As I follow the absurd events in Crimea, I cannot help but think (as I did at the beginning of this post-Cold War of crisis) of Aksyonov's "The Island of Crimea." (See below article from the NYT).
Were he alive, this great Russian author (he and Vonnegut [not to to speak of another great author, the Ukrainian born Gogol']) had much in common, I'd suggest, in their sense of the absurdity of life) would be the best correspondents to report on the Crimean situation, far better informed (and wise) than parachuted western correspondents (or myself, for that matter) explaining this corner of the world in between advertisements on Tee-Vee/the social media to USA "consumer" audiences.
Not to speak, of course, of the idiocy of the Russian government-controlled media. Still, in a weird way, Russian prop is far more emotionally digestible than "Western" pop-news. The vulgar, unbearable Russia Today program, for example, being propaganda, is never "honestly" interrupted by "propaganda."
Hey, no "ads"! Cuzz -- It's all ads! In a strange way -- which city-upon-a-hill American moralists/exceptionalists cannot fathom -- that Russian propaganda is more "honest," because it leaves little doubt, except to idiots, that it is propaganda.
Surely,I hope irony is permissible in our God-blessed, NSA-observed land. Thank the American Almighty that no gulag awaits me.
But I digress.
Indeed -- I hope these unbearingly uptight media "professionals" (how many of us can stand looking at another anchor, male or female, on the TV MSM) will take no offense -- I am referring to the jet-lagged western media "commentators" in/and out of Ukraine, who prize their journalistic "independence"(oh, yeah, strong-jawed Brian and his cohorts of NBC, who euphorically brought us Putin's Sochi Olympics)remind me (in an eerie way)of the face-hidden commandos that Russia claims it does not control taking over Crimea.
Simplistically put, it's hard "soft" power US MSM) vs. rather soft "hard" power (Commies). Or do I have it the right way around? Yes, I' confused: I've always thought "soft power" is the male organ after orgasm. As the learned Joseph Nye, Jr., the coiner of this meaningless term, "soft power" is attraction. (As if attraction had anything to do with power -- it has to do with love).
Well, take your choice of what kind of power you want. Granted, at least in the USA we do have the choice, on paper.
On a more serious note, let us hope that the senseless struggles for domination in Crimea, that extraordinarily ecologically delicate and fragile jewel of human civilization for centuries (which I had the privilege to visit)-- senseless struggles which, as Kerry mentioned, do belong in some ways to the 19th century (I suppose he was referring to the Crimean War)do not turn into bloodshed, a tragic possibility.
My take, for what it's worth: At this stage (let's hope it ends soon, but I doubt it will), the Crimean/Ukrainian "crisis" is strictly beyond diplomatic (supposedly "rational") control, but that doesn't mean the end of the world or WWIII.
Dips go on and off airplanes (I learned this "dip trick" from following Dick Holbrooke in the Balkans as a Press Officer to the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade in the mid 90's), pretending to the media that movement is resolution. Before getting on an airplane, Dick would address the press, faking (of course, for the good of his country) that he'd achieved anything by moving about. He was a remarkable diplomat.
Grossly overpaid U.S. academics/pundits/ex-ambassadors (the distinction is increasingly blurred) are arguing (think Cohen vs. Snyder) about what Ukraine is all about, as if this really mattered to the long-suffering and talented people in that area.
U.S. "aid" agencies can't wait to get "into the act" when their budgets are down due to U.S. global repositioning. Our legislators (and most of all employment-assured bureaucrats) will use the "Crimea" card (who lost Crimea?) to the utmost for get funding for themselves -- and, of course, for the "suffering" people overseas they "assist."
I had the privilege to serve in Ukraine in 93-95 as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. I played a modest role in opening the only "American Center" in that former Soviet republic, a center subsequently (and quickly) shut down by the USG due to "lack of funds."
I'll forget forget what my Ukrainians contacts told me about Western aid-supported economy "shock therapy" time:
Were he alive, this great Russian author (he and Vonnegut [not to to speak of another great author, the Ukrainian born Gogol']) had much in common, I'd suggest, in their sense of the absurdity of life) would be the best correspondents to report on the Crimean situation, far better informed (and wise) than parachuted western correspondents (or myself, for that matter) explaining this corner of the world in between advertisements on Tee-Vee/the social media to USA "consumer" audiences.
