This did not happen: Trump was supposed to speak at a public event in the Japanese embassy. As is customary, he and everybody else removed their shoes before stepping on to the tatami where he was set to speak. The Secret Service got antsy about something, though, and rushed Trump out of the building. Moments later, Trump was resting at a safe location when Melania joined him. She immediately noticed he was wearing some canvas shoes, half electric blue and half lime green, shoelaces a thick bright white.

“Donald, what the hell are those shoes you’re wearing?”

“The Navy gave them to me.”

“The Navy? Why?”

“They’re special shoes… They’re covered with a special substance.”

“What’s special about them?”

“It’s a special substance designed to—”

“Secret Service made you wear them, didn’t they? After they rushed you out, didn’t they?”

He looked down at the floor and said nothing.

“Moron.”

Now, again, this did not happen. I know this very well because this was a fucking dream I had last night. I’m telling you about a dream I had so that you can see how much this presidency has affected me. My brain is so fucking sick of this guy, it’s creating fantasies for me to see him humiliated in the way my brain finds would be most humiliating for him. That’s fucked up.

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Caveats: I moved away from Caracas in 2006 and I haven’t been back to Venezuela since 2008. I’m an American citizen now and we as a family do well financially. I don’t miss Caracas, I think it was a shitty city when I lived there and I have it on good authority it’s way shittier now. I had wanted to live abroad since I was a teenager, circa 1993, and that was no secret to my family or friends. Also no secret: I got no love for country. I’m not a patriot. Never been. Never will be. I firmly believe your nationality is but an accident of birth.

So, yeah, I like arepas. I like hallacas. I love the beaches along the Eastern coast. I love the beaches on the Western coast as well. I like the plains, I liked driving there and stuffing my face with carne en vara. Etc., etc., et any other lovingly autochthonous bullshit you might want to add here. But make no mistake: I’m sure I’d love sailing up and down the Golden Horn if I had been born in Istanbul. Or drinking yak’s milk before riding out into the steppes had I been born in Ulaanbaatar. Or biking through downtown Amsterdam had I been born in… you get the idea.

All of this to say: despite these and any other caveats you can think of, believe me when I tell you, “a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

——————

Trump is a moron. If you think otherwise, you’re probably a moron, too. Sorry but them’s the numbers. Even people who are benefiting from his being in the White House know —know— he’s a moron. And that, my left-leaning friends, is what I want to talk to you about. Every once in a while, if given enough time, a moron will say or do the right thing. It doesn’t make him any less of a moron, it just makes him right that one time.

Venezuela is bleeding out. Venezuela is being eaten from its insides by rampant cancer. Venezuela is slowly choking to death. We can sit here and discuss the role the American government has played in this drama through the years. We can debate about American interventionism south of the Rio Grande. We can even talk about the wealth of nations and the curse of the oil reserves. It’s a moot point by now. By now the choking, the cancer, the bleeding out has a very clear, easily identifiable, proximal cause: the Maduro regime. We can sit here and try to figure out the distal causes –Chávez, the two-party system, the effects of populism, etc., etc., et fucking cetera– but that would be like trying to figure out if the tumor cutting off the blood flow to your economy grew because of your shitty genes or the three packs of cigarettes you smoked a day when you were a teenager. It doesn’t fucking matter right now. You have to get the fucking tumor out right now. Right the fuck now.

The scalpel that you have right now is a blunt little tool, yes. It comes in the form of a narcissistic moron. It comes in the form of Marco Rubio, an opportunistic hypocrite if ever there was one. It comes in the form of Pence, a repressed bigot who would very probably steer America off the conservative cliff if given half a chance. Or in the form of Bolton, an outright asshole with base motivations so undisguised, watching him speak publicly you get the sense of listening to a character description of the bad guy in a Marvel TV show. Abrams, Pompeo, all the other imperialist shitstains. I could go on.

