How I Failed Escapism 101
‘The Diplomat’ and ‘The Black Wolf’ are too close to reality for comfort.
AS THE COLD WEATHER DESCENDED this month, and with it the chilling prospect of three more years of this dark-age presidency, my thoughts turned to escape. Maybe binge seasons two and three of The Diplomat, the Keri Russell show that friends reported was much improved over season one. Maybe read The Black Wolf, the new Armand Gamache mystery from Canadian author Louise Penny. Maybe do both the same week!
That is how I discovered reverse escapism—when you plunge into imagined worlds, yearning for oblivion, only to find super-exaggerated versions of the worst people and ideas that are plaguing you in real life.
For instance, I know of only one living person who was thinking about Canada as the fifty-first state before Donald Trump started yammering and threatening about that. Who? Louise Penny. And even she was skeptical about her plot as she wrote her book. “I remember thinking ‘Have I jumped the shark? Have I gone too far? Will anyone believe this?’” she told CTV News.
The Black Wolf came out two months ago with an author’s note about turning in her final draft in September 2024. “Imagine my surprise in January 2025 when I started spotting headlines that could have been ripped right from the book.”
Thanks to The American Revolution, Ken Burns’s new documentary, some of us have recently learned that George Washington had much the same idea 250 years ago, when the Continental Army advanced on Montreal and Quebec. Canada was meant to be the fourteenth colony, but it didn’t work out.
Penny’s fictional aggressors are plotting a dangerous, nefarious takeover path, while Trump has pretty much stuck to tariffs, threats, and hectoring. Nonfictional Canadians don’t find any of this funny and vow that Canada will never, ever be part of the United States. Canadian purchases of some American products—including liquor pulled off the shelves for months in most provinces—have dropped precipitously. Meanwhile, travel to America was down by nearly one-quarter as of October—a $4 billion loss from 2024.
The boycotters include Penny. She canceled her autumn book launch at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after Trump commandeered it in February. Then she canceled her whole U.S. tour.
“I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but given the ongoing threat of an unprovoked trade war against Canada by the US president, I do not feel I can enter the United States,” Penny wrote on Facebook in March. “What is happening is not just a potential economic catastrophe for Canada and so many other nations, it is a moral wound. . . . Please understand this decision is not meant to punish Americans. This is about standing shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow Canadians.”
The Diplomat should have been a romp compared with Penny’s beleaguered crew and the dastardly yet bizarrely prescient plot they are trying to unravel (not to mention my own irritation that Trump is floating Canada as the fifty-first state, when everyone knows that if we’re going to start adding states, Douglass Commonwealth—D.C.—is first in line).
Yet The Diplomat features characters who are flawed at best and, in some cases, much worse. How about an American vice president who is manipulative, unpredictable, addicted to risky, complicated schemes, and given to offering unsolicited grooming tips to the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James? The diplomat herself, who is smart, headstrong, tactless, ambivalent about her marriage, and to be fair to the VP, does have a bad case of chronic bedhead?
Or her spouse, a less-than-trustworthy former diplomat who keeps ending up in the spotlight for wrong reasons, even when he’s trying to lay low? And, because why not, a prime minister who is a younger, stronger, more physical, impulsive and volatile version of Trump, equally heedless and equally incapable of gaming out checkers, much less chess?
Pile on the international intrigue, sexual intrigue, and political intrigue. The tragedies, deaths, murders, deceptions, nuclear incidents, shocking U-turns, and betrayals. I won’t say all of it seemed like reruns of life here in these United States. But I wouldn’t rule out any of it having happened, either, given the past year of flood-the-zone, can’t-absorb-it-all insanities.
Who among us doubts that the Trump administration is a den of schemers? The difference is the scheming largely happened before the election, produced Project 2025, and they’ve already achieved most of what they planned, right out in the open. In our names, they’ve murdered people on boats, and by cutting off food and medical aid across the globe. They’ve ripped people out of routine, productive lives all over America. In Congress and the courts, many have engaged in shameful machinations to prop up political leaders who aren’t fit for their jobs, from the top down.
IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN The Diplomat or read The Black Wolf and decide to go for it, if only to prove me wrong, I’ve tried to avoid spoilers here. I’ll just say this: Their intensity, as well as their unsettling resemblances to life as it is unfolding right now, made this attempt at escapism an utter failure.
The “comfort food” music documentaries I wrote about a year ago were a better choice, though like all escapes, regrettably temporary. I’ve now discovered long-running British detective series that take place in Norfolk, or Northumberland, or Wales. Wild, scenic, historic settings. Teams of personality-plus detectives and experts. Cases that get solved. And no national politics or politicians to muck things up.
I’m up to book seven in the Wales series and trying to slow myself down. There are only nineteen, and I need them to last.
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