Get ready for Happy Pol Pot Day!

Since the world is now upside down, I figure we should start celebrating the birthdays of history's worst dictators, tyrants, criminals, & mass murderers. I'll call your attention to them as they come up throughout the year, and maybe even provide brief and fittingly gruesome bios. Unfortunately we've just missed Kim Jong Un's birthday on January 8, but Pol Pot's is coming up this Saturday, February 22.

This Saturday will be Happy Pol Pot Day!

In the realms of thuggery, assassination, terror, bullying, genocide, and overall strong-man rule, history gives us much to celebrate in the spring. Osama bin Laden's birthday ushers in the season on March 10, followed by Happy Nicolae Ceausescu Day on March 19. We can celebrate the extra-judicial murders of Rodrigo Duterte on March 28. April 3, Joseph Stalin’s birthday, is full of material: the purges, the political assassinations, and of course the “Holomodor”—the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians through a Stalin-imposed famine. What fun! After that extravaganza, the life and crimes of Sadam Hussein, which we’ll remember on April 28, may even feel a bit like a let-down.

And we can’t forget Happy Viktor Orban Day on May 31.

It's only fitting this year that we celebrate George III's birthday on June 4: I’m planning something low-key, like making a little popcorn and streaming “The Madness of King George.”

June 7 will be Muammar Gaddafi Day, June 14 will be Happy Donald Trump Day, & we can worship Xi Jinping on June 15.

This year, let’s forget July 4, Independence Day, and instead celebrate our own home-grown Nathan Bedford Forrest Day on July 13, with all the traditional American summer-holiday stuff: picnics & barbecues, hot dogs and hamburgers, potato salad, corn on the cob, baked beans, etc. And don’t forget the cornbread! We’re talking Tennessee here! We can all dress up in Confederate grey, like reenactors, fly the Stars & Bars, and decorate our backyards with burning crosses and by hanging slave effigies from tree limbs.

And speaking of summer picnics, we can have a Benito Mussolini Picnic on July 29, a Hitler Picnic on August 2, and a Fidel Castro Picnic on August 13. We can round out the summer with Happy Sloboban Milosevic Day on August 20. Bashar al-Assad's birthday--very fittingly--is on September 11.

By the way, I remember, as a kid, being transfixed by the famous 1945 photo of Mussolini’s body strung up by the feet in a sunny plaza in Milan, along with other executed fascists, being jeered at by thousands of Italians. It made a huge impression on me—as I assumed, of course, that nothing like that could ever happen here.

Moving into the fall, we can look forward to an Ayatollah Khomeini party on September 24 and a Putin Party on October 7. Maybe that will be the day when Vlad visits the White House, where Trump will kneel before him and, in a very medieval ceremony, formally become Putin's vassal. Afterwards maybe we'll give Putin a ticker-tape parade in New York City. It will be a day full of pomp like nobody's ever seen before.

Let’s not forget Benjamin Netanyahu’s birthday on October 21. What, I wonder, will be the dominant theme of Bibi Day? Will it be the partly-successful attempt to corrupt and destroy Israel’s democracy, or will it be the murder of thousands of Palestinians and the displacement of millions from their homes in Gaza? Such an embarrassment of riches! And how fitting to be able to celebrate Happy Yahya al-Sinwar Day just a week later! Two peas in a pod.

Ending out the year, November 23 will be Happy Nicolas Maduro Day, and 2 days later we'll get to celebrate the many dissident murders of Augusto Pinochet: you know, the “disappearances,” the government critics who were dropped alive out of military airplanes and helicopters. December 4 will be Francisco Franco Day--yes, alas, still dead. One day after Christmas is Mao Zedong Day, and we can end the year, on New Years Eve, celebrating Robert Mugabe.

This can’t be all. I’ll do some digging. History is full to the brim of lawlessness, cruelty, violence, persecution, genocide, ethnic cleansing, one-party states, the imprisonment and assassination of political opponents, the corruption of judges and courts, and the capture and intimidation of parliaments. We should be able to have a thug-related holiday every day of the year.

Our calendars should be full of memorials. Of reminders. Of cautions.

Happy tyranny, everyone!