But my point, my left-leaning brethren, is this: these are the cards Venezuelans were dealt and fuck us if we’re not going to use them to get the cancer out. And fuck you for not seeing it. Fuck you for sitting in your couch passing judgement on our welcoming Trump’s recognition of Guaidó’s position. Fuck you for looking down on us and our joy every time Rubio tweets about jailing these fucking criminals raping our country. Fuck you and your disapproving expression when we share Pence’s “vaya con Dios” video message. Fuck you for spewing the party message like a drunken parrot, copying and pasting right out of the regime’s mouthpiece websites. Fuck you for spreading the “Hands off Venezuela” hashtag and, by the way, how can you call any Trump supporter a fool when you fail to see you’ve been the quintessential useful idiot of Maduro’s Ministry of Truth, you gullible fuck! Most of all, though, fuck you for not helping.

I am in favor of democracy. To a fault. When it was clear Chávez was going to destroy the private sector, flush years of intellectual capital down the partisan toilet, and squander what is likely to be written down in world history as one of the greatest economic boons of all time, I still would not call his rule illegitimate. It was what the people wanted. The hard truth for us thinking Venezuelans is this: Chávez won. Several times. Seventeen, to be exact. Unquestionably. Undisputed victories at the polls one after the other. His rule, catastrophic though it may have been, was legitimate as fuck. Like López Obrador’s. Like Evo Morales’. Like W’s second term. So legitimate, only death could get him out of office. And not without putting up a fight: by all accounts, Maduro’s first presidential win came about because Chávez fingered him as his anointed successor. But that was as far as it could reach, though, and we all knew it. The machinery behind him moved heaven and earth to keep Maduro in power. And by heaven and earth I mean the other two branches of government. The one supreme justice to stand against this massive power grab, who was no angel herself, is now exiled. The Parliament, after years of moronic inadequacy, finally got its act together and tried to stop this stalled car from sliding down the hill of authoritarianism, only to find itself with a newly formed parliamentary body superseding it and vetoing all its decrees. The part of government charged with assuring elections were fair was so transparent about its alliance, even the company supplying the voting machines washed its hands of all subsequent election results. The age of legitimacy is long gone. Guaidó, far from having declared himself president, is following the dictates of the Constitution Chávez himself birthed into political existence. By the letter. Look it up.

So let’s be clear: right now it’s not about you or your idealism, Roger Waters. Get it through your thick skull, Boots Riley. Maduro’s “government” is not a heroic socialist endeavor undermined by the capitalist interests of the American apparatus. The V Republic is not a 21st century experiment on a people’s ability to govern themselves, failed on account of foreign intervention. It might have started like that. Might have. Twenty years ago. Not anymore, if ever. This thing that we have right now is the rot that’s been rotting for so very long. Maduro’s rule is the rule of the kleptocrats. Maduro’s military high command is the high command of a very successful drug cartel. Maduro’s diplomatic relations are the relations of an administration beholden to foreign lenders with a clear interest on this transition not working out. Maduro’s economic policy is to drain everything there is and fill their own coffers with nary a thought for the poor guy who voted for Chávez seventeen times in the hopes the government would lift him up from the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder. Look it up. I say Maduro this and Maduro that but it’s shorthand. Shorthand because Maduro is our own brand of moron. Maduro is the patsy, the puppet with multiple hands up his ass. The red and white point of a nasty pimple. The part of the tumor pushing out and forming a bulge on your skin. Fuck you for poking the bulge, feeling the pus and black blood underneath it, and telling us not to excise it.

I’ll give you this: it’s true you don’t have to have lived in Venezuela to have an opinion. You don’t have to have lived in a place where toilet paper has to be bartered and traded like salt and spices in the 1st century. You don’t have to have used your whole life savings as ransom for your kidnapped brother or wife, as if you were a fucking millionaire who got sloppy with his security detail. You don’t have to have feared for your life after cutting your finger while slicing the single carrot you were going to have for dinner because there are no antibiotics to be had, no sutures, no bandages, no fucking adhesives to cover the gash. It’s true, you don’t need these experiences to have an opinion on what’s going on right now in a country you might or might not be able to find on a world map. Anyone trying to invalidate your arguments using your lack of these experiences is wrong. What you do need, you fucking ballast on the public discourse, is the willingness to keep informed, to scratch the surface and check the source. To read from both sides of the issue and then grace us with your thoughts.

