Auchtoon!

There was an article in The Wall Street Journal this week quoting General Motors CEO Mary Barra at a GM all-hands meeting. She was opining about a recent trade agreement between Canada and China in which Canada will allow 49,000 electric vehicles (EVs) to be imported from China in 2026. This of course is alarming to GM (as well as Ford and Stellantis) because Canada has long been a market they have dominated and, by all indications, these EVs are inexpensive and well-made.

So I would’ve expected a quote along the lines of “It’s a bad idea” or “China cheats” or “Boy howdy, this really sucks.” What Barra did say was:

“I can’t explain why the decision was made in Canada.”

This struck me as disingenuous. Barra is a very smart person, and the reasons for why Canada did what it did are many and obvious. (In the cartoon, I listed the first 13 that came to me. There were more.)

Now to be fair, Barra went on to explain why she thinks Canada is making a mistake with its decision. And I’m mostly aligned with her concerns about future consequences and sense of foreboding for the Detroit Three. But let’s not pretend to not know why the decision was made.

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has a lot similarities to Greenland:

It’s way up north, not easily accessible, and often described as “arctic.”

It’s not very populated. (The UP has nearly 30% of Michigan’s landmass but only 3% of its population.)

Air force facilities that guarded our northern flank during the cold war (K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, Kincheloe Air Force Base, and Calumet Air Force Station) have now been decommissioned.

It has a longstanding Nordic cultural heritage (Finnish mostly, not Danish in their case).

And generally they don’t like it when people who don’t live there try to tell them what to do.

Respect Yoopers. Respect Greenlanders.

During the President’s visit to Michigan this week, as reported by NBC News:

President Donald Trump flipped the middle finger Tuesday to a person who could be heard calling him a “pedophile protector” while he toured a Ford truck factory in Michigan. In video shared by TMZ, Trump points to a person who is not seen in the frame and mouths some words. He then flashes his middle finger in that person’s direction.

And by “mouths some words,” it has been confirmed that it was an imperative using a particular expletive. (Huh. Two weeks in a row now I’ve had allusions to f-bombs in my cartoon. That’s a dubious first.)

Trump did then go on to speak words out loud at the Detroit Economic Club. But it was the usual salad of lies, hyperbole, and petty grievances. Words that, as always, were about him, not us. So we can safely conclude that he really only had one message specifically for a Michigander.

As I write this, it has only been a day since an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. And already it feels like the news cycle has moved past the stunningly brutal summary execution for what amounted to a traffic violation and has moved on to speculation on how this might affect the mid-terms. By the time this is shared Friday it may be off the radar — there is, after all, an excellent chance that a new violation of international law will have caught our attention.

But I’m stuck on sadness and bitterness for now and expect to remain there for a while. Sadness because of the loss of life. Not just Ms. Good but for all the people who have suffered (and will suffer) because a wannabe dictator needs to keep his base frothing with fear and anger. Bitterness because it’s so unnecessary. As Detroit and other cities and towns have proved, real improvements in public safety don’t come from armed thugs set loose upon the citizenry. Real improvements come from coordinated community efforts.