On the flight home from Seattle last night I watched "No", a 2012 Chilean film about the 1988 plebiscite which removed Augusto Pinochet from power. In it, a young advertising exec played by the ever dreamy Gael Garcia Bernal (I am straight but not blind) comes up with an ad campaign for the "No" vote, those who would remove Pinochet from power. It's a good not great movie, but I learned a fair amount about a moment in history I would have remembered had I been less stoned and anxious about my own future at the time. It was one of those rare instances in that moment of great political liberation: Gorbachev coming to power, the Berlin Wall coming down, Ceausescu being put up against the wall and shot, Mandela walking out of prison... I remember all of those, somehow this equally remarkable one had escaped me.
When I got to RDU, I saw John Elderkin standing at the outflow from the secured area and said hello. He was waiting for his nephew, who was coming in on the same flight I was. When I mentioned casually that I needed to grab a cab, he gallantly offered to take me home. Imagine that.
As we cruised down 40 he mentioned that some big things had happened in Russia while we were in the air: Prigozhin was pulling Wagner out of Ukraine, civil war seemed to be breaking out... Holy moley. As you can imagine I got to sleep pretty late.
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