I remember feeling uneasy about it as I typed the words, a month ago, which I remember were something like…
“perhaps it’s wildly optimistic, but…
…have we turned the corner?”
Meaning: has the country finally come to its senses? Have they come to see Trump for what he is, which is the complete opposite of whatever they thought they saw in a television show? Will they dosomething about him, for whatever of a multitude of reasons? Shit—if the Republicans want to discover, tomorrow morning, that Trump has Alzheimer’s, and that the lighthouse of his genius no longer shines so brightly…well, I’ll jump on that bandwagon. They can name every building, street, town and male child after Trump for the rest of time, and I’ll be totally cool with it.
I did it with Reagan, I can do it with Trump.
Anyway, the Christmas spirit seemed to have wormed its way into little Marc, or maybe I was just exhausted. I certainly wasn’t realistic, which was curious, because I did peer out the bus window at all of the destroyers that popped up in San Juan harbor on their way to Roosevelt Roads. I wrote about them last year, if anybody remembers what that was like. I even was going to get off the bus, one morning, just to take a photo. Ah, one of the many little voices I should have listened to.
Trump is a dry drunk who has never touched a drop of alcohol—a view I thought was my own, until it turns out his chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, shares it. And with drunks, everything gets turned upside down. Usually, with normal people, things are not as bad as they seem. Things will right themselves, after a bit.
Not with drunks, and not with Trump.
Well, the boats were in the harbor, and little Marc was on the bus peering at them through the window, and it should have been obvious right? I’m the guy who keeps wondering what the Germans, back in the 1930’s, thought about that railway built into that enormous forest that sheltered that temporary camp that was both huge and yet not possibly big enough to accommodate the endless trains crammed with people (arriving) and chillingly empty (leaving).
And that awful smell of something burning—ugh!
The Germans didn’t “see” the concentration camps that were in their backyards and that some of them must have helped build. I didn’t “see” the warships that were floating in front of me.
I mean, who could imagine that “we” were going to send a strike force into Caracas, Venezuela in the middle of the night, enter the compound where the President of the country was sleeping with his wife, kill the thirty Cubans who were providing security for them, and then seize the president and his wife, put them in handcuffs and fly them out of the country.
This is America, dudes, where we do the subtle / hypocritical approach. Artificial Intelligence has just told me that the phrase “give us your oil or we’ll bring you democracy,” entered the public discussion in the first decade of the century in response to the Iraq / Afghanistan wars. Then, tired old Google gives me the first search entry result, which is this!
Well, I have no memory of writing about medical sadism, or publishing it in http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com but it certainly sounds like something I’d say. And if all I’ve done in my life is given the world that phrase, maybe it’s enough.
The raid was bad enough. The news conference, in which he outright admitted that the invasion was all about the oil, was horrific. Having the ambassador to the United Nations come out the next day and openly admit to admiring and hoping-to-implement the Monroe doctrine with its “spheres of influence,” was nauseating. Hearing that Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba might be next was horrifying.
The lack of subtlety was one thing, the lack of planning for the inevitable day-after was another. The idea was that “all” of the big oil companies were going to invest billions, if not trillions, of dollars in a country seething with resentment at foreign interests extracting the wealth of the country while its residents are in grinding poverty and misery. Even assuming that the oil companies are willing to do that, and that they are able to provide security for the enormous workforce that will be needed, what will keep the Venezuelans from nationalizing the petroleum industry, once all those dollars / Euros / pounds / shekels have made the oil fields / refineries / whatever-else all bright and shiny again? Putting little questions of patriotism and pride aside, the best thing for Venezuela to do might be to let the multinationals rebuild their system, and then take it over again.
Nothing about the plan made any sense, on the face of it. Maduro was horrific, but leaving his vice president in power, and being willing to “work with her,” raises big questions. Delcy Rodríguez went from vice president to “acting president” of Venezuela overnight, but the real question is when, if ever, she agreed to play Washington’s stooge.
Well, you, Dear Reader, know how it all worked out, or how it didn’t. You’re like God, Dear Reader. I’m supposed to be writing this damn story, but you know the ending and I don’t. I am “driving” this damn bus which has a mind of its own, and you are the passenger, who knows where we’re going.
I sure don’t.
So there was little Marc on Saturday morning, looking at YouTube, which had clips entitled “Maduro Seized,” and “US Illegally Removes Maduro from Power,” and my non-caffeinated brain dismissed it as AI generated fake news. Worrisome, but not serious. It took twenty minutes for it to occur to me to check The New York Times, or the BBC, to see if the insane had materialized.
It was like getting kicked in the stomach.
