Report from Quito

The Virgin Mary watches over every branch of our bank.

I have not gotten into a writing groove for this blog and may never do. Part of the issue, before the holidays, was incessant physical therapy for a bum knee. And part of it is the toughness of reconciling our new life far away with the worsening reality of the old life in a place where our loved ones still live.

I can report that I am happy to be in Ecuador and not Minneapolis right now, for all I might perhaps do to protest the Gestapo murder of Renee Good and ongoing atrocities if I were still there.  

What a fellow immigrant to Ecuador calls “the Minneapolis fuckery” doesn’t come as a surprise, sickening as it is. It’s pretty much what a majority of Americans voted for, twice. Contrary to an oft-repeated and now pathetic cri du coeur, this is who we are, or at least it’s who many, many of us are – like the people who have contributed thousands of dollars to fundraising campaigns for the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee. 

Of course she was shot dead. In America, shooting each other dead is what we do. 

America is not the world. This should be self-evident, but if you don’t travel abroad often (or ever, like many Americans), you can lose sight of the millions upon millions of other people out there, most of them black and brown and eking out a subsistence living. The ICE attacks in Minneapolis or Portland or L.A., wrenching and immoral and undemocratic, are just a few of the problems that face humanity across the globe. 

This becomes more real to us the longer we live in another country – although I saw video of Minneapolis ICE raids and protests yesterday on Quito’s local news. What happens in the U.S. can disturb other nations, but people’s lives nonetheless go on, because they must. Just as they will if the U.S. falls and further destabilizes the “world order,” whatever that is.

We’re not naive about where we live. Latin America has a solid tradition of dictatorship, state-sanctioned kidnap and murder, and large-scale government corruption. The U.S. has had a part to play in all that. 

We’ve heard dark conspiracy theories about Ecuadorean governments past and present; we won’t be hugely surprised if one day the police cadets who march daily on the parade field down the street from us are ordered to rough up immigrants, or suspected drug dealers, or anyone else whose provenance is questioned by those in power. 

One thing our distance from Minneapolis affords us is perspective. Turns out America isn’t as exceptional as a lot of us were brought up to believe. Governments, and ways to run them, come and go. Cults of personality swell and shrivel; authoritarian assholes, charming or grotesque, sicken and die. 

In the meantime, we two immigrants from Minneapolis to Ecuador will continue to experience guilt (we’re not there) mixed with relief (we’re not there!) and worry (people we love are still there). I feel something else too: shame, humiliation, degradation. It didn’t have to be like this.

That faint pink glow on the horizon is the prospect of President Vance, whose remarkable suavity, honesty, warmth and good humor will do for his regime what five-plus years of Voldemortian outrage haven’t accomplished: bring the termite-ridden Jenga tower of ignorant, tiny-dicked, xenophobic, mendacious, misogynist malfeasance crashing down to hell where it belongs.

And even then, we’ll still have guns.