Could Fantasy Become Reality?

I donated five bucks

this morning to the Obama Transition Team, greasing the Presidential Choo-Choo enormously, I'm sure, but since my net worth has been halved on paper this Fall, I've had to economize. As a result of the donation, though, I was asked once more to "Share My Vision for America" with the Team, and, of course, being the big-mouth I am, I did, and, in that process, came up with a rather strangely perfect job for myself in the Obama Administration, for 8 Great Years: Picture this! Doug Evans Betanco, Ambassador of the United States to Nicaragua.

Yikes, I love it! I'd look great, now I'm thinner, in a cut-away or tux and I sort-of speak the language, and the Embassy party scene in Managua is hotter than can be believed! I could truly do some good there, especially for the peasants, even if I were surrounded by a viper's nest of CIA gentleman-representatives still living as if Reagan were President. My first task would be to bring my staff into 21st Century Transformative Diplomacy. Cool, Old Man. Very cool.

Now, now, I can hear you saying, "Good God! Doug's gone off to cloud-cuckoo-land, for sure!" And, believe me, I'm really not counting on Federal work to keep me out of the breadlines, because I know I simply do not fit the mold of Beltway Bubble Believers very well, at all. I've considered my government here at least as wacked as I am for thirty years: I live on the other side of the paradigm shift that's happening. Anyway, I've probably flunked out already (See post below on applying for a position in the Obama Administration) because of my FBI dossier, which I'm sure is extensive because I created a crazy stir back in the 70's that involved a former President, sort of a secret that everyone knows. Oh, well, I've grown since then.

Gosh, I could forge such links in Latin America from that perch, and really, we'd better start forging good ones because South of the Border, my friends, is a newly-emerging dynamo of capital and development in this Hemisphere which currently is very wary of involvement with the manipulations of the Old Imperial America.

OOOOOOOOOH! I've got to start thinking about forging links in Latin America, to the mutual benefit of all the peoples involved.

So, anyway, This is the essay I send to the Obama Transition Team, today:

"My Vision for America"

My New America keeps its word, internally and externally, and walks its talk with maturity and courage as One with the rest of the world, an honorable nation among nations. Acting maturely means being peaceably responsive to the needs of all the world's peoples, not just the rich elites; honoring international law and World Court decisions, even when they go against us; and, especially, owning to our past mistakes, rectifying them when possible, and choosing in the future to forge a higher path.

My New America, for instance, would honor the World Court's decision in the case of Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua vs the USA in the 80's: the Court found for Ortega, found the US guilty of "conducting a terrorist operation" against the State of Nicaragua from 1979-88, and levied reparations in the billions against the USA. This has been ignored by the State Department for 20 years, and the whole world knows it. If we expect our fellow nations to honor that Court’s decisions, we need to honor them ourselves. When we don’t, we build support for world-wide terrorism’s ad campaign on the ground against us. Honoring this debt is in both the national interest and for the world’s security.

My New America would honor that debt by paying those reparations with interest and monitoring the funds so at least half gets into the pockets of some of the world's poorest people, the campesinos who comprise 90% of Nicaragua's citizens and who have borne the brunt of the ruinous hardships this US action catalyzed. Nicaragua’s economy is ruined, perhaps irretrievably. While the funds might technically go to the current Ortega government, they must be administered by a third party, perhaps The Carter Center, to assure that our tax money does not end up lining only the pockets of the Nica elites. The people at the bottom of the world's economic beanstalk need nourishing, if the beanstalk is not to topple out of starvation at its roots. As well, the USA needs to honor its own laws, in order to stand taller in the world.

My New American President Obama would need to re-educate the American public to understand the truth about Nicaragua: the Sandinista Insurrection of 1979 was both reasonably peaceable and justified, very much like the American Revolution in intention and inspiration, and in no way a "Communist takeover" by wild-eyed guerrillas; the only terrorists in Nicaragua were the Dictator Somoza's National Guard, trained by the US to subjugate the population; after the Triunfo of the Sandinistas, we paid the Guardsmen who had fled the country to terrorize the new and legitimate government of Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica.

The New American people need to understand that the spin-dance of Old-American foreign policy vis-à-vis Latin America in the past no longer exists in the New Millennium, that we will not be lied to anymore, because our New America will no longer lie to its citizens or to the world.

My New American President Obama would travel to Nicaragua to offer both apologies for our dreadful past together and gratitude for the opportunity to make amends, so that we can move forward to stronger democratic and economic bonds. I want to accompany him on that trip because, In my New America, I would like to help build those bonds, if only by this suggestion, or, even better, in a more visible and responsible role. It would bring great honor to my "family" there and to me, here and in Nica. As I've bonded with the people of Nicaragua and lived part time there for fifteen years and spent my time both here and there forging stronger links between these two American countries, I'd just leap for joy to see brotherhood and honor reign in both. The rest of the world would fall to its knees and pray, in a thousand languages, "Thank God, the US we know and want to love is back with us today!"

Gracias, Charles Douglas Evans (aka, in Nica, Doug Evans Betanco)

It's funny, yet true, that when I returned to the States last June from a winter in Teote, I was calling myself in this blog Ambassador Evans Betanco because Teote had asked me to be its voice in Glenwood Springs. Unfortunately, the work with Nicaragua has no more buy-in here in Colorado, so that FCE focus is gone from my life. Why kick a dead horse alive? But, I really would love to be a really real "Hon." And, while I was doing all that ambassadorial stuff, I could be plowing money of my own into building my English Language Academy in Teote. Hoo-Hah!

Gracias, CenterDoug