Matt Labash writes a great article on Canada and interviews a few Americans who have moved there to escape the Bush Gulag.
IN A SENSE, Canada is the perfect place for American quitters, as it evidences self-loathing masquerading as self-congratulation. This I learn over dinner in Vancouver. A delightful realtor named Elizabeth McQueen has enticed me with a promise any American boy likes to hear--that we'd be dining with "two very attractive lesbians." She didn't lie. One of them could make a killing as a Courteney Cox celebrity impersonator. Besides, they're psychotherapists from San Francisco. They ask me to change their names to Cocoa and Satchi since their patients don't yet know they're leaving America.
They've come to Vancouver to look for real estate, having gotten married on an earlier trip to Canada. They were politically active back home. They wrote letters to the editor for every cause: "Save the whales, save the trees, save the lesbians," says Cocoa. They hate the war and the Patriot Act and the results of the gay-marriage resolutions. They hate the conservative agenda and fundamentalist crackers and all the other usual suspects. They hate it that Karl Rove, in Cocoa's words, helped to elect "an alcoholic butthead who can't put two sentences together, cocaine addict, married to a frigid drunk-driver-murderer-Martha-Stewart wannabe."
But beneath all her gracious sentiments is something else: a loss of faith. When describing how she feels traveling abroad, Cocoa sounds like the old joke about how Canadians apologize when you step on their shoes: "I felt ashamed as I was going everywhere with my American passport. It was just like 'I'm so sorry.' . . . After the last election, I kind of lost faith in what we Americans are doing in our country."
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