Tonight, my best friend of more than 10 years stormed out of my apt after dinner in a furor. We’ve been friends for enough years that this instance did little more than bead up and trickle down my teflon outer skin. Who cares? He’ll come back when he cools down, right? But it was the subject matter that inflamed his American biases, grounded in myopia, that triggered such an childish stamping out the vestibule and slamming of the door. And that’s what’s makes me sad. And curious. I have always known, since childhood, that American are detrimentally geocentric. In fact, that is the reason for which I applied for a Rotary International Youth Exchange grant when I was 12 to leave suburban “subexistance,” as I called it, to move to the extremely remote and “third world” Ecuador when I was 14. I graduated from high school in Ecuador at age 16. What I learned from my tenure as a student and citizen of Ecuador in the mid-1990s was that citizens of democracy may only hinder the plight of their nation, and themselves, when they organize outside of the party system. This thesis was greatly attacked by the academic body at Columbia when I first published it, but has become increasingly more embraced on a global scale over the past 15 years. How curious is it that we are finally recognizing that sometimes the only way to have leaders lead efficiently is to just fucking let them lead. I am perhaps extremely biased; after all, my thesis advisor - who has gone on to win tremendous accolades as an academic and has run the East Asian Studies dept at SIPA, amongst many other credentials — made a beautiful, if indemnifying speech at my graduation from Columbia University’s Barnard College, in which he told the student body that “one day, Evelyn will run for office. And you will all vote for her. And it will be the best vote that you ever cast. It will also be your last. She is fascist. But in the best way. She may be the key to fixing all that ails this country.” Well, that’s a lofty tribute, certainly. And I’ve never addressed it directly before now. Perhaps out of a place of humility; perhaps out of a desire to fly beneath the radar until the moment was right to strike. My best friend stormed out of my home in a tirade tonight; it may be the right time to strike. And why is that? Well, he’s mad because I, in my interactions with businessmen globally, have come to ascertain that Putin is a great leader. Do I agree with his ideals? Certainly not. Do I agree with his mandates? No. Do I agree with his tactical initiatives? No. Do I understand why he has garnered an 86% approval rating amongst his constituents? Absolutely. Because here’s the thing that all of us fascists understand: Bureaucracy and democracy both yield the same red tape structure that imperils progress, community building, economic recovery, and the peoples’ respect of the political framework of a nationstate. I’m as left wing as they come; hell, I’m a third generation Unitarian Universalist! But that doesn’t mean that I’ll allow to have the wool pulled over my eyes to see the US as anything but the indebted mass of increasingly large percentages of un- or under- educated citizens. So maybe the Unitarians hate me too; but that hasn’t been my experience. In fact, left, right, middle- wing bystanders seem to draw upon my every word. And is that because I am the smartest person in this country? Probably not. But I am the most humanistic-empowering. And to empower people, you must strictly guide them. As Dorothy Parker once said, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”