Twenty years ago to the day, the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife and accomplice Elena, fled their palaces in Bucharest, intending to find a safe haven abroad, in Panama or Brazil, but it was too late, their writ ran no more, the army rebelled, the Ceausescus' helicopter was forced down in the countryside, and on Christmas Day 1989 they were executed, after a summary trial that was a disgrace and a kangaroo court, even considering the undoubted guilt of the defendants. But the moment I will never forget from the Romanian revolution--indeed, from that whole remarkable year of revolutions–is when Ceausescu, giving what was to prove his last speech, hears for the first time in his life the hissing of a hostile crowd; the combination of outrage, confusion, and fear on his face tells the whole sad tale of a dictator's delusions. There was no Plan B. (YouTube video of the moment itself.) In the film, his minions, also caught by surprise, run back and forth in confusion. I watched this extraordinary tectonic shift of history from the couch in my overheated New York apartment, beer at my side, pet bird chirping, drug dealers hollering in the street below, my ambitions unfulfilled, my hopes undimmed, my prospects unpromising; but after the Romanian debacle, my hopes for humanity were, naively, raised. I thought that by ridding ourselves of Dracula we had finally banished the darkness and were moving toward those broad sunlit uplands Churchill used to love to talk about. Alas, we are but human, and the darkness falls again soon enough. But moments like this one are the shafts of sunlight through the clouds.