In the meantime, though, fuck you, my leftist compatriots, for shitting on our efforts to cut out our tumor. We’ll keep ignoring you and use your moron as a rusty butter knife to get rid of our moron because you haven’t been able to get rid of yours, and we’ll look at you condescendingly once we’re done and chalk your shitty protests about our methods up to your frustration. No hard feelings.

“Never shook Satan’s hand/look, see for yourself/You’d know it if I had/that shit don’t come off”

That little pearly declaration of innocence comes from the aptly titled Satan’s Bed, a deep cut from 1994, out of Pearl Jam’s third studio album. I was 16 when that thing came out and at that tender age I could already figure out that the titular fallen angel was mentioned not in reference to the guy with the horns, the son of perdition, the little whore, most unclean, you know, the old names by which the church designated all things that were against the church. Like science. Like mixed threads. Like women’s independence. Like wearing a condom. Like anal sex. All the things that suck power away from the church. Like shellfish. No, I figured out that Satan here was the institutionalization of control. Corporate control of recording artists. Behavior control via consumerism and medication. Dogmatic control of education and civility. In a very real sense, the Satan whose hand leaves you tattooed in feces was the church, among the other horsemen of the Apocalypshit. At 16, Vitalogy either confirmed my sneaking suspicions about what the man wanted with and for me, or opened my eyes to other shit the man wanted to shovel on top of me.

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In the fall of 1991, I was neck deep in the Use Your Illusion/Black Album quagmire of heavy metal when the pale and bearded Sasquatch that was grunge came out of the Weyerhaeuser-owned forests, stomping on second-hand army boots and sporting a faded corduroy jacket. This weird entity saw me banging my teenage head to glossy production and multi-part epics, grabbed me by my four incipient moustache hairs, forcibly pulled me out of the California hard rock tar pits, and set me on the path of wailing catharsis.

Fine, it was only three hairs.

Nevermind. Ten. Badmotorfinger. Out of Time. Blood Sugar baby, she’s Magik! I was sitting by my window, watching rain fall in November when the man pulled me by my ears and dragged me in the box with him –and if that reference doesn’t ring a bell for you just stop right now because you’re going to have a hard time reading this.

Being a metalhead, you know, not liking salsa or any other Latin music, sporting an evergreen grimace, wearing black shirts underneath your blue Catholic school polo shirts, was NOT a cool thing. And not merely because only really stupid people would use bonus layers in the tropics. On the contrary, it was a sure-shot recipe for alienation, at least in the beginning. But it was part of rebelling. I had to rebel: did I mention I went to Catholic school?

Hey, it’s not my fault the apartment I grew up in was chockful of books. You remember what happens when you begin reading “serious” books, right? Your small little world gets blown open and ideas come pouring into your head like people into a Walmart on Black Friday morning. Like flies into your kitchen when you’re frying fish with your windows open. Like immigrants into your country when you’ve spent years destabilizing their governments in service of your interests. Like shit into the toilet bowl after curry from a food cart. Drop that kid who reads British dystopia into the sheep-clone producing vat that is Catholic school in Latin America and that’s bound to generate some flatulent reactions. If thinking for yourself is bad Indian, Catholic school is a cork up your ass.

