How to Survive Living Next to Rome , by @ajkeen keenon.substack.com/p/how-to… “Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” @JohnRalstonSaul As the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International — speaking to us from the top floor of his house in an autumnal Toronto. Like another frequent Canadian guest, Stephen Marche, Saul offers a sharp critique of the United States which, he reminds us, is a geographically smaller country than Canada. Not that size matters, of course. Saul thinks of America as Rome. Canada’s great achievement, he says, is surviving as Rome’s neighbor for over two hundred years. In contrast with Chile, Mexico or Guatemala, Canada hasn’t been invaded or subverted by its clumsy imperial neighbor. When America sneezes, the rest of the continent gets pneumonia. Except Canada. Even in autumn. Is Trump an aberration? Not according to Saul who offers Grover Cleveland as the 19th century DJT. Like Stephen Marche, Saul thinks there will be a civil war in the United States within twenty-five years. But he doubts it will be a repeat of the 19th century Civil War of Shermanesque armies against armies. More likely a continuing breakdown of the legal system, and of the willingness of individuals, states and the federal government to obey the law. More like the chaos of Caligula than Caesar vs Pompey. On the tariffs Saul is cheerful. Canada sent half its goods south before the 1988 free trade deal and three quarters after it, he reminds us. So Trump’s tariffs have frightened the Canadian provinces into dismantling the trade barriers they kept against each other. Duh. “We thank him for his stupidity,” Saul says of Grover Trump. John Ralston Saul once wrote a book about Canada entitled A Fair Country. So I suggest a book about America should be called An Unfair Country. He laughs. He’d call it The Great Drama. With perhaps the subtitle: Not As Big As Canada.