Opinion

VANG VIENG, Laos -- The Central Intelligence Agency's "secret war" in Laos ended 50 years ago, silencing Lima Site 6 and other isolated airstrips which helped the U.S. carpet bomb this tiny impoverished nation during the regional Vietnam War.

Lima Site 6, set among Vang Vieng's jagged karst mountain peaks, is now a deserted stretch of black asphalt speckled with squashed trash, 90 miles (150 kms) north of Laos' capital Vientiane.

Debris on the airstrip's gravelly surface includes empty plastic waterbottles, a dirt-stained cotton medical mask, and a faded Queen of Spades.

The strip resembles an empty urban parking lot stretched into the exaggerated rectangle which allowed Air America to land and take off amid the karst peaks.

During the 1961-1975 war, the CIA's Air America flew thousands of flights each day, lifting off from more than 200 scattered covert Lima Sites -- military code for unimproved "landing strips."

Those planes transported Americans, Thais, and U.S.-led minority tribal Hmong mercenaries alongside the dead and wounded, plus "hard rice" -- ammunition -- and refugees.

What is happening in Italy regarding Gaza is unprecedented in the history of solidarity between the country and any other international cause anywhere. A popular uprising is underway, the consequences of which are likely to alter, not only Rome’s position on the Israeli genocide in the Strip, but the country’s own political structure altogether.

To understand why such a conclusion is a rational one, we must consider two important factors: the popular mobilization throughout the country and the historical context of Italy’s political attitude towards Palestine and the Middle East.

When the Israeli genocide in Gaza started, the lnguage and political posturing of the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni were more or less consistent with the political positions adopted by other European leaders.

Words fail me – but they’re all I have, or so it seems as I sit here at a table in my new apartment. They ain’t enough! Not as I read the news and feel . . . something . . . rise, politically and socially, and presume to be the American future.

Is this the rise of fascism? I use this word with uncertainty. I have never lived within its brutal purview and do not live within it now, as I write about the increasingly bizarre – and terrifying – presidency of Donald Trump. I feel no constraint as I write, no need to be cautious with my words. I feel no eyes on me, ever-assessing the loyalty of  the opinions I express. I feel no fear, only outrage, as the snarky and bumbling “supreme leader” wannabe tells us who our enemies are. Can’t someone shut this fool up?

But then I read the news and, often enough, learn there’s a further Trump transgression today, a further grab for authoritarian dominance. And I have to look deeply at this freedom I think I have and acknowledge that it’s vulnerable. If others – other Americans, other human beings – can lose it, so can I. I can become the enemy.

Brad Bannon nails it in his Sept. 10 report: “Jobs are down, prices are up and Trump is in trouble . Brad Bannon is a national Democratic strategist and CEO of Bannon Communications Research which polls for Democrats, labor unions and progressive issue groups. He hosts the popular progressive podcast on power, politics and policy, Deadline D.C. with Brad Bannon.    

Bannon refers to a new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “paint an astonishingly bleak picture of the Trump economy.” He continues. “The nation created few jobs in August, and BLS added to the grim portrait by taking off the board almost a million jobs that had supposedly been created over the last year.” 

And the economy is still affected by inflation. On this, Bannon points out that 

When the escalator at the United Nations came to a wrenching and sudden stop this past Tuesday as soon as Trump stepped on it, I would like to believe that future historians will record that as the pivotal, split-second moment which marked the beginning of the end of the Trump Reign of Terror.

A Terror that began — and ended — on an escalator.

June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower — to September 23, 2025, at the United Nations.

When the escalator at the UN came to that sudden and unexpected halt, was that the sign we had been waiting for? The escalator! Is it possible that the escalator’s complete loss of power, its instant paralyzation, its seemingly abrupt and total collapse meant that this too was the end of the Reign of Donald J. Trump?

Go with me on this. I want us to imagine what life might look like in a Post-Escalator, Post-Trump World.

But you’re asking, how can I say we are in “Post-Trump” when right now you can turn on any TV and see him pouring the final load of concrete over the Rose Garden?