Day 1506
Rat on a journey
To all my American friends, you are fucked — though you probably already knew that, which is, in its own way, a kind of wisdom. Citizens may not all be accountable. They remain responsible, however. This is the distinction that history, that most patient and least forgiving of schoolteachers, tends to enforce long after the classroom has emptied.
There is a particular kind of rat — not the flustered kind, not the cornered kind, not even the ambitious kind who at least has the decency to want something real — but the kind who lies the way a man lies when he has collapsed the distinction between lying and storytelling, which is to say: completely, and with flair. This rat told a television anchor, when asked directly whether he had fabricated a story, “Yes!” — with the breezy confidence of a man announcing that he takes his coffee without sugar. He considered this a feature. One must, in a way, admire the consistency.
On Tuesday morning, while this rat stood at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest telling thousands of Hungarian students about America’s deep commitment to peace — a subject he has studied, one imagines, the way a cat studies swimming — the rat’s boss posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He was not speaking in metaphor. He was describing Iran. In the old stories of my country, the man who announces the death of a civilization before lunch is usually the villain. In the new stories, he is the president. Hours later, his flunkies did their taco Tuesday routine for the cameras, as men do when they have learned that the performance of normalcy is itself a form of power. The vice president, reached for comment, was unavailable. He was explaining sovereignty to students in Hungary. This rat is today in Islamabad, brokering peace with Iran — because the world, having run out of serious men, has begun hiring storytellers1.
We have written twice this week about almost being killed by a falling flower pot in Budapest — a city that has, it turns out, a talent for dropping things on people’s heads, a talent it shares, one notes, with its current government. The rat was there the same week. He stood before the students and described fourteen months of patient diplomacy, pieces of paper exchanged, positions converging, Viktor Orbán cast as an indispensable statesman of peace. The students applauded. It sounded wonderful. It was, in most of its meaningful particulars, a story — and if there is one thing the rat knows how to do, it is tell a story. A man who knows he is lying and says so on television has achieved a kind of terrible freedom. He is no longer constrained by the facts, which are, he has discovered, much slower than he is.
What the rat did not say — could not say, standing next to a man whose government has blocked EU aid to Ukraine and whose intelligence services have been credibly linked to Russian influence operations — is that the boss rat’s administration has spent those same fourteen months dismantling every piece of leverage the United States ever held over Moscow. Sanctions relief floated. Military aid suspended. Intelligence sharing paused. American negotiators told the Ukrainians, in front of the Russians, that they would never get Crimea back. This is not what mediators do. This is what one party to a conflict does when it has already chosen a side and requires a story to make the choice look like wisdom.
Ukraine is not “haggling over a few square kilometers,” as the rat put it, with the warmth of a man describing a flea market dispute over a slightly damaged lamp. Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia has killed tens of thousands of civilians. It is, by any legal definition that has ever been applied to anyone other than the current friends of the United States government, a genocide. In the fables of my childhood, the man who omits this kind of context is not called a mediator. He is called something else. The students did not ask. Perhaps they were being polite. Perhaps they already knew.
Back in Washington that same morning, the rat’s boss — a man one sharp observer has called a malfunctioning LLM, a rat who would never have been hired to run a Fortune 500 company and yet is running the world, which tells you something about the world, though I am not entirely sure what — was announcing the death of a civilization. Not a metaphor. A statement of intent so unambiguous it functions, as any prosecutor would note, as evidence of motive. The men around him kept their heads down and kept working. This is what men do when they have decided that the alternative to complicity is inconvenience. They will tell their grandchildren they were at the agriculture department. Vance was in Budapest, warning students about foreign influence while conducting a foreign influence operation, describing a genocide as a haggling dispute, calling its enabler a peacemaker, and being an ocean away while the rat’s boss announced, cheerfully, the end of a civilization before lunch. There is a word, in several languages, for this. In English, the closest approximation is: shameless. In the language of fables, the word is: rat.
It is, at the moment, a roughly thirty-hour trip from Terminal 1 at John F. Kennedy International Airport to Kyiv — an overnight flight to Warsaw, an evening train out of Warszawa Wschodnia, and another night in motion, arriving the next morning. People make that trip every day. Journalists. Volunteers. Soldiers going back. It requires no act of imagination, only the decision to go. The rat has made no such decision. He is in Islamabad. The golf partner and son-in-law of the rat’s boss have been invited to Kyiv instead. If any of the three does show up, one suspects the reception will be less forgiving than the one the rat received in Budapest. The flower pot, after all, missed.
Western civilization may not be so lucky.
Our AI-coordinated, glute-driven propulsion project became a good deal less painful over the last 72 hours, thanks to some ibuprofen and a couple of easy 5-kilometer walks. I used a pair of heavy elastic bands to map the thin line between microtrauma and neural activation. Re-jigged hip extension power is slow to come online—sometimes stubbornly so. Re-fashioning the suspension system is weeks-long project. For now, we’re steering clear of kettlebell squats. We’ll take our new ass for a test spin next week.