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Honestly, who could believe it, if that is we weren't actually living through it? And maybe even then?
I mean, once upon a time, Donald Trump would have been unimaginable as president (or do I mean king, emperor, or simply madman?) of the United States. Hey, you know, the guy who can only imagine White South Africans and right-wing (if not absolutely fascistic) Europeans as immigrants to this country and certainly not anyone from shithole countries!
Id hate to tell my grandfather, who arrived here as a teenager on a ship in the early 1890s with the equivalent of 50 cents in his pocket and, though an impoverished Jewish kid from (now embattled) Lviv, was allowed to stay.
And here's one thing for sure. Don't count on any teenagers from Venezuela being allowed to remain in this country today, even if their homeland is soon to be bombed by an unnamed great power not with Donald Trump in the White House and this particular Supreme Court, which only recently allowed his administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants who may be in danger when forced to return to their country. After all, a certain president, who has been destroying Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean Sea, has already given the okay for the CIA to conduct secret operations against that country and is evidently considering attacking it directly.
And while you're thinking about all of that, take a moment to join TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon as she accompanies a young immigrant filing his application for asylum in this country. Tom
Trump is Bad at Running the Country
But Sometimes That's Good for Him
I first heard the expression strategic incompetence in El Salvador in December 1993. Along with my partner and two friends, Id been recruited to do some electoral training there. We were working with the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front, or FMLN, a coalition of leftist parties that had led a long-running guerrilla war against a series of U.S.-backed autocratic governments. Id visited El Salvador once before, during the 1989 elections, when armed troops were overseeing the voting. I remembered watching as people deposited their ballots into transparent plastic bags, their choices clearly visible to the world and to the soldiers. (Not exactly what you'd call a free and fair election.)
A new round of national elections was scheduled for early 1994, and, for the first time, instead of boycotting it, the FMLN was running its own candidates. This was a risky choice. By the time we arrived to teach their members something about door-to-door canvassing, several FMLN candidates had already been assassinated.
It took us a few days to fully grasp just how profound a cultural shift such an election was for people whose project and lives had previously depended on clandestine organizing. For years, their members had kept contact among themselves to a minimum for security reasons. They also routinely limited contacts with other Salvadorans to those in whom they had the highest confidence. We knew wed experienced a breakthrough when one of their comandantes said, Oh, I see. Even my mother should be part of this campaign.
It was one of those comandantes who taught me the term strategic incompetence. Not long before, many of their potential voters had been refugees, having only recently returned from camps in Guatemala. A number of them had lost whatever identification papers they once had and, in any case, it was all too normal for people in rural Central America to lack birth certificates. The most common proof of birth was a baptismal record at a parish church, and many of those churches had been bombed to dust during the U.S.-backed air war against the FMLN.
So, to be able to vote, many Salvadorans had to apply to the government in the capital, San Salvador, for a cdula an official credential. The process of getting one was invariably lengthy. Those who lived far from a municipal center had to make weekly treks on foot to post offices in towns to check whether their ID had arrived. All too often, the answer would be: no. As that comandante explained to me, this was an example of the autocratic governments strategic incompetence a systemic failure, in other words, that served the interests of those then in power by discouraging people from voting.
Round and Round We Go
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