WEST BRATTLEBORO — In one nation, the president runs a national security apparatus that regularly assassinates journalists who oppose his regime, along with ex-spies who defected and some ambassadors who knew too much.
In another country, its leader is said to have fed alive some of his enemies to starved dogs and to have used anti-aircraft guns in a firing squad on an airport landing field. He dispatched two young women from another country to put deadly poison on the gloves they wore and kill his half-brother in a brief embrace.
These two countries, Russia and North Korea, are now apparently closer allies of the United States than Canada is.
The dark turn United States foreign policy has taken since the G-7 summit is almost incomprehensible. Even the madness of George W. Bush's attempt to finish the Gulf War his father started seems to have a sort of comparative reason.
What is happening right now is simply insane. There is no other word.
Because of the power of the presidency, we are experiencing the mad whims of a deranged king. Let's cut a movie trailer and show what a paradise North Korea could be. Let's forget how hard as iron the nation is and how the U.S. came out one down in every preceding encounter, from the Korean War to the Pueblo Incident, to every failed nuclear agreement since 1992.
It is dangerous when foreign relations turn into reality TV. We have seen our president, in a fit of pique and not wanting to play with the grown-ups in the room, reject an accord signed by its closest allies.
It is dangerous when there is nearly irrefutable evidence that the president's so-called wealth is mainly based on laundering of money from Russian oligarchs and other thieves.
But it really doesn't matter now. Anyone who can follow the news knows what is going on.
We are experiencing a sort of civil war - coasts against the South and Midwest, cities against rural areas, the older generation against the rising one.
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I hope that I am wrong.
We're treading water right now, waiting for the November midterm elections, and some people hope the Mueller investigation or the state-level investigations in New York will turn up enough to force the president out of office.
The president's fixer, Michael Cohen, looks like he might be ready to flip. The Trump Foundation has been sued by the New York Attorney's office.
Maybe there is some hope in these multiple efforts against a mad presidency, but I don't think it's going to happen.
None of us can keep up with the news - not even the fine people on the front lines at our few remaining champions of the independent press.
And while we should be all-out behind voter turnout in November, don't bank on a Democrat win in the House or Senate. The way things are skewed by gerrymandering and voter restriction laws, the odds are that Republicans will still control Congress next year.
We know the deal. A majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the forces that have power now rely on the reality that the minority of voters who support them have been duped by dog whistles and propaganda for decades.
But Trump is wearing all of us down. He's winning. That's what he does, like Hitler, who had about the same level of support when he took power in 1933 and left Germany a scorched earth in 1945.
We're celebrating 50-year anniversaries these days of the hot summer of 1968. I had just turned 11, and I remember like an arrow in my heart the morning I woke to find my father weeping into his hands in our living room because Robert F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. Those were savage times. Some of the cities that burned out in riots in that period never really recovered, like Detroit or Newark.
It feels like the same hot summer this year, in Brattleboro at least. The infestation of panhandlers and the traces of addiction on the faces of so many young people tell of the pain within our community, a reflection of a much larger anguish, beyond our control.
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What is there to be done? I don't know. I'm just an old journalist and teacher who has lived through more history than I want to bear.
But I do have this story. At 26, I was sent by Newsweek to interview Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. at his fine home on Chestnut Hill in Boston. After years in exile in the U.S., he had announced his intention to return to Manila and re-enter the political arena.
Aquino told me that there would be an assassination attempt at the airport when he landed. He was shot in the back of the head by one of the soldiers who escorted him out of the plane.
Two years later, I was living in Manila, working freelance for The Nation. Marcos had stolen the snap election from Aquino's widow, Corazón “Cory” Aquino. Mass protests started what turned into a peaceful revolution that ended the Marcos regime.
As I think of the tragedy of the times through which I have lived, two slogans come to mind. One was a quote from Ninoy Aquino: “The Filipino is worth dying for.” He meant it. He knew that he was going to be killed.
The second quote was in Tagalog. Tama na. Sobra na. Palitan na: “It is enough. It is too much. It is over.”
I also remember the color yellow that was everywhere on the streets of Manila, where four million people crowded during a peaceful, passive act of direct action.
I was in that massive gathering, and only many years later did I learn that the Air Force jets circling above us had been ordered to strafe the crowd.
And the pilots refused to fire their guns.
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What will it take to end this nightmare?
I'm not the one to say, but I will suggest that the next time caravans of buses run down to Washington, D.C. for some sort of protest that we be prepared to stay.
The revolution won't be televised, or run out in hashtags. It will be live.
Make yourself ready. These are dark times ahead.