OUR BELOVED DICTATORS

 Let’s admit it, we love dictators.

We love Mussolini.
 We love Napoleon.
 We love Pinochet.

No? You disagree?

You believe that, in a country like ours, they should be thrown overboard, and in a jiffy, p-l-e-a-s-e?

 True, the frame of this entire nation, what sustains it, what articulates its flesh is liberty.  And this, despite the initial crimes that were committed against Native Americans and African Americans. We’ve got our own apartheid, our own holocaust, which we should claim . Why? Because we must not forget, for one. But also because it is upon these abuses that we learned and were able to construct the most sophisticated democracy on earth. Granted, it makes liberty quite expensive, and democracy far more precious than priceless stones like The Sancy Diamond. But that’s the way it should be. What we have is not to be taken for granted, and the American Constitution, with its system of carefully orchestrated check and balances, is not as infallible as we thought it once was, but only as solid and honest as the lawmakers who handle it.

  Democracy, in order to survive, must reinvent itself, as society evolves. It does so by amending old laws, creating new ones, establishing new rights. Rights of women, of gays and transgender people. The rights of Blacks and Latinos. The rights of Natives and Mother Earth. So democracy is that organic matter, that stream that un-pollutes itself, that manuscript in constant search for “le most juste”— for just action. It is not a finished work, nor should it ever become one.

 Were it so—finished and square, with a wall, no horizon—it would no longer look like itself.
 Finished, it would be, indeed, finished. A dictatorship.

 Democracy can be, in fact, chaotic at times, albeit capable of offering prosperity and stability. When good economics and low unemployment are part of the landscape, when the middle class spreads wide like a solid foundation, we don’t mind the occasional chaos, for that goes with liberty. But when the economy crumbles, when the job market locks up and poverty increases; when the wealth distribution is so uneven that the middle class keeps shrinking at an alarming pace, stability disappears and chaos is as dizzying as a disease.

 Scraping the bottom of the barrel, workers are wondering how they are going to pay their bills. Cancer patients are asking themselves if they will have to cut their pills in half again in order to be able to reach the end of the month.

 In what used to be the wealthiest nation, Americans feel now weakened, unprotected.

 Whose fault? Democrats’? Republicans’?

 Or just Congress, either party, filling their pocket and bowing to high interests, while forgetting that children will  go hungry at home, waiting  impatiently until the next morning, when they will be fed at school the only meal of the day?

 If democracy needs a diversity of parties and p.o.v., corruption does not discriminate. It is all embracing. And in the past ten-fifteen years, it appears that corruption has been far more active than democracy. Had the reverse been true, chances are the aforementioned economic situation wouldn’t have occurred at such a profound level.

 In other words, our congress grew corrupt and lazy as our country grew fragile and desperate.

 Knees were so weak when he arrived. The knees of our county. Our knees.

 But when we saw him, so loud, so strong, we welcomed him with open arms.

 We would grow strong too.

 We had seen his name time and again on gigantic towers.

 A gigantic name on a gigantic tower. TRUMP. Even his name looked like a tower.

He promised order. Order. And a great big wall.

 There he was, a loud mouth, for sure, with a bad temper, just like daddy. But that was character, that’s what it was. Character.

 And he talked like the rest of us. A man so rich who talked like simple people. That meant we could get rich too.

 So what if he was if he was connected to the Russians, or to the mafia?

 He would protect us.

 So what if he was a bit of a dictator at times? So what if he had the Sinclair Broadcast Group force its 137 stations spread propaganda about him all across the nation? He had his heart in the right place. He cared about us.

 Right?

 Right?

 These were rough times and he was the right man for the moment. He would fix things.
 He would.

 Come to think of it, Hitler came soon after that huge 1929 economic crisis. That’s what got him elected. He would fix things too.