even more powerful: silence.

When the world respects what you represent, your reputation precedes you. Your mere presence embodies power and authority.

It’s why the United States never needed a military parade on the Fourth of July. It didn’t have to show what it had. Everyone already knew.

Until trump ordered one that is—a clear sign that he did not understand this basic principle of international affairs, or the power of the office he had inherited.

Think about it. Since World War II, the United States has never faced a sustained conventional military challenge from another major power. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran were all wars of choice.

The times the United States has been directly attacked have involved terrorists, as on 9/11, or proxies, where responsibility could be obscured or plausibly denied. No major country would openly challenge the United States. That was the power of American reputation.

Now that reputation is in shambles. And that creates a slippery slope.

First, America’s presence is no longer taken seriously. Then its word. Then its sanctions. Then, eventually, its military.

When you are no longer taken seriously, you have to use more military power, impose more sanctions, and issue more threats and demands just to accomplish what once could have been accomplished by a phone call.

That’s a very dangerous place to be. And there is another consequence that may be even more important.

Countries begin preparing for a world in which the United States can no longer be trusted.

Iran and Canada are, in very different ways, responding to the same fundamental problem: what do you do when your relationship with the United States becomes uncertain and unpredictable?

Both have become highly motivated in their conflicts with the United States because trump has made those conflicts existential. And when a conflict becomes existential, victory is no longer necessarily about defeating the other side. It's about surviving. A question of will.

Iran will outlast the United States. 

Canada will outlast the United States. 

Because both countries understand the basic calculation. They simply have to survive long enough for the political circumstances to change.

Iran is already maneuvering to take advantage of a changing balance of power, consolidating its influence around the Persian Gulf and positioning itself for a future in which American power is less decisive.

Canada is doing something similar in its own way: distancing itself from dependence on the United States and strengthening its relationships with Europe and Asia.

Trump is bankrupting the United States in its most valuable asset: its credibility.

Something that took decades for the United States to build can take only a few years to destroy.

Once countries stop believing that American power is permanent, they begin making decisions based on the assumption that it isn’t.

Alliances change. Trade changes. Military relationships change.

And the world changes with them.

And unfortunately, if history is any indication, those periods of global transition come with tremendous costs.

Costs that we will all have to pay.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The American poet Wendell Berry passed away yesterday at the age of 92. I always liked his work for its gentle wisdom, plain lyrical language, and common touch that, I think, derives from working on the land. Berry was a farmer in Kentucky. I would say that he was in the mold of Robert Frost, except that unlike Frost, who was born and grew up in San Francisco, Berry was the real deal. 

He was also a bit of a throwback to an earlier time. The vast majority of the poetry that was published and became popular in the post-war era was largely urban-based and cosmopolitan in sensibility. Berry's poetry stayed stubbornly close to his agrarian roots. 

This is not to say that he didn't write about pressing issues over his many many volumes. He did. In a poem called Against The War In Vietnam he wrote: Believe the automatic righteousness of whoever holds an office. Believe the officials who see without doubt that peace is assured by war, freedom by oppression. The truth preserved by lying becomes a lie. Believe or die. 

Berry's poetry often carried a strong political edge and social critique. With the social, political and economic upheaval of modern technology, and environmental degradation brought on by climate change - these "despair for the world" provoking times -  his poetry feels more necessary today than ever. 

I love this one too. Especially the lines:

make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration,   

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time   

to eternity. Any readers   

who like your poems,   

doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came.

Who Are We, Really?

I think a lot of people are scared to be who they really are.

That simple statement raises some complex questions. For one thing, is anybody really anything?

I think there is a 'real' person inside each of us. Another way of saying it is the 'authentic' person. In the nature-versus-nurture debate, the 'authentic' person is the one closest to our unique individual nature and character. It is primarily determined by the particular mixture of genetics and biochemistry we are born with. These express themselves in our physical and emotional traits: our dispositions, capacities and abilities.

We are complex life forms. But if you think of it in plant terms — at the risk of oversimplifying — it's essentially everything that is already in the seed. A package of potential that will grow into the flower it is capable of becoming. And every flower is a little different.

