Vacation diplomacy
A plea to fellow Canadians: visit Mexico instead of Florida! PLUS: Super Bowl memories
It is early winter, and I’m standing in the town square in San Jose del Cabo, in front of its striking cathedral that dates to the 1700s.
At the time Donald Trump had yet to make clear his plans to bully his neighbours, but as a Canadian in Mexico, there is a whiff of uncertainty in the air about what the lumbering elephant in between us might do. Our tour guide explains that the cathedral is one of many built by Jesuit missionaries in Baja California, the part of Mexico that sticks out like a finger into the Pacific Ocean on its west coast.
One of those missionaries, he says, fell out of favour with the locals. The lore is that he became romantically involved with a woman, which doesn’t sound very priestly, but our guide says that part of the story is not exactly codified. Anyway, the priest was murdered.
The guide points to a mosaic above the cathedral’s main entrance: “It is depicted here,” he says. I looked up with a start. Hot damn, they really did it! Three hundred years later the murder mosaic sits, on a church of all places, as some kind of warning to would-be settlers: Careful with those hands, you.
I’ve thought about that scene a bit recently. Now, that is how you deal with someone who says he comes in peace but actually has other intentions.
Of course, the other way to deal with our bullying neighbour is to interact with America as little as possible, which a lot of Canadians are now enthusiastically doing. And that’s how we get to the real thesis of this piece: Why Canadians Should go to Mexico Instead of Florida. Let my first-hand research be your guide:
(But you have to do it here, at the National Post, where this piece was published in full on Thursday. Apologies for the bait and switch.) Come back when you’re done.
The Super Bowl that almost killed me
This photo popped up in one of those “On This Day” notifications this week, which made sense since it’s from the press box at the Super Bowl.
Every time I see it a wince a little, because that game might have been my end.
It was Super Bowl LI, February of 2017, and the New England Patriots were playing the Atlanta Falcons. The thing about covering a big event like this is that you have to get there early because the security protocols are strict and you can’t just stroll in with a bag through the usual media entrance. Plus, Donald Trump had just begun his presidency by banning visitors to the United States from a bunch of mostly Muslim nations, so security was even more cranked up in response. My umbrella was confiscated for reasons that remain unclear.
So, you get there early, and then there is very little to do for several hours, other than chat with colleagues. Sometimes you feel like you should be doing something productive, so you write a bit of what some people in the business call z-copy: chunks of a story that are basically background but can be tacked on quickly on deadline if the outcome was in doubt up to the final minutes. I wrote some of that stuff, mostly on how the Patriots had spent the week being even more villainous than usual because head coach Bill Belichick had endorsed Trump quite overtly and quarterback Tom Brady had a MAGA hat in his locker earlier in the season — and both of them refused all entreaties to get them to say anything about the politics in which the United States was at the time embroiled. Not even a token “racism is bad.”
Eventually the game finally began — Luke Bryan sung the national anthem — and the first quarter was fairly uneventful. I had a mostly blank screen with some of those pre-written paragraphs at the bottom. Then all hell broke loose. The Falcons scored, and scored again. With the Patriots needing to answer, Falcons DB Robert Alford stepped in front of a Brady pass and raced 82 yards to the end zone. Falcons 21, Patriots 0. That last touchdown had even provided what seemed like a perfect metaphor for the larger story: as Alford raced past him, Brady dove to attempt a tackle, but ended up on his belly, his arm grasping at air hopelessly. Brady and the Pats dynasty were being undone by a younger, faster team.
I started writing my column. Normally my strategy was to write, say, no more than half of a column through halftime, leaving space for a top few grafs that would only come together once the story of a game was more clear. I rarely wrote something top-to-bottom at that point in a game, because you were courting disaster.
But, it was 21-0. The Falcons were rampant. I began with some kind of bit about how Super Bowl LI was a giant act of catharsis. For years everyone had learned to hate the Patriots, and now here they were with that smug idiot Donald Trump in their corner, and finally someone had blown their doors off. This just didn’t happen to Belichick and Brady. I made special note of the pick-six in which Brady was left flailing about on the Reliant Stadium turf like an upturned turtle.
I kept writing through halftime — Lady Gaga did the show — and even some of that pre-written stuff worked in seamlessly. I was basically all set by the time the third quarter began, because Super Bowl halftimes are crazy long. I was ready to idly munch on press box food and enjoy the second half.
Both teams traded punts, and then the Falcons went on an 85-yard touchdown drive to make the score 28-3 with just 23 of the 60 minutes of regulation game time left. More snacks for Scott. The Patriots managed a long touchdown drive of their own, but it ate up more than six minutes. They also missed the extra point, so it was 28-9.
Hmm. No team had ever come back from as many as 10 points down in the previous 50 Super Bowls. Surely this was just the Pats starting to make the final score respectable? But, it’s not like I had anything else to do, so I started working on a column about how, in this craziest of times, the Patriots had pulled off a remarkable comeback.
And then I kept working on it. The first column sat in one window, pristine, but I started working on the other version, as the Patriots kicked a field goal in the fourth quarter and then scored a touchdown and, son of a bitch, got a two-point conversion. Now they were down by eight points with about five minutes to go and I was pretty much fully committed to the second version of the column, the one where everything went right for the Pats after first going wrong.
New England scored again, of course, and made the two-point conversion, of course, and then, with Atlanta getting the ball with 57 seconds left in the fourth quarter and the game now tied, I realized I might just be totally fucked. I had a version of the column where the Falcons sailed to victory and crushed the New England dynasty. I had a version where the Patriots engineered a remarkable comeback. (I should add here that the requirement at these events is that you file as time expires, or at least it was when people still cared about printed copies.) What I absolutely did not have was a version of a column in which the Falcons raced out to an early lead, suffered an unlikely Patriots comeback, but pulled it out in the end. So I frantically started trying to cobble together some version of that.
I honestly don’t remember much of anything about the overtime, except James White scored for the Pats to end it. I was mildly relieved because by that point the comeback version of the column was the only one that made much sense. I still kind of hate that I was pleased the Pats won. For shame.
The version that ultimately published is still up here on the internets, which you can read here. The other one, the one where the Falcons killed the Patriots dynasty, floated around on various laptops but is now lost to history.
Enjoy the Super Bowl, everyone. And Godspeed to those on deadline.