If you’re like me you spent long, sweltering summer vacation road trips in the back seat of your family’s woody station wagon on your way to some godforsaken low-tech tourist trap, watching your parents throw refuse on the highway and listening to them conversing in an idiom that sounded like badgers repeatedly sneezing but was in all actuality Cuban-accented Spanish.
Oh, sorry, that was my 1960s-era family vacations.
You, smart traveler, can avail yourselves to the latest the hospitality industry has to offer. However, as so many of you are millennials and polls tell us up to a third of you feel all warm and fuzzy towards socialism, you may want a vacation getaway that propels you a little back in time. Perhaps something reminiscent of the charming enforced famines of Stalinism or the Marxist picnic hamper that was Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
As a service to you, as my readers know how respectful and kind I am towards socialists, I have several locale suggestions in mind that could make you nostalgic for watersports, as in boat people, or the toasty cookouts, as in book burnings, of National Socialist Germany.
South Africa– Ah, yes, take a gander at the friendly land competing to make Mugabe‘s Zimbabwe look prosperous, a country whose inhabitants used to have a particularly adorable relationship with the marksmanship of British infantry. But make no mistake, it’s a one par-tay state!
Cleverly fooling us into thinking it had a slim chance in hell due to the relative statesmanship of Nelson Mandela, this zany kleptocracy is so corrupt Rahm Emanuel sends his aides here for graduate degrees in advanced budget burglary. When they’re not marrying ghastly necklacing gorgons, the leaders of the formerly profitable imperial afterthought are leading the continent in confiscatory peasant revolts and not surfing well.
As The New York Times put it in a 1983 book review of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, ” ‘Caliban’s Kingdoms’ (Johnson’s chapter on post-colonial Africa) is a depressing, even wrenching account of Africa: the liberation of colony after colony from Europe; the great hopes of African intellectuals, most of whom had been given socialist-oriented educations in Europe; the rejoicing of millions of blacks at their freedom; and then the grim, often horrifying record, continuing to this moment, of assassination, coup, genocide, civil war, political breakdown and economic disaster in the new nations, resulting largely from unbridled statism ranging from the inept to the barbarous.” Not much has changed.
But don’t fret! There’s native cuisine for the wayfarer and the party leadership. For the locals? Not so much. But hey, in Johannesburg food is like a bad pun, not everyone gets it.
Nicaragua- As full of useless ideology as they are dim of mind, this Sandinista Back to the Future regime is led by walking Trivial Pursuit question Daniel Ortega. Not satisfied with trying to wreck the country in the 80s, he’s back for a return engagement that so far has Ollie North peering merely from the wings. So far.
With that reasonableness and sense of fair play known worldwide as the hallmark of Latin American Revolutionaries, this geriatric Garibaldi pays more attention to his comb-over than he does to the rising level of discontent on the streets of Managua. When he does totter out, he longs for a return of a communist global leader like Yuri Andropov who will support the glorious people’s revolution and sweep away the last vestiges of church and capitalism. But until then, Pope Francis will do just fine.
If you’re looking for a sensible vacation eatery, try tasty North Korean organic meals at the Tree Bark Cafe. Nightlife? Nicaraguans hate the capitalist rat race. But love the real rat races easily found in your hotel room! Smart money is on Little Fidel in the 5th.
Venezuela- If Nicaragua is a Bolshie lounge act, then the goons in pestilential Caracas are playing the main room of the Hegel Hilton. Amenities include funny uniforms and sashes, mass starvation, and incompetent drone-flying rebels. If that doesn’t kindle your vacation wanderlust don’t forget an absence of potable water, non-existent medical care, and an inflation rate approaching one million percent, or the number of times a 30-year-old Antifa protestor has been parentally reprimanded for wetting the bed.
Visit for the dysentery. Stay for the cholera!
And what of its main caudillo, the seriocomic Nicolas Maduro? Aside from ruining the name of a perfectly fine cigar wrapper, his hair looks like hot-buttered yak fur and his typical ten-hour speeches transformed Valium into the only drug the nation isn’t in need of. His predecessor, a man who made Manuel Noriega look like an ad for Proactiv, took part in so many coups and countercoups he once inadvertently overthrew himself, only to sign his own death penalty reprieve with minutes to spare.
When not cavorting with imported state security personnel from the land of cretin t-shirt icon and badly shaved homosexual-hunting (in the literal sense) Doc Che Guevara, Nicky spouts shadowy claims about Yanqui plots of hegemony while showing the economic acumen of a slow-learning cocker spaniel.
His good points? The joint he leads isn’t nearly as communist, isn’t nearly as bad of a broken-down third-world failed state as…
California- The Golden Showe…I mean, Golden Bear state, that once led the world in aerospace and technology, now leads it in public defecation and gay pride parades that make heretofore tolerant individuals rethink their position on gay rights.
Fabulous!
Not to be outdone by Oregon and Seattle in turning the state into a festering sore on our national buttocks, the only three admissible topics of conversation in California are hair, clothes, and weight. And that’s at CalTech. Stanford focuses on chakra realignment.
Discerning cognoscenti will take particular joy at the yearlong Berkeley Used-Needle Festival, which encourages the most stylish of junkies to donate their pre-owned paraphernalia to the street and gutters, where collectors can step on them and hopefully catch a most au courant disease.
Extra points for Hep C!
When the state government isn’t voting collective bargaining rights to aphids or studying the migration habits of the gray-crested divorcee, its clinically insane economic programs are fostering mass migration, thus turning normal Western states into pre-dystopian purple state-voting munghouses suitable for drooling psychopaths and Democratic state legislators. The last line being redundant.
So put down your fair trade quinoa and unplug your Kindle, dear millennial traveler. These vacation hotspots await you and your cohorts for months, if not for years, if your socialist comrades decide to extend your vacation a tad for spying.
But c’mon! One lice-infested meal on an ice-cold prison floor is way more fun than the drab, ignorant, Trump-loving suburban hellholes of the US, right?
Think of the street cred at your next Bernie rally! Think of the pride your college professors will take in your exploits! Oh, sorry, forgot…thinking isn’t quite your cup of mochafrappachino.
