Jesus, when one leaves academia, one should at least hope to be finally free from the ridiculous habit of privilege-scratching. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though:

I distanced myself a bit from social media these last few months and I’m sorry to discover, upon my return, that there’s trouble in Denmark, so to speak. I’m not even sure of the scope of it as I missed the twitter exchanges that apparently took place, but I can see from blog posts there was a debate about privilege within the post-ac community that has left some feeling like we’re divided and others questioning whether they should continue blogging.

It’s like people have been so enthralled by the magic of “privilege checking” that they can’t break the spell no matter how far they move  away from academic circles.

Come on, folks! The best thing about not being in academia is that you never have to hear about “degrees of privilege” ever again. You are free now, so just fly, fly away from the privilegemania.

The Russian-speaking community of Gaza wants to ask the Russian Federation to admit Palestine into the RF. There are currently 50,000 Russian-speakers in Gaza. For the most part, they are Russian women who married Palestinian men.

“So what if Palestine is far from Russia?” they say. “The Gibraltar and the Falklands have no border with Great Britain either. Russia is perfectly suited to protect us from Israeli aggression.”

The situation in Ukraine is tragic, not funny, but there are times when I just have to laugh. The official Russian news agency RIA has issued a statement that the US and the EU have violated the Budapest Accords granting Ukraine’s sovereignty, by staging a coup in Ukraine.

Russia is now, apparently, defending Ukraine’s sovereignty from American aggressors by annexing the Crimea.

First, the Russians said they invaded to defend Ukraine from ultra-nationalists.

When none could be found, they were defending Ukraine from anti-Semites.

When none could be found, they were defending Ukraine from German Nazis.

When none could be found, they started defending Ukraine from American spies.

I wonder who the Russians will be defending Ukraine from when no American spies will be located.

Any guesses? A group of evil Zionists? A bunch of Muslim terrorists? A band of terrifying Quebec nationalists?

In the current crisis, Ukrainians have shown extreme levels of restraint, coming out to meet the Russian thugs unarmed and offering peaceful resistance to the invaders.

I think it makes sense to compare Ukraine to Israel. Both are beleaguered nations with a recent experience of horrific genocide. Both have had to restore a mostly dead language. Both possess territories that have been disputed by other nations. Both have a historically tense relationship with the closest neighbors.

Israel, however, is proceeding in the opposite manner. Just today it bombed 3 military bases in Syria. There is not a whiff of peaceful resistance in this country.

Let’s remember that Ukraine is losing territories as a result, while Israel is gaining territory. Let’s remember also that the resulting death toll in Ukraine has been minimal.

Which of these policies appeals to you more and why? I mean, of course, if you lived in one of these countries.

Here is another vivid example of why short-term thinking that plagues American politics is dangerous.

The other day, President Obama finally declared economic sanctions against 11 of Russia’s politicians. Among them, only one is somewhat involved in what is happening in Ukraine. The rest have nothing whatsoever to do with the issue. They also don’t have a whole lot of importance in Russian politics. For instance, Elena Mizulina is a loud homophobe and promoter of ultra-patriarchal values. She appears on TV shows to yell and foam at the mouth. For Putin, she is a useful clown, nothing more. Mizulina has zero political influence on her own and is nothing but a silly, bumbling pawn. In Russia, both the Putinoids and the dissidents are laughing at the ridiculousness of these “sanctions” that don’t really punish anybody for anything.

Based on everything that the White House has been doing about the situation in Ukraine, I have a very strong suspicion that there is simply nobody in the President’s entourage who is capable of analyzing the situation in the region and advising Obama accordingly.

In 1991, Americans unilaterally and baselessly declared that the Cold War was now over and hastened to dismantle every program of study that trained specialists capable of understanding Russia. Now it will take forever to create at least a few places where such professionals would be educated. We are talking about really tiny amounts of money here that in no way impacted the economy of the country as a whole. Still, these puny little “savings” mattered more than the need to train specialists who’d understand what was happening in the largest country on the planet.

Ask anybody you know what they think about post-modernism and they are likely to wince as if a bad smell suddenly assaulted their nostrils. Postmodern art is complex and requires an intense participation on the part of the reader or spectator. It also represents the moment we are living right now, and the spirit of the times we live in is often uncomfortable for many of us.

In his famous 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard said that the most important characteristic of our era (called the postmodern era) is an “incredulity towards metanarratives.” What this means is that we have abandoned the hope that there will be a system of belief that will be capable of explaining everything. There is no single ideology, Lyotard stated, that one can rely upon nowadays to serve as an exhaustive way of understanding the world.

Some of us will agree with this statement, while others are still clinging to religion, Marxism, neo-liberalism, etc. as a single overarching system of explaining how the world works. Those others are precisely the ones who feel uncomfortable around the highly ironic, self-referential and contradictory postmodern art.

If we turn to literature, it can be safely said that some linguistic environments do postmodernism better than others. American writers are notoriously bad with the postmodern. Of course, there are people who enjoy Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and even Cormack McCarthy. However, compared to the really phenomenal post-modern works created by writers from, say, the Spanish-speaking world, novels by the postmodernists from the US are nothing to write home about. I would probably be able to name only Toni Morrison as an example of a worthwhile postmodernist from the US. Her novel Beloved is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and reread.

