Banana Republic: Rivera La Grande
By Varela
To me, Joe Garcia is a great guy personality-wise, but he’s such a mediocre politician that he could lose against David Rivera.
That’s why I’m deathly afraid that Rivera will assume Mario Díaz-Balart’s spot, not because David is worse than Mario but because he’s sadistic and unrestrained.
Rivera is not just a liar, he’s a mythomaniac. Ninety-nine percent of all politicians welsh on their campaign promises and drop little lies here and there, but they’re not pathological liars like Li’l David. When Rivera says he never lies, he’s lying.
And has anyone ever seen his agenda? No such thing. Rivera does whatever’s contrary to his campaign promises. That’s it. He doesn’t have ideas, just damned compulsions. Instincts.
He raises taxes, ignores the middle class, enriches himself through laws created to prevent mortgage trickery, through laws regulating urban development, everything. He resorts to mafia techniques to win; he threatens, intimidates, attacks, slanders – and denies everything later. Even when confronted with a recording of his words, he claims it was a fabrication of Cuban agents.
He is simplistic, abusive, scheming and gross.
The Democrats already have created an Internet site to expose his bullshit.
But, despite his defects, Rivera could win, because he’s allied to the powerful. Also, because of Joe Garcia, who always loses. (For God’s sakes, let’s all try to vote for Garcia, even if we don’t like him, because he’s better than Rivera.)
If Rivera wins (hold on to your hats), we can expect an era darker than the grimmest days of the Middle Ages in Europe, with all their obscurantism and Inquisition; the Dark Ages, with cholera and epidemics of theft, with the rich stealing from the poor. We’ll become cavemen with computers.
To begin with, travel-and-remittance agencies (not just flights to Cuba but also packages of food, clothing and medicines) will still be allowed, but Rivera will raise their taxes to the max and will order that a hammer and sickle be painted on their windows, the way the Nazis painted a Star of David on Jewish store windows all over Germany.
Paramilitary brigades will be formed, with brown shirts and armbands with a hakenkreuz. Rivera will invent a sign allegorical to his concept of Liberty and Democracy. CDs will be crushed outside the Versailles Restaurant. Books will be burned outside the Freedom Tower. And rare erotic statues will be demolished at Marlins Stadium.
The police will be given full powers to raid homes at midnight and drag alleged spies to the middle of the street. And maybe they’ll be gunned down right there, because federal law allows only three prison sentences and that’s not enough for the ultraright.
Schools will be created to teach a new language, another concept of a nation, a way of thinking that’s different from the rest of the country.
Immigrants will all be repatriated, except for the Fanjuls’ cane cutters, who are not immigrants but slaves.
And any worker who complains about workplace mistreatment will be immediately placed on a black list as a “leftist agitator.”
Artists who create anything in the slightest controversial will be thrown into madhouses and electrocuted a bit at a time, until they become idiots or cease to think. Art will become pamphlet, hymn, slogan and convent litany.
Lobotomies will replace plastic surgery. Prohibited will be beards, berets, the color red (Chavist) and olive green (Castroist).
Any woman who aborts will be denounced by the fountain at Jackson Memorial Hospital. And all cars will carry a sticker saying “I am a true American. I am a Riverista.”
Finally, Florida will ask for ideological secession from the Union (never an economic secession, because it will need more federal money to fight local communism) and the current state designation – the Sunshine State – will be voided.
I can’t imagine (and this horrifies me, because we’re close to Halloween) what new designation will be given to Florida.
Make a guess. Before we all move to the Keys or the Carolinas.