And it was that same, sickening feeling that I used to have when I woke up hungover from the night before. I had started the day before vowing, at last, that today was the day I was going to lick it. I was going to put down the booze and straighten up and get my life in order, open the front door and step into the sunlight! Instead, my head was pounding and my cell phone was harboring hurt responses from the people I had drunk-texted the night before.
Putin had won, once again.
Trump is probably just a “useful idiot,” and not consciously under the control of the Kremlin. I suspect that he’s in that large group of people who know that they’ve misbehaved, that there’s probably plenty of evidence of that misbehavior, but who doesn’t know exactly what the Kremlin knows or has. Only that they have it—whatever it is—and that it’s probably bad.
But even if he knew his behavior had been irreproachable, Trump was susceptible to so many other approaches. There was his grandiosity, and wouldn’t expanding American territory to include Greenland (to be renamed “Trumpland,”), Venezuela, another island (the biggest) in the Caribbean be the best and easiest way to shoot to the front ranks of US presidents?
There was the lack of any moral compass, which can always gum up the works.
There was his belief that the rules applied to the suckers, not to him.
There was his ignorance of any history, including his own.
There was his avarice, because when Trump’s rich friends do well…well, it works out well for all of us, doesn’t it? At least, it works out well for Trump, who likes to have happy, super-rich friends surround him.
Can you blame him?
In the end, convincing Trump to invade Venezuela was like persuading kids to steal candy. Ridiculously simple, and very convenient, too. Putin can stick Ukraine and Belarus and Latvia and anything else left over from the old Soviet Union back under his belt.
From a military point of view, the raid was stunning. From any other point of view, the thing made no sense, unless you seriously considered—as I would never do—the foolish idea that maybe Donald Trump had just gotten pissed off at Maduro, who had begun “dancing” in a red hat to the 80’s music that Trump loves, with its memories of the discos and the parties. Trump got it into his head that Maduro was mocking him, and even though Trump had admitted, a month ago, that Maduro was willing to “give him everything,” that wasn’t enough. Trump had to send the military in and remove him.
Trump is damn close to removing the whole damn world order, and if that sounds pompous, it should. I was taught about the “world order,” the way I was taught about God, meaning that I was in fifth grade, or so, and able to grasp simple concepts above “yes” or “no.”
The simple concept was that after two horrific world wars in the first half of the century, nobody could endure the idea of any more such wars (especially involving nuclear weapons) in the next fifty years. So we Americans (insert patriotic adjectives / descriptions) had put together an entire system of international law, and had built a place on the East River in NYC for all the 180-plus nations of the world to come and settle their petty little differences, though if they had just listened to US…
…never mind.
Well, we set up the United Nations and we created NATO and we kept things pretty much in order, except when there were “regional wars,” which nobody really bothered about, because unless you were Gazan or Syrian or Ukrainian or whatever, well, who cared?
I mean, if you can’t even find the damn country on the globe….
The adults might see nations in terms of foreign policy and “spheres of influence.” Well, we didn’t understand spheres of influence in fifth grade, but we knew about the bullies in the sandbox. You had better have the teacher (God) on your side or a bunch of your friends (NATO) when the bully started pushing kids out of their corner of the sandbox.
Well, the United States had gone over to stupid old Europe and straightened things around (insert sigh / heavenward glance and “once again!”) and then come back home and with Yankee pluck and generosity had rebuilt Germany and Japan and created the framework for a century of peace and prosperity (except for the people living in the “regions,” who kept on having their wars).
They gave us the oil, we gave them the democracy, and weren’t we all happy?
Miss Steensland explained all of this to us, and we all nodded our heads and took it for granted that all of the rest of the world had listened to Miss Steensland, too. Or they had had a Miss Steensland. Or that Miss Steensland both knew everything and controlled everything, which should have been the case, since when you are in fifth grade and Miss Steensland is your teacher, and she is explaining “the world order” well…
…you need Miss Steensland to be in control.
And indeed, I still need Miss Steensland to be in control, and am privately horrified that she just stopped, a decade ago, which is when she let Donald Trump come down the elevator and unpour his nonsense onto the world stage. She had done pretty well all of those long, boring, peaceful decades. My Uncle Deet had to go off and fight World War II with nothing more than his unread Bible (that little detail I don’t forget) but Donald Trump and I didn’t have to. We had to invent bone spurs to avoid Vietnam.
Well, Miss Steensland is somewhere doing, probably, awful and illicit things, since no fifth-grade teacher would ever set up a lesson plan in which the class activity was invading another country, removing its awful leader, and then imposing its will upon the citizens.
Miss Steensland is in a crack house, doing “favors” for gentleman to get her next fix.
Fortunately, Dr. Heather Cox Richardson is at hand, and I have no worries..
None whatsoever!
…about her.
