The Southern Cross Review

(... published in Córdoba, this "Review of fiction, education, science, current events, essays, book reviews, poetry and Anthroposophy" has much to recommend it ...not the least being a recent interview with yours-truly!)

SCR: How many United States citizens of voting age live in Argentina? You’re the only one I’ve met in twenty years.

YMS: I don't know and I'm not sure that anyone does. But the US Embassy here says that there are 20,000 US citizens residing in Argentina.

SCR: How many are Democrats…or at least anti-Republicans?

YMS: I have never met a self-described Republican in Argentina in my almost 5 years as a full-time resident. Argentinos describe to me a phenomenon regarding their former President Menem that I find amusingly similar to our former President Nixon. After landslide elections, it is virtually impossible to find anyone that will admit to voting for either man. I suspect we already see something similar with George the Second.

SCR: Of the two Democratic candidates still running for the nomination, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which do you favor?

YMS: I'm often asked that and I thank God that I supported John Edwards until he nobly left the race before Super Tuesday! "Going on the record" can be useful sometimes!

But all along the campaign trail this time, Democrats have been blessed with tremendous candidates that evince passion in the electorate. For us, this electoral season has been like someone entering a restaurant in which everything on the menu makes us salivate... unlike our Republican counterparts who have found nothing to excite them and have, in the end, selected something from a meager bill of fare that, moments ago, they passed over as unappetizing.

.......

SCR: A propos dead soldiers, to what extent has the war in Iraq impelled your desire to organize expatriate Americans in Argentina?

YMS: I cannot point to the more than four thousand US dead in Iraq more than to the damage to the US Constitution that those men and women swore to die to defend as reason to organize expat-yanquis. Nor can I point to their deaths more than to the destruction of a hope for a middle-class way of life that those soldiers aspired to by volunteering for military service... as I did myself at a young age in a similarly depressed United States... as good reason for patriots to gather under the "big-tent" of today's Democratic Party. Their service, that of the living and those that made the ultimate sacrifice to a liberty both real and imagined, must be honored if we are to hold our heads high.

SCR: How do you explain the fact that George W. Bush was actually elected president twice. This is very hard for the rest of the world to understand or digest.

YMS: George W. Bush was appointed President of the United States by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2001. As for 2004... never underestimate the power of the incumbency and manufactured fear. Not too many years ago, our leaders counseled us that we had "nothing to fear but fear itself." Those leaders were Democrats.