On this very day four years ago in 2021, United States vice president Mike Pence, presiding over the U.S. Congress, certifies the official tally of Electoral College votes in the 2020 election campaign of Pence’s boss, U.S. president Donald Trump, against challenger Joe Biden, a former vice president. Biden is declared the winner, 306 to 232. As Pence brings down the hardwood gavel onto the block on the speaker’s podium, he closes a long day’s proceedings — hours after a violent insurrection inside the U.S. Capitol building, instigated by Trump himself, that had sought to overturn Trump’s loss in the election and reinstall him illegitimately as president. Other members of Congress, at Trump’s urging, had also attempted to sabotage the vote certification proceedings, but to no avail.

These many long months of campaigning for president of the United States of America have now come to an end this day as voting begins tomorrow, 5 November. The world has been shown two very different sides of this thing called “America” over the tedious, tiring campaign season — an often jarring and jolting contradiction in terms that will be decided by millions of voters in what is undoubtedly the most important national election of their lifetimes.

A former president of the United States of America occupies an uncomfortable seat at the defendant’s table inside the New York State Supreme Court, as the criminal case of The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump moves along briskly amid a frenzied American media circus over so-called “hush money”. At stake: a possible 20 years in prison for the 45th president of the U.S. on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records with the intent to commit tax fraud, violate federal campaign finance limits and illegally influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which he ended up winning.

It is early morning on a Tuesday, September 11, a day like any other day. Soon that feeling of ordinariness and calm will be shattered by two planes attacking iconic buildings. By the end of this day many people’s lives will be destroyed, a nation will be shaken to its core, a tainted page in history will be written and the world will be changed forever.

...Today, a half-century later, investigators and prosecutors at various levels of government around the U.S. are hot on the trail of a whole new set of cowards — those involved in the planning, organizing and carrying out of the 6 January attack on the U.S. Congress in 2021. Like Garrison did more than half a century earlier, investigators and prosecutors at various levels today are exposing such cowards for who they are. And what these cowards are revealing to the world is not a pretty picture of America, the land of justice and freedom.

A half-year after the greatest crime against the USA that the universe has never seen — to borrow a Trumpish superlative — it bears looking closely at what has been happening since the 6 January 2021 failed coup attempt sparked by the former president of the United States and the inauguration of the legitimately elected president, Joe Biden, not long afterward.

The violent insurrection on the United States Congress a few days ago in Washington DC, urged on by no less than the Fake President himself, Donald Trump, intended to reverse by force a free and fair election. More than that, the insurrection intended to overturn the system of democratic government in a coup attempt. That attempt failed, though it could easily have succeeded under the circumstances.

Now that voters in the United States have politically buried their Fake President, Donald Trump, at the polls by a wide margin, we can all continue popping the corks off those celebratory bottles of champagne into the new year and finally close the book on that unfortunate reign of America’s self-appointed emperor…right?

Millions of people lined up for miles and miles over the course of three days in late April 1994, many of them voting for the first time in their lives in their country’s first democratic elections — who can forget such images?

The whole world seemed to hold its collective breath as it watched South Africa take its first steps away from the brutal apartheid racial segregation polices of the preceding 48 years (and from centuries of European colonialization of southern Africa before that) and into a new era of liberation and freedom.