Not to speak, of course, of the idiocy of the Russian government-controlled media. Still, in a weird way, Russian prop is far more emotionally digestible than "Western" pop-news. The vulgar, unbearable Russia Today program, for example, being propaganda, is never "honestly" interrupted by "propaganda."
Hey, no "ads"! Cuzz -- It's all ads! In a strange way -- which city-upon-a-hill American moralists/exceptionalists cannot fathom -- that Russian propaganda is more "honest," because it leaves little doubt, except to idiots, that it is propaganda.
Surely,I hope irony is permissible in our God-blessed, NSA-observed land. Thank the American Almighty that no gulag awaits me.
But I digress.
Indeed -- I hope these unbearingly uptight media "professionals" (how many of us can stand looking at another anchor, male or female, on the TV MSM) will take no offense -- I am referring to the jet-lagged western media "commentators" in/and out of Ukraine, who prize their journalistic "independence"(oh, yeah, strong-jawed Brian and his cohorts of NBC, who euphorically brought us Putin's Sochi Olympics)remind me (in an eerie way)of the face-hidden commandos that Russia claims it does not control taking over Crimea.
Simplistically put, it's hard "soft" power US MSM) vs. rather soft "hard" power (Commies). Or do I have it the right way around? Yes, I' confused: I've always thought "soft power" is the male organ after orgasm. As the learned Joseph Nye, Jr., the coiner of this meaningless term, "soft power" is attraction. (As if attraction had anything to do with power -- it has to do with love).
Well, take your choice of what kind of power you want. Granted, at least in the USA we do have the choice, on paper.
On a more serious note, let us hope that the senseless struggles for domination in Crimea, that extraordinarily ecologically delicate and fragile jewel of human civilization for centuries (which I had the privilege to visit)-- senseless struggles which, as Kerry mentioned, do belong in some ways to the 19th century (I suppose he was referring to the Crimean War)do not turn into bloodshed, a tragic possibility.
My take, for what it's worth: At this stage (let's hope it ends soon, but I doubt it will), the Crimean/Ukrainian "crisis" is strictly beyond diplomatic (supposedly "rational") control, but that doesn't mean the end of the world or WWIII.
Dips go on and off airplanes (I learned this "dip trick" from following Dick Holbrooke in the Balkans as a Press Officer to the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade in the mid 90's), pretending to the media that movement is resolution. Before getting on an airplane, Dick would address the press, faking (of course, for the good of his country) that he'd achieved anything by moving about. He was a remarkable diplomat.
Grossly overpaid U.S. academics/pundits/ex-ambassadors (the distinction is increasingly blurred) are arguing (think Cohen vs. Snyder) about what Ukraine is all about, as if this really mattered to the long-suffering and talented people in that area.
U.S. "aid" agencies can't wait to get "into the act" when their budgets are down due to U.S. global repositioning. Our legislators (and most of all employment-assured bureaucrats) will use the "Crimea" card (who lost Crimea?) to the utmost for get funding for themselves -- and, of course, for the "suffering" people overseas they "assist."
I had the privilege to serve in Ukraine in 93-95 as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. I played a modest role in opening the only "American Center" in that former Soviet republic, a center subsequently (and quickly) shut down by the USG due to "lack of funds."
I'll forget forget what my Ukrainians contacts told me about Western aid-supported economy "shock therapy" time:
In Ukraine, we got shock but not therapy.Meanwhile, as a non-economist, I cannot imagine how a pittance from a global perspective -- 16 billion dollars, EU/US contributing to Ukraine's welfare -- will ever work on behalf of the admirable persons living in the troubled, disunited space of Ukraine. With all due respect to government bureaucrats (I was one of them), I don't think the public is aware of what really happens to these USG funds -- indeed, if they ever leave the Beltway, except in "reporting from the "troubled area" MSM reports.
December 8, 1983
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
By Walter Goodman
THE ISLAND OF CRIMEA. By Vassily Aksyonov. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. 369 pages. Random House. $16.95.
