America as a Developing Country
2020 was literally catastrophic. But here are 20 big ways in which it wasn’t all bad.
For whatever reason, I still recall a 1997 TV ad tag line for the telecommunications company MCI: “Is this a great time or what?”
No sane person would say that about 2020. The year brought us an endless array of developments to despair about. I’ve decried some myself, such as here and here.
Rather than add another compendium of miseries to the universe, I’ll instead note some things that went right or where the good at least mitigated the bad. Here are 20 for 2020.
[Continue Reading]We started this week.
Bruce Springsteen’s 2006 song, “Long Walk Home,” offered a stark metaphor for George W. Bush’s America. The protagonist returns to a hometown peopled by friends who, having abandoned their ideals, have become strangers to him.
Since 2016, that feeling has rung true for many of us, arguably to an even greater extent.
But the song is also resolute and hopeful about the long walk back to enduring ideals, a better town and a better country. Its most memorable lines are:
[Continue Reading]You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t
Trump is toast. But his final presidential scam is a doozy.
The Donald Trump Electoral Unreality Show, which features him still trying to steal the presidency from Joe Biden, will come to an end come January 6. That’s the day that Congress will meet to count and accept the electoral college results submitted by the states. Those results will show Biden winning by 306-232 – and by a margin of over seven million votes, though of course the popular vote officially means nothing in America’s particularly peculiar version of democracy.
Could Congress reject the results? In theory, yes. In reality, no. For that rejection to take place, both houses would have to separately vote to do so. With the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives, that simply won’t happen.
[Continue Reading]Trump's actions are execrable. His inaction is even worse.
Though dictator Ferdinand Marcos was deposed in the Philippines back in 1986, to this day many foreigners know him best for the 3,000 pairs of shoes accumulated by his insatiable clotheshorse of a wife, Imelda. Her collection was so bizarre, her greed so brazen, that it still astounds.
Imelda Marcos’s footwear symbolized so much about a duo that stole $10 billion from their country’s coffers: their corruption, arrogance, human rights abuses and indifference to the poverty and suffering of their fellow Filipinos. To top it all off, many of those ripped off by the rapacious couple remain loyal to their memory and family to this day.
[Continue Reading]We've been warned.
I first witnessed a coup attempt in the Philippines on the morning of August 28, 1987, a couple of months after I arrived in Manila to work for the democracy-promoting, San Francisco-based Asia Foundation. On that day, a well-armed group of military dissidents nearly toppled the duly elected government of President Corazon Aquino. As tanks and armed personnel carriers rumbled by our office, my colleagues and I had no idea whose side they were on.
Just weeks earlier, a Filipino co-worker had proudly told me about joining the massive “People Power” demonstration that helped depose the country’s dictator in February of 1986. Now he and his fellow Filipinos began to look broken. How had so much turned so bad so fast for their democracy?
[Continue Reading]