I GO TO COSTA RICA AND DEMOCRACY DIES

What should have been a travel piece

My oldest and closest BFF Mitzy took pity on me in my writerly poverty and has treated me and her 3 kids (twins, 8, teen boy, 14)  to a very exhausting 2 week vacation pouncing around Costa Rica to various hotels and treehouses.  Yesterday I was in a treehouse in the cloud forest of Monte Verde, after a couple of days on Samara beach.  I lost my prescription glasses on day 2 or 3, so the whole country is just a sweaty green haze to me, apart from the blue rivers and warm oceans and mosquitos the size of Sikorsky Black Hawks. 

SO WHAT THE FUCK JUST FUCKING HAPPENED TO DEMOCRACY?  I delusionally feel like I went too far South, and my voodoo-signal that was keeping my psychic foot on the necks of the  Supreme Court got interfered with, due to the deplorable internet they have here, and this was enough to plunge America into a fucking imperial ruin.  I take no responsibility for this.

Costa Rica is a great example of what is possible when your government isn’t evil, and the landscape isn’t raped for short term profit. 

The ocean is warmer than blood.  The people here live in tiny homes, or corrugated tin shacks, but they are kind and happy.  Their country is a beautiful, multifaceted jewel of largely unobstructed nature.  They have no army in Costa Rica; the islanders are dedicated to the protection of its colossal plants and fist-sized bugs and indigenous sloths, and enjoy a thriving tourist trade.  The mantra of Costa Rica, printed on every keychain, is “Pura Vida,” - Pure Life, which they use as a greeting or a thank you, almost to the point where it gets overbearing.  

I may not live there anymore but I’m still a New Yorker, man.  Being a decidedly indoor cat, I am very delicate. I’m a fuckin’ pansy.  I like hanging out in the bathtub at the Ritz Carlton with a glass of champagne and a sativa vape.  I never went to Burning Man —something I’d probably enjoy on an artistic and psychedelic level, but I abhor discomfort, direct sunlight, hippies, nudity, filth and camping.   Mitzy, as a tour leader, is a merciless taskmaster general.   “The objective of this trip is not relaxing,” she told me early on. “This trip is educational.” To that end, there have been numberless hours spent with her shouting and squealing children in a Toyota Land Rover, driving through torrential rains on some of the worst maintained roads imaginable. 

I was also dragged along on a nighttime jungle tour in the Monte Verde cloud forest, which was like walking through chicken broth full of poisonous snakes. The mosquitoes don’t recognize the bug repellant OFF here as anything more than an amuse-bouche — like strawberry body-glitter on a stripper.

“This is why God invented television,”  I said to myself, looking with a flashlight at a giant purple salamander, as my mascara mudslided down my cheeks and my blue plastic poncho formed a sweat lodge around my upper body. 

This last vacation treehouse, the most exotic spot of the bunch,  is the most Burning Man-level uncomfortable of all. The house is a literal treehouse, built into an enormous, many-hundreds of years old tree.  It is open to the elements on every floor.   I nearly cried when we walked in after the 10 hour drive, and yearned to be at a Radisson I’d seen about 50 miles back. 

The tree itself, like many of the massive trees of Costa Rica, is being strangled by a tenacious breed of ficus plant that slowly surrounds the host tree and chokes it to death.   This, I believe, it what the GOP is doing to our country.  The Republicans are the terrorists we bred in our own nation.  They came from the same soil, but they are strangling their host.  

The message to send now is that Democrats will not stand down and watch the country slide into a dictatorship, which is explicitly guaranteed by the Trump administration.   Biden, now granted absolute monarchic power, must act like a fucking man and a leader, make a hideous moral decision that is the only correct decision, and make the entirely un-democratic move of murdering or jailing his political opponent because of what he has guaranteed that he will do.  It’s the kill Hitler argument, writ large, for real.  If these jackboot cretins take power, they’ll never let it go, and the atrocities they  commit will shatter the bones of our union. 

The political situation, now, is why God invented television. But even if democracy fails, Le Resistance lives on, as they say in South Park.  The time for any and every form of protest, from micro-to macro-, is immediate.   

I refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a second Trump presidency.  I will not be ruled by a racist, sexist, rapey, malignantly narcissistic, fascist, pseudo-Christian-ish shit-bag, or a Supreme Court with Clarence fucking Thomas on it.  His infinite power will be meaningless to me, because I will never recognize it, and any obstacle, any speedbump, any non-participation with it I can present, any disease I can give it, I will.  

Now is the time for us to know each other better.  We must create networks, and a community of networks.  Resist in big and small ways.  Only a 1960’s level Love-In will save us now.  Get ready for a gigantic brain-drain of talent from the US to Europe and elsewhere — anyone with the means will go Canadian.   

Costa Rica is not a bad alternative, if you love bugs.  But staying in this treehouse made me realize I can handle more that I thought I could, in terms of lodging.  It’s uncomfortable as fuck, but it’s in a tree.  Stay in America and fight, is the message I’ve derived from being here.  I’ve never had a patriotic bone in my body, but after the Supreme Court demolished the American experiment, I feel as American as World War II.   Fascism is to be resolutely fought and vanquished, in the name of humanity.  I hold this truth to be self-evident.  

Kill Nazi scum.  Pura Vida. 

Hire me, a pro. Cintraw@gmail.com

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Ramses II,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2023