THE fictional Island of Crimea - as distinct from the actual Crimean peninsula - and the title place of Vassily Aksyonov's inventive novel, is a sort of Hong Kong, a piece of land saved from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. It has since developed into an outpost of the West, the shops filled with goods, the air with freedom. But no one is willing to let well enough alone. Especially not the novel's hero, Andrei Arsenievich Luchnikov - ''Looch the basketball star, Looch the racing star; Looch the youth leader of the fifties, jet-set leader of the sixties, political leader of the seventies'' - who dreams of reunion with the Soviet Motherland.
Luchnikov, editor of the most important newspaper in Crimea, has no illusions about the nature of Soviet society. He reflects: ''Who was the true hero of today's Russia, who was braver - the cosmonaut or the dissident?'' Yet from some mixture of guilt over the desertion of the Motherland by his father's generation, religious faith in the Russian spirit and its redemptive powers and a craving for intrigue and derring-do, he carries forward his reunification scheme to its predictably bitter end.
What Luchnikov observes about his own plot - ''Things get out of control, you know what I mean?'' - applies, too, to the plot of this book. The story veers every which way as this accomplished satirist plays with the mutual attractions and revulsions of a wide- open society that seems to be inviting chaos (there's more than a touch of the United States in Crimea) and a closed society that is engineered to quash every spontaneous impulse.
Mr. Aksyonov - the son of Eugenia Ginzburg, whose own books are classics of Gulag literature - was a popular writer in his country before he was forced out in 1980 after his novel ''Burn,'' about Moscow in the Khruschev era, was published in Italy. He now lives in Washington and this is his first novel to appear in English, in a vigorous translation by Michael Henry Heim. Mr. Aksyonov's imaginary Crimea contains every political element of the 20th century, from Red Guards to vicious reactionaries.
This conglomeration provides the author with plenty of material for gags. While Soviet troops are invading Crimea, the Moscow evening news, which has already been likened to a daily lobotomy, reports on ''the spring sowing campaign, the speech given by the temporary charge d'affaires of the Republic of Mozambique on the occasion of his country's national holiday, and a presentation of awards to veterans of the coal industry.'' Several passages could be skits from a dissident coffee house, such as the sendup of a session of UNESCO, where the emissaries speak in formulas and avoid reality, and a romp in a steam bath where upper-echelon Soviet bureaucrats are portrayed as a Soviet Mafia.
Most of Mr. Aksyonov's shafts are directed at Communism, but capitalism comes in for a few. Now and then he downs both with a single shot. Luchnikov's beauteous wife Tanya, a star of Soviet television, reflects while enjoying the luxuries of Crimea: ''Now I see what makes capitalism so sickening and offensive. They've got everything they could possibly want and then some, but it's never enough.'' So she resolves to catch the first plane back to Moscow - ''my world, a world where you can't get anything you need, everbody's afraid of everything, the real world.''
Most of the characters fit a bit too snugly into Mr. Aksyonov's political categories to be convincing, but they are fun anyway. The most interesting is Marlen Mikhailovich Kuznekov, a melancholy middle-level Soviet official who is deeply loyal to Communism yet is drawn irresistibly to the Island of Crimea, with all its openness and commotion. Kuznekov suffers from a case of divided loyalties, the ideal vs. the real.
An anti-ideological theme runs through the novel. Luchnikov, the Russophile and dissident, asks, ''Will we finally overcome our xenophobia, join the family of man, and cease beating ideologies into one another's heads?'' The answer offered here is not reassuring. In the East, as Mr. Aksyonov presents it, ideology has become a weapon of the powerful to retain the privileges of power. The West, meanwhile, is so racked by conflicting ideologies that there can be no sense of community.
When East and West finally do meet on the Island of Crimea, Luchnikov's hopes and fantasies are exploded by brute might. But they also meet in a happier way in this fiction. Mr. Aksyonov presents America though the eyes of a Russian (Looch is interviewed on television by ''Walter Gesundheit, the program's bore of a host'') and gives us Russia in the idiom of an American, or what is now the universal youth idiom, a prose equivalent of jeans: ''You must be off your gourd.'' The combination is sometimes as bumpy as an American car on a Russian road, but the trip is never dull. ''The Island of Crimea'' proves that detente can be fun.