Try to picture that metalhead kid, already a freak among beautiful people, and then wrap a long-sleeve flannel shirt around his skinny waist. It’s like proudly sticking to your ponytail when the top of your bald head is already shiny. Like a nasty zit on a Dustin Hoffman-sized nose. Like a roach crawling along your pristine white ceiling. Like a bellybutton piercing on a hairy beer gut. Like a month-old hangnail on Fred Flintstone’s enormous toe. Point is, I stood out when everyone else was trying to fit in. I knew what was going on, I could have played the game. I could have had my best friend teach me how to salsa. I could have worn the neon things and blend in. I just couldn’t bring myself to do any of that shit. I embraced the hangnail attitude. Of course I was going to fucking rebel. The rebelling was aimless, though. I knew I had to – had to – raise my fist against something, I just didn’t know what exactly. I was trying to be Jimmy Dean in Rebel Without a Cause but, with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve figured out I was Charlie Sheen in The Boys Next Door. Worst of all, I looked like a browned and roasted version of Joaquin Phoenix in To Die For. Pack a shit sandwich and bring Drano to wash it all down.

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“if you permit no thought of disease and death to enter your mind you will have accomplished nine-tenths of the battle to stave off these foes. Tight clothing must of course be absolutely discarded.”

The physical object I first knew as Vitalogy was a CD cardboard booklet unlike any other I had seen before. I know that my “before” is laughable because, you know, teenage, but still. I’d never seen the mid-period Led Zeppelin vinyl spinners and slide-outs, or the original Zippo edition of Catch a Fire, or Velvet Underground’s peeling banana. So this stunted rendition of a 1900s “medical” book was the pinnacle of music packaging for me. The Pearl Jam people found this weird treatise on health (from which the above quote is taken), a mix between Orwellian Newspeak and homeopathic babble, cut it into pieces and proceeded to paste it in, over and around such dissonant imagery as polaroids of birthday clowns and roadkills, dental x-rays, illustrations from The Stranger, clippings from warning labels, and napkins filled with the kind of poetry that flourishes when you figure out you have to start acting like an adult. At 16, I wasn’t clear on what stream-of-consciousness meant but this fucking thing surely made me feel like my head was just above the water line in a urinal at a gloomy bar frequented by twenty-somethings who have just dropped out of college because their parents won’t pay for the philosophy major tuitions anymore.

Among the uric kaleidoscope that were these 34 pages, one stood out to me like a hernia of the abdomen. Like the tooth you just broke slipping on a recently waxed tile floor and you can’t stop tonguing it even though it hurts. Like a Finnish exchange student with the pierced eyebrow trying to learn how to dance merengue in a Quinceañera party. Like that single thick black hair that grows out of your left earlobe. It’s a petition letter to then-president Clinton, where the blank lines normally used for signatures are filled with the lyrics to a song that starts like this: “Don’t need a helmet/Got a hard, hard head.” Can you see where the appeal lies for me?

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Priests did not like teaching me.

In Catholic school, Sunday school doesn’t take place on Sundays. Sunday school happens three times a week during school hours and is part of the school curriculum. Sundays are for church and, since you can’t stash your kid in Sunday school while the Sunday service is going on because Sunday school doesn’t happen on Sunday, if your kid can’t behave during the Sunday service you’re expected to school your kid to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down so adults can be schooled on Sundays. Some kids get serviced on Sundays but that’s a whole ’nother rant.

Did lighting candles in a daze help me find (not) god? Did metal lyrics help realize people were following gods that failed? Can I blame Cobain for how much of a pain I was to priests trying to teach Sunday school on a Tuesday morning to some thirty teenagers as horny as hair metal dudes in a late 80s video so gleefully misogynistic, if you watch it right now in the late 10s you might feel you should be sued for sexual harassment?

Maybe.

Point is, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble imagining me as that kid who kept asking the priest things like, “If I get married and then my wife dies and then I get remarried and then that wife dies and then I die, do I get to keep both wives in heaven?” I got so many assignments on St Augustine’s life as punishment for my “maliciously intended” questions that I think I’m three credits away from a diploma in north African Christian Philosophy.

Maybe not.

Point is, being a quick-witted, fairly eloquent, horny teenager with a burning drive to buck the system and make myself a nuisance to the man, I vehemently argued for the benefits of condom wearing and the societal graces of abortion with all the priests and religious people I ever came in contact with. “Quick-witted?” you think. “What a pompous asshole.” Might I remind you, it’s not hard to be quick among teenagers who’re weighted down by seminal vesicles filled to the lugubrious brim. “Fairly eloquent?” you say. “You just used ‘lugubrious’ wrongly, you pompous asshole!” Yeah, maybe, but it’s easy to sound erudite when you’ve read three or four more books than your average classmate who’s mainly interested in titty magazines. “Let’s go with ‘horny teenager’ and leave it at that, yes?”

