America as a Developing Country
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! And some happy memories…
On a trip through Ireland back in 1979, a couple of college friends and I chanced upon a small convenience store run by a cheerful woman.
“Where ya from?” she asked.
“America.”
“Ah, America. A nation of mongrels!”
[Continue Reading]Along with lots of caveats.
In a week when America’s Covid fatalities topped 500,000 – an official figure that might actually understate the real toll and that in any event represents more than all of our overseas wars’ combat deaths combined – it seems incongruous but useful to summarize some good vaccination news.
So here goes.
[Continue Reading]Hitler, the Confederacy and today’s authoritarians show the price we could pay for not pushing back in a big way.
It’s been almost a month since Twitterless Donald Trump flounced down to Florida. Some hoped that, having lost his presidential and social media platforms, his Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen would flame out.
No such luck. In voting to acquit him at his impeachment trial, 43 out of 50 Republican senators yet again caved to his control. In the House, Arizona, Texas and Michigan, his loyalists keep pushing his party line or pushing out figures who don’t fall in line.
[Continue Reading]Lessons for the Republicans’ leadership, starting with 1917.
Adopting a policy of “no enemies to the left,” Russian prime minister Alexander Kerensky freed Vladimir Lenin from jail shortly after he tried but failed to overthrow Kerensky’s government in July of 1917.
In November, Lenin succeeded.
An excellent essay by Slate’s Fred Kaplan draws parallels between Kerensky and most of today’s Republican leaders. Kerensky thought that his greatest threat was forces seeking to return czarist rule to his country. He accordingly sought to align with the very Marxists who soon toppled him.
[Continue Reading]A lesson from Cambodia about striking when the iron is hot.
I once shook a dictator’s hand.
Flying from Bangkok to Cambodia about 15 years ago for a consultancy, I ended up seated in the plane’s front row. A well-attired man boarded with his wife and large entourage, and sat across the aisle from me. He was the country’s autocratic prime minister, Hun Sen.
As we stood up and our eyes met after landing, he spontaneously shook my hand, said “Welcome to Cambodia” and turned to go. The Thai Airways flight attendant, unaware that I knew who he was, politely told me to wait until he and his scurrying travel party disembarked, because “he’s like a king.”
Which brings me to the point of this post: For all of the ways in that small Southeast Asian nation differs from America, we can learn from its brave democratic forces’ failure to topple Hun Sen when they possibly had him on the ropes several years later. In the coming days, Congress must bar Donald Trump from ever holding public office again.
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