A Promised Land

America as a Developing Country

My Chat With a Conspiracist

And why he’s better than his would-be betters in the Senate's "Sedition Caucus."

Reliable Sources

Out in the Street

As I strolled down the main commercial drag of my new hometown of Benicia, California yesterday, a fellow offered me a small slip of paper and asked, “Do you know how the Chinese Communist Party stole the election? Check out the video from this paper.” The slip recommended a “Who’s Stealing America” documentary on the front and supposedly reliable news sources on the back.

The guy had a mask on, kept his social distance and seemed nice enough, so I engaged. Our chat went something like this:

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Light at the End of the Dumpster Fire

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.

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Our Long Walk Home

We started this week.

Rounding the Corner

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:

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

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Rainmaker

Trump is toast. But his final presidential scam is a doozy.

The Good News

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.  

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American Nero

Trump's actions are execrable. His inaction is even worse.

If the Shoe Fits

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.

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