Fine.

Point is, I couldn’t believe none of my horny teenage friends had my back when I kept pestering the priests on why the church was dead set against choking my own chicken from time to time, or why the Pope came out against using condoms when half of Africa was contracting AIDS, or why a fetus was considered to have a soul when fucking souls are a fucking figment of your fucking collective imagination! No wonder the poophole loophole was sooo poopular. We all wanted to have sex but we were all petrified of knocking our girls up. The notion of how extremely fertile teenage girls are was hammered hard into our brains in health class like the nails holding JC up by the wrists. Like the drum beat on Jesus Christ Pose. Like Augustine’s pumping of his lover while he waited for his bride-to-be to turn twelve fucking years old. Like the feedback out of the bass amp at the start of Leash. Like the banging of a gavel after finding all those priests not guilty of child molestation.

Maybe not that hard.

Point is, when I found that petition on page 14 of the Vitalogy thing, I felt fucking redeemed.

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“President Clinton, I am outraged by the shooting of Dr. David L. Gunn who performed abortions. In signing this petition I am demanding federal intervention into this problem.”

In March 1993, a former Klansman dick convinced a loner asshole to go down to the armpit of Florida and shoot a doctor dead. In retrospect I think it’s safe to say something like this was bound to happen because when dicks and assholes get together, someone is going to get fucked. The petition ends with, “Please put a stop to the harassment and violence before more people are hurt.”

Three other doctors were killed.

I didn’t know any of this in the fall of 1994, though. I didn’t know people were actually lobbying and pushing lawmakers to defend the right to have an abortion. Fuck, I didn’t even know that in some places abortion was a right! Catholic school fucked me so bad, I remember a conversation I had about the lyrical content of Pearl Jam’s second studio album, Vs., with people who had not gone to Catholic school: I was arguing that Animal was about the Rodney King beating because of the one two three four five against one line when someone said, “no, you dumb wit, it’s about jerking off,” then proceeded to close his hand, finger by finger, around an imaginary phallus and stroked the shit out of that air cock for my visual benefit. Whether the onanism is correct or not, I was left aghast at my failure to read the masturbatory subtext. Aghast, I say, given how adept I was at the practice! Fucking Catholic school, man. Fucked me up so bad that my brain will shove self-love into the deepest recesses of itself, label it ‘wrong’ in cursive script, and deny any and every reference to it.

But here was Vitalogy, singing an angry as hell Kumbaya. “Don’t mean to push/but I’m being SHOVED.” Mom’s shoving the abstinence thing in my ears. Teacher’s shoving the outdated lesson into my eyes. Priest’s shoving his tongue down my throat. Fuck you all! “Why must we trust/all these rusted rails/They don’t want no change/we already have.” I had changed. I was reading the news right along the British dystopia, now. I was beginning to keep up with world events and policy developments. My brain felt like the inside of the Vitalogy booklet looked. All these ideas and information galloping around my head, bumping and trampling each other. Falling cacophonously and rising in harmonized, electric-guitar distortion and killer drum fills. Coming out of my mouth like garlic-bread burps, ugly and disgusting to everybody else but deeply satisfying to myself. Thumping in my brain like the Spin the Black Circle bassline. I might still look like metalhead Joaquin Phoenix but I know I don’t think like next-door Charlie Sheen. I don’t even want to be Jimmy Dean anymore. Fuck all of those guys. From now on I’m Norma Fucking Rae and I have the soundtrack to go with my sign holding. And if you call me a fag I’ll fucking bash your head in!

