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rimrunnerSo U.S. forces snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro early Saturday morning, giving the people who make their living explaining this stuff to the rest of us plenty of time to unpack events by Monday. It’s weird to me that the weekend still sort of exists in the news cycle, social media notwithstanding, but the sources I tend to check for coverage of big stories, legacy and new media alike, had their deep dives queued up and ready to go today.
The overall theme is general agreement that Maduro isn’t a good guy, alongside questions as to whether Trump was legally allowed to order the extraction (such a nicer word than kidnapping) and whether that makes any difference. Certainly nothing that happened over the weekend was without precedent (I’m old enough to remember Noriega, though was young enough at the time to not really understand what it was all about), and that’s where a lot of what justification has emerged from the White House rests: we’ve done this before.
What next is a guessing game, but some things seem likely: the existing regime, minus Maduro, will probably remain in charge, possibly with U.S. military intervention; American oil companies will likely move in, at the president’s invitation; this will become another incident in high school history textbooks that the students reading them will lack context to understand until it happens again. (It’ll probably involve some of the same people…yet again, if history is any guide.)
A thing I’ve thought about a lot in the last ten years is what kind of country we want the United States to be, anyway. It’s troubled me during events like the No Kings marches, where a whole lot of people showed up to, in essence, express disapproval—but I saw and heard very little about anyone’s vision for what America, and American leadership, should look like instead. Perhaps we don’t really know.
At some point, though, our own authoritarian-style leader will be gone, too. It’s very unlikely that it’ll be due to the forces of another country literally helicoptering in and flying him off. It might even be through free and fair elections, and a peaceful transfer of power, though there again history gives us cause for concern. We won’t know, until after it happens.
It feels like wasting time to wait until then to start building the kind of country we want to be—especially if what we want it to be is something other than what those in power have been building toward for literal decades.
The overall theme is general agreement that Maduro isn’t a good guy, alongside questions as to whether Trump was legally allowed to order the extraction (such a nicer word than kidnapping) and whether that makes any difference. Certainly nothing that happened over the weekend was without precedent (I’m old enough to remember Noriega, though was young enough at the time to not really understand what it was all about), and that’s where a lot of what justification has emerged from the White House rests: we’ve done this before.
What next is a guessing game, but some things seem likely: the existing regime, minus Maduro, will probably remain in charge, possibly with U.S. military intervention; American oil companies will likely move in, at the president’s invitation; this will become another incident in high school history textbooks that the students reading them will lack context to understand until it happens again. (It’ll probably involve some of the same people…yet again, if history is any guide.)
A thing I’ve thought about a lot in the last ten years is what kind of country we want the United States to be, anyway. It’s troubled me during events like the No Kings marches, where a whole lot of people showed up to, in essence, express disapproval—but I saw and heard very little about anyone’s vision for what America, and American leadership, should look like instead. Perhaps we don’t really know.
At some point, though, our own authoritarian-style leader will be gone, too. It’s very unlikely that it’ll be due to the forces of another country literally helicoptering in and flying him off. It might even be through free and fair elections, and a peaceful transfer of power, though there again history gives us cause for concern. We won’t know, until after it happens.
It feels like wasting time to wait until then to start building the kind of country we want to be—especially if what we want it to be is something other than what those in power have been building toward for literal decades.
