A version of this piece appeared in the Washington Post.

Full disclosure: I can move to Canada should the outcome of the Presidential election displease me.

That’s because Canada is from whence I came due to the outcome of another Presidential election, one that did please me.

In 2008, I was living in my hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, working often for US companies in my role as writer of books and producer of television. When Barack Obama won not just the White House, but the imagination of the civilized world with his message of hope and change, our street in Vancouver had a party. Other neighborhoods in Canada and around the world did the same, unleashing a massive cheer for the USA after the dark and bloody eight years preceding this momentous event.

There is much truth in the Irish political joke that goes: “The problem with political jokes is that they get elected.”

I had never really thought about that before until 2016, when catastrophe hit the land and somehow a TV reality “star” got elected president of the USA. And started stocking his so-called administration with my tribe, Irish-Catholics.

My father was an Irish immigrant, and I grew up in a progressive Irish Catholic home where the Kennedys, problems and all, served as the model for what the Irish could do to make America a more perfect union.

In the late 1940s, when he was a struggling writer of pulp fiction, L. Ron Hubbard said, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”

And so he did, one that came to be the billion-dollar international powerhouse known as Scientology. Indeed, it is not just Scientology that is rich. Religious entities generally are flush with cash in the United States. In 2017, religious organizations and causes received an estimated $127.37 billion out of the record $410 billion that Americans gave to charity.

The City of York, an ancient walled settlement in the north of England, home to the splendid York Minster Cathedral and today, more than 200,000 people, was once the site of one of England’s worst atrocities.

On March 16th, 1190, the entire Jewish community of York was massacred as the ghastly apogee of a wave of anti-Semitic riots.

Abraham Lincoln. a young, self-taught lawyer, hangs out his shingle in Springfield, Illinois. He has given himself a year to make a go of it, or he will try something else. His first case is a murder case, in which Abraham Lincoln has to defend the man who killed his friend.

In 1992, I won the New Views Screenwriting award from British Columbia Film for my screenplay “Impolite”. It was my first screenplay, I was fresh out of graduate school, and with the princely sum of $500,000 (Canadian) in my pocket, I was going to make my first movie.

The quest story focused on an obituary writer, Jack Yeats, chasing down a dead guy, and on that journey, encountering the slippery twins, Paris O’Rourke, a Catholic priest, and his brother Naples (possibly Satan). The director, David Hauka, had cast everyone but the twins, when our producer, Raymond Massey, said “Christopher Plummer.”