war in ukraine :: do what you can

i've been thinking a lot about my russian friends and how they must be feeling. i wonder what they're thinking? what news they have access to? what they believe? whether they have children who might be sent to putin's folly of a war. i'm friends with one on facebook, but she hasn't answered my message. she might not be able to now, if putin turned it off. so terrible what he's doing and how those who will suffer from his actions are the ordinary people in both ukraine and russia. such an amazing culture, with so much of the world's best literature and music and art.  

since i wrote this a couple of days ago, my friend in russia has answered. she's ok and though she's vague in her posts, she actually still has access. and she said we must all hope for peace. what else can we do?

i'll tell you what i did today - i bought some prints from a ukrainian artist. it's a small gesture and probably only significant to the artist who i bought them from, but it made me feel like i was doing something. and i don't want it to be in some fortunate western kind of way, but maybe it is. but still, i hope it made a difference. please support yulia if you can. her illustrations are lovely and she has a cat. you may have to print yourself at the moment, but honestly, isn't that the least you can do?

a little stroll through crimean history

i'm following with interest the events unfolding in the crimea. i really liked this piece in this morning's guardian/observer, which i think, in an even-manner, outlines what's going on, tho' there's more in this piece and it clouds the picture for me a bit. there are many facets to this story i'm trying to decide exactly what i think about the situation. i think it's hard for us to really get at the truth of what's happening, despite our instant access to information about it. so to try to understand, i dug in my memory to tolstoy's sebastopol sketches, the small tome of vignettes that some say makes tolstoy the first war reporter (i also think it's his best work, but that's the stuff of a different post).

the original crimean war (1853-56) was the first extensively-reported and photographed war. you might remember some musings on the roger fenton photos right here on mpc. it also changed the nature of war in many ways, including medically, as it was there that florence nightengale did her groundbreaking work. in the original crimean war, the russians fought the declining ottoman empire and were even winning, but thanks to napoleon and the brits getting involved on the ottoman side, they lost and ended up losing their black sea fleet. (that's admittedly the very short version of the story.) russia ostensibly got involved to protect the interests of orthodox christians in the ottoman empire, seeing themselves as champions of eastern orthodoxy everywhere. it was actually some trouble with various factions in the ukraine which made russia get involved in the first place. sounds familiar, eh?

well, in the accords after the war, the crimea ended back in russian hands, tho' they were prevented from establishing naval bases along the black sea, which crippled them there for years afterwards and probably served to prop up the dying ottoman empire for a few more decades.

as late as 1954, russia transferred administration of the crimea to ukraine, much to the dismay of the many russians living there, but they were all part of the soviet union so that was that. but those russians have remained russian and there are arguments for russia protecting their interests against a ukraine in chaos (no matter who has caused that chaos).

so i suppose by now you can tell that i'm actually inclined to be not that opposed to the russian "invasion." and i find it absurd and ludicrous that the US is making noise about getting involved, even going so far as to stick some hypocritical words in the mouth of the US secretary of state john kerry, "you just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.' um, mr. secretary, i know it wasn't your administration, but wasn't there a rather recent invasion by your good selves in another little country called iraq on some trumped up charges of wmd?" how will we ever learn from history if we can't even remember it a mere decade later?

regardless of who is wrong and who is right (and there are undoubtedly many aspects of wrong and right on both sides), this isn't going to end well. but maybe a return to the cold war will do us good. we've been a little lost without it. and i don't just mean in the russian history departments of american universities.

walls in my mental topography

pondering walls, like everyone else on this 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall. already last night on the news, they were discussing it and the significance of the event, which marked, at least symbolically, the end of the cold war. sabin was watching and her response was, "berlin wall, blah, blah, blah," which is interesting. because it's clear that she has no reference for it (being 8 and all). she can't imagine what all of the fuss is about just because some people knocked down a stupid old graffiti-covered wall. she knows nothing of NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact, nor the Iron Curtain, nor the Soviet Union. (strange that those things are so deeply etched in my mental topography that i can't bring myself not to capitalize them.)

when i think about the fall of the berlin wall, it takes me back to college. i had personalized plates on my car that read CCCP (believe it or not, the state of iowa allowed that), i was studying russian, i was an avid fan of gorbachev and i despised ronald reagan with a passion (the only thing that cooled that was the 8 years of dubya, who made reagan seem quite harmless in retrospect). i don't believe for a single second that ronald reagan was a visionary that foresaw the downfall of soviet-style communism. he was just a guy who could deliver a good speech and happened to be in the right place at the right time to get the credit. and those who really deserve the credit were the people on the ground who pushed their way through that wall and in all honesty, the wall coming down was just the culmination of a long, slow demise of the soviet empire (which took another two years to formally dissolve).

