You know how MAGA leaders have been bouncing around these ideas of American greatness: the windbags drone on about the anthropology of Christian values, about the structured intimacy of aspirational masculinity, clarifying what the country’s new priorities and foreign policy should be. Well of course it’s galling. It’s irritating that any male merchant banker turned politican anywhere, especially from Tennessee, can quantify/qualify your own desire when it’s so freaking hard just to make up your mind when presented with a large display of Mukuzani at the local liquor store. And that has been in abundance lately.
Even more galling, duh, is all the chatter about protecting American sovereignty.
Bypassing rue Descartes
Bypassing rue Descartes
I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler,
A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world.
We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wiino and Bucharest, Saigon and Marrakesh,
Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,
About which nobody here should ever be told:
The clapping for servants, barefooted girls hurry in,
Dividing food with incantations,
Choral prayers recited by master and household together.
I had left the cloudy provinces behind,
I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.
Soon enough, many from Jassy and Koloshvar, or Saigon or Marrakesh
Would be killed because they wanted to abolish the customs of their homes.
Soon enough, their peers were seizing power
In order to kill in the name of the universal, beautiful ideas.
Meanwhile the city behaved in accordance with its nature,
Rustling with throaty laughter in the dark,
Baking long breads and pouring wine into clay pitchers,
Buying fish, lemons, and garlic at street markets,
Indifferent as it was to honor and shame and greatness and glory,
Because that had been done already and had transformed itself
Into monuments representing nobody knows whom,
Into arias hardly audible and into turns of speech.
Again I lean on the rough granite of the embankment,
As if I had returned from travels through the underworlds
And suddenly saw in the light the reeling wheel of the seasons
Where empires have fallen and those once living are now dead.
There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else,
And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame
And now I know that the time of human generations is not like the time of the earth.
As to my heavy sins, I remember one most vividly:
How, one day, walking on a forest path along a stream,
I pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.
And what I have met with in life was the just punishment
Which reaches, sooner or later, the breaker of a taboo.
— Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley 1980
We helicoptered in from Chita with a team of doctors, toured the local desert (Chara Sands) and abandoned GULAG work camps in the adjacent Kodar Mountains. It was April. Lakes at higher elevations were still frozen solid. The ice was bright blue.
The Last Tango in Chara is a speculative vignette about a small settlement about 100 kilometers from Yakutia (Republic of Sakha) where inhabitants guzzled magic pills during the early 1990s in order to escape reality.
The same placebo was prescribed to the entire population of Belarus in late 1996. The drug induces a state of contentment and happiness among those who take it, allowing them to accept their dire circumstances without concern for existential questions and the hopelessness of their situation. Many Ukrainians swore off the substance at the turn of the 21st century, sparking revolutions and, eventually, all-out war with the drug pusher next door.
Z’s landslide election victory in 2019 heralded the return of toadyism. The president’s Servant of the People Party formed a mono-majority after snap parliamentary elections, the Constitutional Court fell apart and the country’s democratic institutions collapsed. Martial law was imposed in 2022, the economy imploded and remaining checks and balances between branches of government disappeared.
The 2-1/2-year-old war in Ukraine is entering what some officials say could be its final act after Moscow's forces advanced at the fastest pace since the early days of the war.
Any fresh attempt to end the war is likely to involve peace talks of some kind, which have not been held since the early months of the war.
Moscow's forces occupy around a fifth of Ukraine. Russia says the war cannot end until its claimed annexations are recognized. Kyiv demands all of its territory back, a position that has largely been supported by Western allies. — Reuters (November 11, 2024)
The last time I checked, Tennessee ranks as the sixth worst state to live in behind Arkansas and ahead of Missouri. Bill is obviously delusional and we probably shouldn’t be agreeing with him about anything.
Politics is the art of the avoidance of blame whilst doing blameworthy things.