My Swiftian Strategy for Dealing With Last Night's Election Debacle: Shake It Off

The gloating began weeks ago, well before last night's disastrous election results. A chap sidled over to me during Saturday synagogue services and said, a shite-eating grin plastered on his face, "So, are you ready to concede that the Conservatives are going to get trounced in the election?"

Well, no, I was not. Not then. But in the face of the worst possible outcome last night--a Liberal Party majority government (shudder!); dopey-changey Justin Trudeau our new prime minister (ick!)--I suppose I have no choice but to accept that the people have spoken, even if it’s not in the way I had wanted.

As for the synagogue gloater who was hoping to get a rise out of me--sorry, pal, you're plum out of luck. A Happy Warrior I have been, and, despite this obvious setback, a Happy Warrior I remain. My modus operandi here is a paraphrase of that insightful contemporary philosopher Taylor Swift: "'Cuz the gloaters gonna gloat, gloat, gloat, gloat, gloat...shake it off, shake it off."

So guess what, gloaters? I'm fine. I'm not particularly happy about the election results, but c'est la vie, as they say here in our other official language. Life goes on much as before, and the saving grace in all this is that, while I know that a "progressive" Trudeau government is going to be awful, and that the cloyingly earnest Trudeau is going to be a perfectly ghastly prime minister (just as I knew at the outset that Obama would be a dreadful president--and you know he didn't disappoint), the next few years are going to be hilarious.

Horrible.

But hilarious.

And, hey, when things get really bad--like, say, when Justin goes back on his promises to Canadian Jews and shafts Israel a la Barack Obama and Liberal governments past--I can always crank up the Taylor Swift really high and karaoke my troubles away.