America as a Developing Country
Jack Smith is doing his job. The rest is up to us.
Finally.
Yesterday, a grand jury indicted Donald Trump for, in essence, trying to gut American democracy. In securing that indictment, Special Counsel Jack Smith launched a case of unprecedented importance to our country.
I’d thought that I might greet the news with relief that the inevitable has come to pass, or despair over what Trump’s abuses signify, or trepidation over the societal ruptures that await us.
But I feel something far more stirring. Not quite elation.
Pride.
[Continue Reading]The Good Old Days Give Way to Better Days
My new hometown of Benicia, CA hosted its 28th Annual Classic Car Show a week ago.
I suppose I could start discussing the event, as well as the global car market’s electrifying trends, by lamenting America’s historic love for gas guzzlers and their legacy of overconsumption and pollution.
Nah.
More on the future later. But for now…
Having wandered around the show, I must confess to being wowed. It’s the first such gathering I’ve ever been to. I have no idea how many autos were on display…400? 600?
[Continue Reading]And What Our Own Struggling Democracy Can Learn
In January, backers of Brazil’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro, seized the country’s Congress and Supreme Court buildings, as well as its presidential palace. The action represented much more than a repeat of America’s January 6,. 2021 debacle. It signified the failure of several decades of massive democratic development aid across the globe.
Reaching back to at least the 1980s, America and its wealthy European and other allies poured many billions of dollars into buttressing democracy, good governance and the rule of law around the world. The efforts continue to this day. Focusing on post-communist and poorer countries, including Brazil, they have been driven by a mix of cynicism, foreign policy priorities, naivete, idealism and good intentions.
[Continue Reading]and again...and again...
California has kicked off 2023 with a bang: two mass shootings in 72 hours. (Mass shootings constitute events in which four or more people are injured or killed, not including the murderer.) This has probably been the country’s most massacre-intensive January ever – and certainly since the Gun Violence Archive started tracking this data in 2014. Only a small fraction of these nearly twice-daily horrors (647 in 2022) gets much media coverage. Still, this seems like a nightmarish Groundhog Day.
Over the course of nearly nine years, the satirical, fake news outlet the Onion has regularly summarized such slaughters 30 times with the same headline, “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
[Continue Reading]They'll be back. And so will we.
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.
[Continue Reading]