Obviously, the environment plays an enormous role in determining how close the plant comes to realizing the potential contained in its seed. For plants, that environment is relatively easy to manipulate to achieve good results: water, light, nutrient-rich soil and so on. But there are environmental factors that are harder to control: climate, weather, disease, predatory insects.

And plants have virtually no means of effecting their environment to optimize their potentiality. No agency. Whereas we do. We have the ability to extensively shape our environment.

That, essentially, seems to be one of the purposes of consciousness. We don't merely respond to our environment; we can reflect upon it, alter it, and create new environments in which we can live.

And this is where education comes in.

I once had a teacher explain to our classroom that the reason it was important for us to learn the skills we were being taught was so that we could make a living. It was possibly the most jaded and reductive explanation for education I had ever heard. I remember him saying something like, "I am teaching you how to spell like the bankers spell."

Of course, learning the skills necessary to earn a living is important. But that isn't the reason for education.

The Latin root of the word education is educare, meaning to rear, nurture, nourish or bring up. Nowhere in its meaning is the idea of earning money.

The reason for education, in my view, is to nourish the sense of self: to learn how we think, how we learn, what interests us, what we are capable of, and ultimately what we might become.

In that sense, education is really an expansion of consciousness.

Early education should certainly focus on thinking skills and the basic abilities needed to function within society. But during those formative years, children should also be learning something equally important: that what comes naturally to them has value, and that part of growing up is learning how to recognize, develop and trust what they already possess inside themselves.

Instead, we often teach them to distrust it.

We teach them to look outward for the standards by which they should measure themselves. We teach them to adapt to the demands of an external, constructed world, even when those demands conflict with their own inclinations and capacities.

This is isn't accidental.

The modern education system developed alongside the Industrial Revolution, and it inherited an industrial conception of human value. It established a hierarchy of abilities based largely on their economic usefulness. Mathematics and science were highly valued because they produced measurable, practical results. Technical competence was rewarded. Standardization, efficiency and conformity became virtues.

The arts and humanities, meanwhile, were increasingly treated as secondary — worthwhile, perhaps, as a sideline, but not essential or critical.

There is a great irony in what is happening now.

The very abilities our society has spent generations telling us are the most valuable — calculation, pattern recognition, information processing, technical analysis — are precisely the abilities that machines excel at.

And so, strangely enough, the AI revolution may be forcing us to reconsider the very hierarchy of human abilities that helped produce it.

We aren't particularly alarmed when AI is used to perform scientific calculations or analyze enormous quantities of data. But when it begins writing poetry, composing music, creating images or producing human-like conversation, something feels wrong, even threatening. Because those activities were never merely useful to us.

They were how we recognized ourselves.

The AI debate is therefore ultimately a debate about how we define ourselves — about who we really are.

For many decades, we have increasingly thought of human beings as wealth-generating factors of production. We have measured ourselves by what we can produce, how efficiently we can produce it, and how much economic value we can generate.

Perhaps AI will finally force us to confront the poverty of that definition.

Because if a machine can perform more and more of the things we once considered evidence of human intelligence, then what remains uniquely human cannot simply be our ability to calculate, process information or even produce things.

Maybe the answer lies somewhere closer to the seed. Our individual nature. Our particular sensitivities and dispositions. Our capacity for experience, meaning, love, imagination, curiosity and creation. The strange and unpredictable combination of qualities that makes one person different from another.

We spent centuries reshaping our environment in order to make life better, only to begin reshaping ourselves to fit the technological environment we created. We were on track to do more than reshape nature. We were beginning to replace it altogether with a technological alternative.

And now we're starting to freak out about a full-scale takeover.

But perhaps what we're really afraid of isn't that machines will become too much like us. Perhaps we're afraid that, after generations of teaching ourselves to become more useful, more efficient and more productive, we may finally have to confront the possibility that those were never the things that made us human in the first place.

AI isn't just challenging what humans can do. It's challenging us to remember who we really are.