One of the chapters in Veller’s novel is a monologue that Lenin addresses to Trump, teaching him how to carry out a real MAGA revolution (the novel was published in 2022). It’s so funny, I had to stop the car (I’m listening on Audible) to avoid crashing because tears of laughter were blinding me.
The novel is, of course, very postmodernist. Anything that is literature in Russian is this way. Between 1935 and 1985, it was impossible to publish anything in Russian that wasn’t social realist. As a result, you can’t write anything realist in the language and not sound like a Soviet apologist. I’m often annoyed with postmodernist literature but I don’t mind Veller’s postmodernism.
It’s really funny that he created a truly American novel with a deep understanding of American culture but who will be his audience? He’s a Russian-language author and can’t become anything else at his age.
On the day of the Canadian election, Trump continues to campaign aggressively for the Liberals:
Words cannot describe how annoying this is. We had a guaranteed conservative victory until Trump decided to interfere. This is beyond self-defeating and dumb.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a MAGA novel? Real literature, big ideas, deep philosophical stuff, a devastating story, characters that grab you by the heart. A true American epic that would show why the fire burns so hot at the core of the right-wing revolution.
Well, I have good news. That novel exists.
I also have bad news. You can’t read it because it wasn’t written in English.
The novel I’m talking about is titled An Island for Whites and its author is Mikhail Veller. He is a very well-known Russian-language writer. He is also very MAGA. Obviously, he doesn’t live in Russia anymore because he’s considered a foreign agent there. The novel came out in 2022. It’s 900 pages long, and it tries to answer the question of why the Western civilization is self-destructing with great determination.
As I read the novel, it became clear why nothing like it can be written in English. There are no longer words, sentence structures or similar depths of honesty. Maybe one day they’ll come back but for now the title of the great American MAGA novel goes to An Island for Whites.
What I’m trying to say here is that the average American’s perception of and (lack of) attraction to walkable urban spaces exists in a context. And our built environment has been a reaction to that context. https://t.co/y9Dw9gVlMv
This is one of those unmentionable topics in the US that confuse a newcomer to no end. Nobody speaks about the reasons for the car culture and everybody’s preference to live in a small town 30 miles away from any city center. Nobody mentions the purpose behind the absence of public transportation from cities to suburbs or of sidewalks.
The moment you figure it out you become a real American. Then it’s your turn never to say what the purpose is and pretend that you hate all this when it’s the only thing that gives you your safe, lovely, paradisiacal existence.
Scammers enroll AI bots in online courses in community colleges in order to claim financial aid.
As a result, 25% of applicants to community colleges in California are now bots.
Will this finally put an end to the entire concept of online courses? Especially at community colleges where students (I mean actual human students) are signally unable to learn anything without being physically present in a classroom.
The Pope’s first miracle after passing occurred today when President Trump meet privately with President in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City pic.twitter.com/L0ULljfsT2
Very hopeful that we will finally start swimming out of the situation where prattling airheaded ladies with low IQs influenced our foreign policy because nobody cared to put them in their place.
This is the weakest novel in the Palliser series because the protagonist, Phineas Finn, is a trifling, uninteresting person. He is a young man with political ambitions but no money, so he runs around London trying to foist himself on some rich woman who can finance his career. Phineas Finn’s superficiality makes his endless “fallings in love” with one woman after another feel quite repetitive.
By the end of this coming-of-age novel, Phineas is thirty and finally, with enormous effort and endless whining, manages not to be a complete toad. That’s a great achievement for him but fails to impress readers used to Trollope’s complicated, deep, and admirable male characters.
It’s still a good novel that I enjoyed because of the humor, the language, and the quirky portrayal of England’s political system. But I hope nobody makes it the first Trollope novel they read because it’s not representative of how strong the rest of his writing is.
All true but so incredibly slow. Not an expert in sight to explain what’s happening, leaving Trump to unravel this, veeeeery sloooowly by himself.
This is a result of wiping out the very class of experts who are not political operatives. There should be people who provide expertise in their highly specialized field without using this as an opportunity to foist their political opinions on everybody. Such experts used to exist. One example is Philip Bobbitt from whom I first found out about the hollowing out of the nation-state by neoliberalism. He advised several US presidents on the subject.
Nobody can be knowledgeable on everything. The world is complicated and is not growing any simpler. There should be experts. People who love what they do more than they love their often inane political opinions. But we left the age of Philip Bobbitt and entered the era of Timothy Snyder, a brilliant historian who abandoned the discipline in which he was the brightest star and became a dime-a-dozen political operator.
People often say that COVID killed the idea of a trustworthy expert class. This is entirely untrue. The people who lied to us were not the experts but the bureaucrats and the journalists. The entirety of my knowledge of what COVID actually was came from the habit of reading one scientific study per day in the first few months and per week later on. The experts were always extremely helpful. Real science revealed the truth. Real science made it abundantly clear by April 15, 2020 that children were at no risk. By mid-May of 2020, real science made it clear that, unless you were elderly, morbidly obese or extremely unwell, you weren’t going to die of COVID. So no, experts did not fail.
Leaving that aside, it’s tragic that there’s nobody to advise Trump on such things as the Russo-Ukrainian war. He’s figuring it out but at a snail’s pace because it’s not an easy topic and nobody should be expected to understand it without learning a lot of the backstory.
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