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I was brought up in the most chauvinistic version of the Venezuelan culture, akin to the Mexican macho attitude, I guess. On a parallel with the booze-guzzling bull riders and horse breakers of the old west. Within sight of the Deliverance pig-loving attitude. I was brought up to think not only is homosexuality wrong, it’s there to be made fun of. You like pink? You’re a fag. You don’t like spicy food? I’m sure you like it up the ass, then. You don’t like dancing? Maybe you don’t like dancing with girls. You play guitar? Maybe you’d like to play this organ. “Thank god all my boys came out men. I might’ve killed myself otherwise.”

I raptly watched the video for Losing My Religion every time it came on Mtv. The heretic nature of the religious imagery spoke to me, of course, but Stipe’s dancing made me very uncomfortable. Why all that arm flailing? Couldn’t they have made it a little less faggy? A friend got Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!! on VHS and we both sat in front of the 19” cathode ray TV to watch it. When those guys came out dressed like old women, we looked at each other with that look teenagers give each other to assure each other that each of us disapproves of such behavior and if we saw such behavior in any other we’d each ostracize him. I realized early on that Cobain’s adoration of women came out in his lyrics and album art and, having a strong mother and strong aunts and strong grandmothers, it was easy for me to identify, accept and emulate such adoration. But dressing up as a woman? Isn’t that taking it too far? At this point in my life I hadn’t seen Bowie in his androgynous mode. Hell, I don’t think I had seen Bowie at all! I doubt I had any experience of Prince’s image other than his Harvey Two-face antics during the Summer of Batman. “Why is the singer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers kissing that other guy in the Give It Away video?” “Well, he has the braided hair. I’m sure he likes to suck cock.”

Fellatio was a weird thing for a teenager in Catholic school. We boys all wanted to have our peckers attended to in this way but all external sources told us that only whores and fags do that. So, obviously, we used “cocksucker” as an insult. You could get your ass raped in jail but, if you’re a real man, they’d have to force and hold you down. Sucking cock, though, equaled your acquiescence and, therefore, your utter and total submission. You submitted? I’m sure you must have wanted it all along. Like most teenage-related things, this contradiction of wanting to have your job blown and thinking of blowjobbers as the lowest of the low was very frequently the fodder of inane discussion. It nearly literally blew my mind when I found out that “cocksucker” as an insult knew no language barriers! If language is the book cover of culture, then “cocksucker” is the little red ribbon that marks the passage on how sucking a cock is as dishonorable as fucking a pig. As stealing from the poor and hungry. As dishonorable as beating a woman. As a woman staying with the man who beats her. As not believing in god and/or Mary’s virginity.

ALL external sources, that is, until Vitalogy.

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“I’ll never suck Satan’s dick!/Again you’d see it, you know, right ’round the lips”

Believe it or not, this line was my inflection point. Before it, I can safely say that, whether I was it internally or not, outwardly I was a homophobic asshole. Making fun of anything not gender normative. Whether I agreed with it or not, I’m still to blame for any unenlightened behavior. Peer pressure is no fucking excuse, especially if you think of yourself as the guy who thinks for himself. Herd behavior is no justification, especially if you think so highly of yourself for thinking you stand apart from the sheep.

Maybe it was coming –maybe it was a long time coming—, maybe it would have happened naturally, eventually. Maybe not. But I’m fucking sure, now, that that lyric in Satan’s Bed crystallized for me the idiocy of the fellatio conundrum and, logically, the gross invalidity of homophobia in all its rainbow-colored spectrum.

Yes, he says he’ll never suck that sulfur-smelling schlong. Not because it’s wrong to suck it but because the owner of the cock is what’s wrong with the world. Whose cock you choose to suck is what measures your mettle. Whoever you choose to be your Satan –the Catholic church, the corporate interests, the homophobic ignoramuses, the abortionists, the atheists, the Korean dancepop idols– that’s the cock whose sucking should stain you. The act of cocksucking, actual or metaphorical, is fine. What might be problematic is the cock. So, please, stop using “cocksucker” as an insult and use Ted Cruz instead. As in, “you’re such a fucking Ted Cruz.”

Enjoy your cocksucking!