Politics & Power Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti pitches the premise like a deadpan movie logline, and that’s the tell: he’s using blunt, almost journalistic plain speech to smuggle in a Beat-era alarm bell. An “American who wants to become a dictator” is funny on its face because it violates the national self-myth; the gag lands by treating authoritarian ambition as just another career plan, the way someone might “go to Europe” to find themselves. The casualness is the critique.

The “sidekick” detail matters. Ferlinghetti frames the would-be tyrant as a performer who needs an audience, a buddy, a camera, a narrative. Dictatorship here isn’t only ideology; it’s show business and masculine adventure, a buddy-comedy road trip repurposed as a training seminar in coercion. That tonal mismatch is where the unease blooms: if fascism can be approached as content, as research, as tourism, it’s already halfway normalized.

Then there’s the choice of targets: “various Fascists,” “the Nazis and Mussolini.” Ferlinghetti isn’t offering a history lesson; he’s pointing to a transferable technology of power. The subtext is that authoritarianism isn’t a foreign contagion but a replicable method, learnable by an American with enough ambition and cynicism. Coming from a poet associated with dissent, small-press culture, and postwar skepticism, the line reads as a warning about how democracies talk themselves into complacency: by treating fascism as something that happened “over there,” in another time, to other people.

The intent is less prophecy than provocation: if you can narrate dictatorship as a quirky quest, you can sell it. Ferlinghetti is daring the reader to notice how easily the packaging arrives before the boots.