Tonight I saw a headline about how “America is headed down a dark road.”
I beg to differ. We’re on that dark road. It’s called the trump 2.0 road and it’s ugly, cruel, and smells like authoritarianism. Dictatorship. All these guys use the same playbook: create fear & chaos, arrest people anywhere, at any time so they “disappear, ” a term that was quite popular during the Pinochet regime in Chile. But when I googled it, I discovered just how many of these regimes have done this.
In 1958, I was standing on our front porch in Caracas, watching a procession of cars fleeing the city for the airport of Maiquetia, 3000 feet below us at sea level. My sister, mom and dad stood out there, too, because he’d asked us to come out and witness history.
The dictator, Perez Jimenez, was fleeing the country with his team of loyalists and although we didn’t know it that night, he had $13 million with him that he’d stolen from the Venezuelan treasury. Typical for these dudes.Get in power, fuck over the people of the country you’re supposed to govern,and then get out with the dough. Jimenez fled to Miami Beach where he lived in a kind of luxury until he was sent to Spain.
Trump isn’t Jimenez. He isn’t Pinochet. Or Maduro of Venezuela. Or Orban of Hungry or Putin. He’s in a class of his own, an orange monster eaten up by a hunger for revenge, power, and recognition. But maybe that’s what drives all these types, a deep, crippling need to be recognized as the strong man, the macho guy with clout & weaponized armies and the power to hit that switch that blows up the rest of the world.
Yeah, welcome to the dark road. To change it, speak up, protest! Hope to see you at a protest on June 14. The NO KINGS! protests.
Use your first amendment rights!