For higher quality postmodern writing in English, you can always check out the amazingly talented British writer Zadie Smith whose overall literary production is uneven but interspersed with flashes of pure genius like the 2012 novel NW.

Of course, the best postmodern writing these days comes out of the former British colonies, and Salman Rushdie is the perfect example of a postmodern writer who has created works of unrivaled beauty and poignancy.

In the words of the famous Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, Spain jumped into the postmodern before fully processing the modern era. This is true, but the leap proved to be highly successful for Spain whose writers do the postmodern amazingly well. Muñoz Molina himself has written a string of outstanding works of fiction, including his chef d’oeuvre A Manuscript of Ashes, which is now available in a translation by the incomparable Edith Grossman.

The writers who are obsessed with the postmodern but who keep producing bizarrely bad postmodern literature belong to the Russian-speaking world. The Silver Age of the Russian literature that gave to the world absolutely stunning in their beauty works of modernist art was cut short by the Stalinist mandate that only works of socialist realism be written and published in the USSR. The fifty years of a forced break between literary generations made the postmodern mentality absolutely alien to the writers who write in Russian and to their readers. Still, the Russian artists keep trying to create postmodern literature because the need to be “just like the West” is profound. The only way out of this dead-end of parroting the Westerners is through searching for one’s own way of relating to the postmodern era.

Ultimately, a profound discomfort with the entirety of the postmodern artistic production reflects a deep-seated discomfort with the reality we are experiencing right now. If there is nothing that you find attractive about this art, then you have got to ask yourself why it is proving so difficult for you to relate to the sensibilities of the only era you are destined to experience personally.

I’ve been asked why I consider the American way of relating to each other and to the world to be superior to the one practiced by my people.

Here are some small examples. Yesterday, everybody – the lunch lady at the cafeteria, the cashier at the gym, the spinning instructor – expressed their support the people of Ukraine.

“I’m so sorry for what’s happening!” they were saying. “I hope none of your family members suffer. I really feel for you, this is horrible.”

I have no idea how they really feel about Ukraine or if they feel anything, but these are people who understand the right way of engaging with a Ukrainian person at this point. Mind you, these are virtual strangers who have seen me around but don’t have a relationship with me.

At the same time, close family friends from Russia, people who have been to my parents’ house, know us intimately, have partaken of our food, etc., have been calling to gloat, giggle, and say really horrible, mean things about the annexation of the Crimea.

Yes, this seems like a little thing, but imagine this kind of meanness and aggression permeating every interaction with everybody. I did not emigrate because I was running from poverty. I was not poor back home. I emigrated because I couldn’t take this kind of environment any longer.

Or another example. Yesterday, I was the only person who showed up for the spinning class. It turned out that everybody else had attended the earlier class, and I hadn’t pre-registered, so the instructor thought nobody was coming. When I arrived, the instructor went out of her way to let me know that I was not putting her out and that I was actually doing her a favor by giving her a chance to work out. And yes, she did give some Jesus talk during the class. But the way things are these days, an FSU person is just as likely to trot out Jesus and then make you feel horrible for showing up for class unannounced.

I always say that Americans are people who are always likely to notice and comment if you look great or have lost weight. FSU people, on the other hand, are always going to notice and comment if you look bad or have gained weight. Again, small things, but out of these small things our greater reality is made.

The reason why Putin finds it so easy to wrestle world dominance from the US is that he has found the main weakness of the American foreign policy. The US policy is notoriously based on short-term needs.

Arm the Taliban in Afghanistan then spend a decade fighting it. Support the Arab Spring, then start sending drones when things don’t go as you expected. Push Cuba towards the USSR, then deal with a variety of suddenly Socialist countries in South America. Coddle Putin, welcome him to the G8, then expel him, or not, or maybe yes. Sign the Budapest treaties with Ukraine, then forget all about them 20 years later.

The electoral cycle is relentless, and this is how a democracy always falls behind a totalitarian regime. A totalitarian leader like Putin doesn’t have to fear reelection. He can choose a plan of action and consistently, coherently and relentlessly plod along towards his goal.

Of course, I’m not writing this to suggest that totalitarianism is better than democracy. Totalitarianism is wrong on every level. But what we miss in order to combat it effectively is the single-minded and shared conviction that, despite the inevitable and necessary differences in our views, we share the same basic values and are ready to fight for them.

Unless we do that and do that soon, we will have a minimal presence on the world arena and will see the planet engulfed by people whose values are vastly inferior to ours. Look, I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but I have lived in the FSU and in North America and I’m deeply convinced that the way North Americans relate to each other and to the world is vastly superior to anything one can find in the post-Soviet space.

We are not perfect in the US and Canada, far from it. But we have things that are definitely worth defending and exporting overseas. And the Russian Empire that is being reborn in front of our very eyes doesn’t.

Antonio Munoz Molina wrote in 2012, “When barbarity triumphs, this doesn’t happen because the barbarians are so strong but, rather, because the civilized people give up so easily.”

And now the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has entered into a military phase. Russian troops have opened fire at Ukrainians. Several Ukrainians have been wounded and one was killed.

The few existing Russian dissidents keep dreaming of the day when Putin will be condemned as a war criminal at The Hague. I’m thinking it’s more probable that he will be declared a hero there.