If reports are to be believed, the CIA is going to start filming Bay of Pigs 2: Electric Boogaloo on location in Cuba any day now. What can I say? It’s hard to kick against the pricks indefinitely. This is now a pro-war column, and the next country I think Trump should invade is Canada.

To explain why, I will have to tell you about a vacation my wife and I took, or rather tried to take, back in July. On a Tuesday evening, we dropped our children off at my grandparents’ house and, after packing our things for the morning, decided to head to the local bowling alley. We figured we’d share a pitcher of Two Hearted, work on our embarrassingly low averages, and get to bed early without having to worry about dishes.

Have you ever had the feeling that all your dreams were about to die? In our case, the vacation started to go south before it even began. A quarter of a mile from the bowling alley, we were pulled over. “Do you own a Harley Davidson?” the cop asked. He might as well have asked me whether I owned a spaceship. “Your license plate number is registered to a Harley Davidson motorcycle,” he repeated with porcine incomprehension. I told him this was impossible and he went back to his car to “check the computer again.” Five minutes later he returned, explaining that the 5 on the license plate “looked like an S.” No apology was forthcoming.

That night I couldn’t sleep. We set off from our house at 4 a.m. This is the part where I should explain exactly what this vacation was. The plan was to walk the 115-odd miles from our house to a town more than halfway across the state and then back again over the course of four days. It sounded like a good idea at the time.

The first day was fine, if “fine” is how you would describe walking 25 miles in 95-degree weather on country roads carrying 50 pounds of water after pulling an all-nighter. That evening I slept like a rock, except for the hour or so we spent outside the hotel lobby waiting for the fire department to show up and turn off the fire alarm, which had been mysteriously triggered around 3:00 a.m. For some reason this seems to happen to me whenever I travel, including once during a thunderstorm.

This should have been a warning. The next morning when we set out the sky looked like Mordor. After four miles my lungs felt like I had just challenged the Marlboro Man to a smoke-off during a Mongolian sandstorm. For a solid hour or so I thought it was the end times. It was only when a friend came to drive us home that I learned it was all Canada’s fault. With three and a half kid-free days still ahead of us, we decided to drive to the nearest place on the map where the air quality was listed as “good.” This turned out to be Bloomington, Indiana, one of the loveliest cities in the Midwest. My host—a criminal lawyer of the old fearless Rumpole of the Bailey school—explained to me that Officer Harley Davidson was using some kind of AI scanning device: “Your tax dollars at work.”

Anyway, you can see where this is going. Now that I have decided to go full interventionist, I would also like to declare war on insurance companies. Not long after we returned home we found a letter demanding proof that no one on our policy was covered by another provider. (As if after having no health insurance plan for most of my adult life I would suddenly have two.) In the meantime, the letter said, they would be “unable to process claims.” Needless to say, they were still able to process our monthly premiums. Imagine if utilities worked this way, and in order to plug in your computer you had to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that no other company was providing your house with electricity.

This, too, was a sign. A few days after we returned home I ended up getting sick. Against my better judgement I took some Sudafed, which always makes me hallucinate. At one point I found myself rolling around feverishly in bed, thinking how disappointed an entire generation of right-wing pundits must be by the fact that Ross Douthat’s old slot at the Times was being taken over by Kim Kardashian. At one point I even started drafting an email to my old mucker asking him whether he’d had a hand in the selection process. By the time I’d rallied, I was surprised to discover that Ross really was leaving for CBS.

The day before this issue went to press, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary here in Michigan. “If you are an Arab kid in America right now,” Van Jones told all six of us watching CNN’s live coverage, “this is one of the biggest nights of your life.” Who wants to tell him? Most readers here will recall that Debbie Stabenow, the retiring four-term incumbent whom El-Sayed is seeking to replace, originally won her seat after a vicious race-baiting campaign against the Republican Spencer Abraham, an Arab-American who was accused of “trying to make it easier for terrorists like Osama bin Laden to export their war of terror to any city street in America.” This was before 9/11, in case anyone is wondering.