but do i remember it per se? in all honesty, i really don't. i remember more the aftermath. i remember russian history departments in universities all over the world scrambling to find a new narrative. i recall those pierce brosnan incarnations of the james bond franchise that struggled to find a new narrative without the cold war as backdrop. i remember studying in russia in the early 90s with an east german guy who was a bit of a character and had a big fat laptop named hannah as his pride and joy. i remember that the other germans i studied with found him very strange because he was from the east. it was obvious that the divided germany had set itself deeply on the personal topographies of its people and that it would take more than the symbolism of knocking down of a wall to change that.

strangely, i'm left with a nostalgic longing for the dichotomies of cold war rhetoric - the whole notion of good and evil was so straightforward then. plus, i think we've struggled since with only one superpower in the world. i don't think it's been good for us. any of us, not just americans. in one symbolic gesture - breaking down that wall - an entire ideology and way of life crumbled - on both sides of the iron curtain. and we've had trouble picking up the pieces. it took another broad symbolic gesture in the form of september 11 to give us a new narrative, but i'm not sure the narrative of terrorism is a worthy replacement for the cold war. i don't really believe today's possessors of nuclear weapons have the same cool heads that the leaders of the soviet union and the cold war united states had. where is mutually assured destruction when you need it?

and speaking of destruction, i find myself thinking of other walls that have fallen. wall street for one, last year at about this time. but it's back up where it was now, isn't it? and the financial wizards are collecting their taxpayer-funded bonuses once again. and nothing has really changed.

maybe the last time there was real change was when the berlin wall fell. it had such fantastic symbolic value. and so we watch it again and again this week. and we read the stories. and we remember simpler times full of grander gestures. and i try not to let in the sneaking suspicion that what we are witnessing now in a kind of slow motion accident-type sequence, is the demise of the american empire...

#2 - not what i thought it was going to be

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

when i was in junior high, at the height of ronald reagan's cold war escalation rhetoric, there was a made for t.v. movie starring jason robards called the day after. (leave it to a B movie actor to use a B movie as a medium for his propaganda.) it was, looking back, prototypical cold war propaganda, and basically showed kansas being nuked off the map by the evil russians. i'd been to kansas and while it wasn't my favorite place in the world, it was a little too much like the flat prairie, amber waves of grain of my home state for comfort. and the movie called attention to the fact that where i was growing up was probably in some danger...within fallout range of strategic air command near omaha, nebraska.

the movie made a big impression on me and for years afterwards, i imagined that somewhere in russia was a girl who looked a whole lot like me and if we could just talk to each other and get to know one another, then all that cold war mumbo jumbo wouldn't really be necessary.

so, years later, when i got the chance to take an evening class in russian at a community college, i jumped at it. i was still idealistically picturing my "sister" in russia as i slaved over the cyrillic alphabet and all those cases...accusative, genitive, dative...i still shudder a bit thinking of those. by then, reagan was in the last stages of his presidency...the bits he didn't really remember anyway, and nancy was running the country together with her astrologer (which in retrospect, wasn't really so bad).

that whole zeitgeist fit nicely with the very spiritual, authentic, red-haired russian woman who was teaching my evening course. i loved her. she loved shirley maclaine's spiritual journey, which was so in vogue at the time, and made dramatic declarations about the future of people in the course. hers for me was that she could feel that i should keep studying russian, that it was my destiny. i was 19 and looking for my destiny, so i thought, "why not?" i was a bit romantic on the notion of russian anyway, so it was as good a destiny as any. within a few short years, i found myself with bachelor's and master's degrees in, you guessed it, russian. self-fulfilling destiny?

i even found myself in the middle of russia, standing at a bus stop together with some friends, waiting to go out to their dacha, when an old man came up and asked me and my friend aida if we were indeed sisters, just as i had suspected all along! i really did have a "sister" in russia and if we just knew one another and could talk, we wouldn't need all that cold war mumbo jumbo.

you may think this story ends there, but i'm not really to that influential person yet.

not long after that, i was in a literary theory course (pursuing yet another master's, i just couldn't seem to get enough). we had to write weekly 1-2 page essays on our reading assignments. being a good marxist (since the only ones left by that time were in american universities), i found a way to weave the evils of capitalism and trickle down economic policies into my reactions to the readings week after week. finally, the professor scrawled in the margin of one essay, "you make me feel old. it's clear that ronald reagan is really the defining president for you."

and that's why that as much as i am loathe to admit it, ronald reagan, B movie actor turned president, is one of my 5 big influences. even if it was an influence borne of loathing, it still significantly guided the direction of my life.

epilogue (or is it actually prologue?): i can still remember when he was shot in 1981, it was semester test time at school and we were about to be dismissed for the day when they made an announcement over the loudspeakers that the president had been shot. i asked a tad too hopefully, "is he dead?" and my teacher, clearly a staunch republican, flew into a rage and made the entire class stay after school because of my disrespectful comment regarding the president. already then, he was effecting my life. at that point, i didn't really imagine just how much.