A speaker uses the courtroom manipulation in Chicago to argue that Canada's trade war and annexation threats are staged geopolitical theater. He points to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when PM Diefenbaker became a media scapegoat, as proof Canada gets cast as a supporting character while real power brokers stay hidden.
Chapters
Chicago, 1924. A woman is on trial for murder charges. She was having an affair, her husband caught her, she shot him, and she hires this razzle-dazzle lawyer named Billy Flynn to represent her. You may know where this is going. This is the plot of the musical Chicago. There's a scene where Billy Flynn is using her like a literal puppet to try to charm the media, but he's terrible at ventriloquism. The lies, the spin, it's all so blatantly transparent, but The way he presents it is so compelling, so chaotic, that the media covers it for weeks. What if all of this— the trade war, the unhinged threats of annexation— what if all of this were not the ramblings of an aging president surrounded by yes-men, but rather a meticulously staged production with scripted cues, a carefully choreographed ensemble, all designed to keep the global media fixated on the spectacle while the real drama unfolds behind the curtain. And what if Canada is unwittingly playing the supporting role? It's happened before. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker would not put Canada's forces on high alert until he got UN verification of the Soviet threat. It was decades later that we found out what actually happened. JFK had forgotten to call them. So naturally, Canada wanted to check a couple things out before we assisted in the potential annihilation of the planet. We're weird that way. This pissed off the Americans, but it gave them an important gift: a scapegoat to distract the media with. Canada's response became a talking point in the American media, filling the newspapers with attention that may have otherwise pointed out that the Turkey missile trade-off that was part of the The Cuban Missile Crisis had gone awry, or the failure of the backroom deals, dozens of them. Even the most trusted actors can be recast as villains if it suits the director's vision. In many ways, Canada's the perfect supporting character. Steady, reliable, we're often cast as the voice of reason. Our very stability makes us the perfect contrast in a political drama. And so what if this trade war is just misdirection? Why else would Trump keep these daily performances at center stage? The press briefings delivered to a media corps playing their own role. What's happening backstage? When they made Chicago into a movie, the scene where Billy Flynn is distracting the media starts to pull back and you realize that Roxie Hart isn't the only one being manipulated like a marionette. The entire press corps is too. Incidentally, Chicago was based on a real event, a real woman named Beulah Annan who shot her lover. She had the lawyer and the headlines of the day. They called her Chicago's prettiest slayer. She got acquitted, divorced, she remarried, and then she died of tuberculosis, largely forgotten by the public. She was 28. None of us will know for sure what role Canada actually played in this whole mess, probably for years to come. But we can be sure about one thing: Canada may be the side act, but someone else is writing the script. And in the end, the ones that we thought were players were only the props.
