A Promised Land

America as a Developing Country

Archives for November 2022

On Thanksgiving, Let’s Be Thankful for What We Don’t Have

Reflections on Cambodia, Ukraine and a Post-it Note

“Boys Will Be Boys”

Back in 1985, fresh out of law school, I was dispatched to Thailand by a U.S. human rights group. I went there to document a torrent of abuses against the 370,000 Cambodian refugees in camps dotting the Thai side of the border following the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of their country.

The savagery these souls faced took many appalling forms: murders, torture, beatings, rapes and robberies by the Thai soldiers assigned to protect them; similar mistreatment of Cambodians fleeing to the camps, carried out by their own countrymen belonging to rapacious resistance units fighting the Vietnamese occupation; vicious raids on the supposed places of refuge by gangs of Cambodian bandits, 20 to 30 strong; shelling of the camps by Vietnamese artillery based just across the border; and brutal, suffocating repression in the few sites controlled by the remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which had killed at least a million people during its 1975-79 reign of terror in Cambodia before the invasion forced their flight to the border.

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Bring on Your Wrecking Ball: Americans Defy Election Deniers

They'll be back. And so will we.

Not all it’s cracked up to be.

A tale of two summers

In the summer of 1983, I visited an old friend who was a young foreign service officer in Manila. Sitting in his living room, sharing beers and shooting the breeze with a few of his colleagues, we discussed the Philippines’ future. One colleague granted that its then-dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, was a repressive ruler. But he insisted that the dictator was “the only game in town.”

Less than three years later, Filipinos’ “People Power” ousted Marcos.

Pro-democracy Americans’ summer of discontent in 2022 obviously differed from that of Manila in 1983. But there was something similar in the despair in the air here.

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It Takes a Village

A Small City Takes on an Oil Giant

A Great Day by the Bay

Three years ago, my wife Betty and I moved to the small Bay Area city of Benicia, 45 minutes north of San Francisco. We were enticed by its waterside setting, balmy breezes, safe streets, affordable housing (by Bay Area standards), thriving art scene, civic pride, and small town celebrations such as wine walks and dog festivals. Its catchphrase, to attract visitors, is “A Great Day by the Bay.”

The town has an unusual political history. It served as the state capital from 1853 to 1854. According to local lore, during Prohibition its bars and hotels provided an off-the-beaten-track escape where politicians, judges, and the like could engage in, ahem, apolitical indulgences.

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