Reader Jim asked me to write about what’s happening in Central America, and I’m glad to do it. Thank you for the question, Jim!

The region has been made unlivable by the gangs. Life in Ukraine is a lot more comfortable, secure, and civilized than in supposedly peaceful El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. It’s absolute horror. It’s not new horror but that doesn’t make it better. Two and a half million people have already left the tiny El Salvador, and over 60% of those who are still there are planning to leave.

The young Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele has been cracking down on the gangs, causing massive hissy fits among lovers of democracy who live in opulent countries and have no understanding of the extent of the problem in Central America. Other Central American countries and even Ecuador have timidly followed in Bukele’s footsteps. He’s suspended many of the civil freedoms, declaring a state of exception in the country.

Hispanic countries have a very poor track record with democracy. Spain finally got it right after 1975. Of course , Spaniards have already tried to tear up their brand-new constitution since then but at least there’s been no violence. Mexico achieved an actual democracy in 2000 but let’s be thankful it’s had no dictatorships in a century. The rest of Hispanic countries hobbled from dictatorship to a civil war to a junta until 1990s. Then most have managed to piece together something that resembled democracies if you squinted hard and looked at them at just the right angle.

Understandably, after witnessing Latin Americans raping each other with severed limbs of infants for a century, everybody is very nervous about any sign that Latin American “democracies” are losing even the formal characteristics of being democratic. But look, to have a democratic country, you kind of first need a country. El Salvador was fast losing everything that made it one and turning into a failed state.

I don’t know if Bukele can save El Salvador but I’m glad he’s trying. The Western belief that formal signs of democracy – elections, constitutions, political parties, electoral debates – will somehow magically turn people who love tearing each other to pieces for fun into a functioning society is a delusion. Nobody can make things better for Central Americans. I say, let’s leave them in peace to figure it out. If they want to Bukelize, let them try. It can hardly get much worse than it is now.

In the meantime, Putin has joyfully congratulated Russians with the Day of Youth, the regular Russian army is preparing to carpet bomb a large Russian city, and I’m back to my regularly scheduled programming. I totally take requests, though. Nothing is off limits.

That’s not hard to understand. Russia is gigantic. Even if Prigozhin’s mercenaries burn the city of Rostov to the ground, neither Putin nor anybody in the rest of Russia will care. People in Russia get off on violence and destruction of what they see as “the collective West.” That’s all they care about.

This one is very old but it never really gets old, if you know what I mean:

A Russian arrives at the Polish border:
“Nationality?”
“Russian.”
“Occupation?”
“No, no, just visiting.”

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) June 24, 2023

Even though there’s sadly no coup, what’s happening in Russia is so entertaining that I pity people who are wasting time and energy on an enormously less interesting Titanic submarine. The submarine is an equivalent of a traffic accident. It’s sad, it’s a bad thing to have happened but only a completely dead news feed would stay on something like it for days.

N’s sister called him to announce that:

A. She’s getting divorced again.

B. There’s a coup d’etat in Russia.

I checked the news, and sadly there’s no coup. I now wonder if the divorce is real.

After almost 3 months of daily writing of my very first completely honest and direct work of scholarship in Ukrainian, I have no idea how I will go back to the cautious efforts to sneak in some glimmer of truth that the scholarship in English always is and the scholarship in Spanish is becoming more and more.

I went to lunch with a friend and she asked what if nobody wants to publish my book in Ukraine. I said I don’t even care at this point because the experience of writing complete, unadorned truth is nothing short of narcotic. It’s like being in a loveless, stunted marriage, and then falling in love and discovering what heights human love can reach.

Of course, the irony of having left Ukraine 25 years ago to experience freedom of the intellect and now having to go back to Ukraine in search of it isn’t lost on me.

Another quote, this time from Alexei Arestovych in Ukraine:

LGBT is not about “… people aren’t allowed to love each other and they need help”, but about an extremely aggressive ultra-left ideology that takes full advantage of the cancel culture and tries to install this culture and sexual deviations as a social norm for us in our country.

My position is clear:

– feel free to love whomever you want. Your rights are protected in the same way as those of any citizen of Ukraine.

But I will not allow sexual deviancy to be established as the norm.

Everybody everywhere civilized is against persecuting, hassling or bothering people for being gay. But stop sticking gender-fluid pronouns and “transitions” into books for first-graders, is what I say.

Leaving that aside, look at the way he’s wording the message. “I will not allow.” This is not an error of translation. This is a person expressing agency and taking responsibility for what is happening in his country.

Here is a quote from my new favorite writer Juan Manuel de Prada:

How do you convince a poor man on a pitiful salary not to notice that the system needs him to have few or no children and to have no natural impulse to lay down his life for them (which would lead him to need to demand a living wage)? To do this, it is necessary to erase from the brain of such a person the concept of rights arising from work (the right to a decent salary, the right to a stable job, the right to live on one’s native land, the right to feed and educate one’s children) and imbue him with a psychopathic belief that far more important are the rights of his genitals, from contraception to abortion. You also have to make this poor man believe that this unspeakable nonsense is not a chip that has been implanted in his shattered brain, but something without which he cannot be free.

Juan Manuel de Prada, Una enmienda a la totalidad

Klara has two mosquito bites on her forehead that blew up and look like little horns.

She’s so proud of her horns that she doesn’t even mind the itch. She struts around with a mysterious look and informs everybody she comes across, “I’m a baby goat. I have horns.”

It would be great if people could feel like that not only in childhood but as adults. A lot of time and energy is wasted in feeling unhappy about one’s appearance, and here’s a little human who loves having two red, itchy protuberances on her forehead. Because they are her protuberances.

Here is another great quote from Peter Pomerantsev. Surkov was the chief ideologue of the Kremlin at that time. He was also a bestselling postmodernist writer who had to write under a pseudonym, of course.

In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

Pomerantsev, Peter. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

This is what happens when nothing really means anything. This is also why all – and I mean there are zero exceptions – of the children of the Kremlin dudes who can’t shut up about the degraded West and the dreaded gender confusion are extremely cosmopolitan, invariably living in the “degraded West”, and very often genderfluid.