February 3, 2026: The Ugly American and the Road to Fascism

The Ugly American was a book published in the 1950s that described Americans as insolated and isolated (and protected) by its oceans, stumbling and bumbling our way as tourists in foreign lands and diplomats in international relations, so convinced of our exceptionalism that we don't know what we need to know.  The book referred to our ineptness in SE Asia leading to the Vietnam War, while our perception of exceptionalism takes us to where we are today--easy prey by a media propagandized since the CIA's Project Mockingbird since the 1950s.   We accept terms like dictator, tyrant, and authoritarian to describe rulers of countries we are taught to hate because they hate our values of freedom, liberty, democracy.   

As a result, "we," not necessarily you and me, appear to be marching in lockstep toward fascism--a country where there is barely a division between the government and corporations, where  money is power, and where a small group of oligarchs take away more and more of the scant freedoms given to us a rights in the Constitution.  

Talk to an old person--they will tell you the solution is education, or more accurately "re-education"--what they learned after their formal education.  It's free, available, accessible.  Get involved with organizations like Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Library and Socialism, Your Space Collective, Migrant Equity Southeast, the IW Cheever Foundation, the Beach Institute; get a library card and read; find the truth tellers at the Americans Who Tell the Truth website; listen to Voices of Resistance.