Not to freak anybody out or anything, but:

. . . President Vladimir Putin, at a youth forum north of Moscow last week, reminded the world that “Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations. This is a reality, not just words.”

Fifteen days earlier, on Aug. 14, at a conference in Yalta, the Russian president had told the assembled factions of the State Duma that he soon planned to “surprise the West with our new developments in offensive nuclear weapons about which we do not talk yet.” This came as Russian strategic nuclear bombers and fighter jets have been accused of violating the airspace of the United States and Western European countries with mounting frequency, while under the surface of the world’s seas Russian and U.S. nuclear submarines have been involved in confrontations recalling the worst days of the Cold War. As NATO leaders convene for their summit in Wales, Russia just announced that its strategic nuclear forces will hold exercises of unprecedented dimensions this month. And the Kremlin, for its part, just declared that it will amend its military doctrine to reflect Russia’s growing tensions with NATO. What this means exactly remains unclear, but in view of the rising tensions with the Western alliance, it cannot be good.

Putin is winning his war against the West, which is precisely the goal he set himself in Ukraine. His soldiers in Ukraine are convinced they are fighting Americans. The news that there is not a single US or NATO soldier in Ukraine has not been able to penetrate the thick haze of Putin’s propaganda. In their minds, not only has the Cold War been revived, it has turned hot quite a while ago. And a hot war between Russia and the West always raises the scariest question of all.

I’ve been fearing a nuclear strike from Russia since Putin brought troops across the border completely openly, without trying to mask them any longer, in August, and the West still did absolutely nothing. Putin has been trying to palpate the boundaries of what the world allowed him to do. He’d do something, wait for a reaction, not see any, and proceed to do something bigger. 

Unlike the author of the linked article, I don’t believe Putin will strike at Poland or any of the NATO countries. My fear is that he will strike Ukraine. Of course, this will all be presented as an unfortunate mistake, a terrorist plot, an instance of idiot Ukrainians nuking themselves, or all of the above. Obama will make another speech, everybody will flap their wings and say that now for sure and sure and sure Putin will realize how badly he is losing this conflict and stop. 

And then Russia will realize that the boundary still hasn’t been reached and will take another step.

I don’t want to fear-monger but it preoccupies me that nobody outside of Russia realizes to what a scary extent paranoia, rage and resentment are consuming the people of that country. Russia will continue moving ahead on its route because it has been given no reason to stop.

 

The system wins at the exact moment when it manages to convince people to love their prison.

Let’s be honest, people, we turned our backs on the nation-state first and now can’t act all surprised that it shrugged its shoulders and started waking away from us, too.

A society of consumers is neither willing nor capable of participating in the sort of give and take that the nation-state model requires. Just look at how we engage politically. Our main political tools are a protest, a petition, and at the very best, a public collective action where we detail our complaints but never offer anything, not even a list of actual requests. More often than not, we can’t even be bothered to figure out what it is we want. Remember #Occupy? The movement kept declaring how proud it was of not having the slightest inkling of its own goals.

As you surely remember, protester was declared the person of the year 2011. A protester is a person who protests, who addresses a list of what he or she finds unacceptable to some nebulous authority. A protester is actually proud of having no vision of what an alternative would look like. Abolish greed, ban bossy – these lists of infantile demands directed to some all-powerful magical authority are the only way in which consumers are willing to engage in politics.

The basic contract between the state and the people in a nation-state was, initially, that the state would ensure the well-being of the people and the people will be ready to die defending their state. Of course, we are not prepared to die for the state’s goals. But somehow the model has transformed into nobody being willing to do anything at all, tolerate the slightest bit of discomfort to make this state model function.

The great political movements of the nation-state have degenerated into Twitter wars, trigger warnings, and endless inane discussions of how everybody is feeling. Even the Salaita affair, which should have given academics a great opportunity to discuss the principles of academic freedom, has been bogged down in ridiculous childish speculations as to what Salaita’s emotional state was like and what his area of specialization is.

We have put an enormous burden on the nation-state and refused to carry even a small portion of the load. How can we be surprised that the nation-state cracked?

Here is an example of one of the ways in which the nation-state is collapsing. Note that this is taking place in Honduras, a country where the state isn’t managing to fulfill its part of the bargain and provide for the welfare of its people. 

Now, a nation-state can break down on both ends, that of the state and that of the citizens. Honduras is breaking down on the side of the weak state that is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the people. We will also see evidence of citizens becoming increasingly irrelevant to all-powerful states, though. It is crucial to keep in mind that these are parts of the same process.

I came out of my break from the Internet and discovered that the Russian troops are shelling the peaceful Ukrainian city of Mariupol and all cease-fires be damned.

I should just have stayed offline.

Dear friends,

tomorrow is the anniversary of my son’s death. The blog will be going dark for the day. I know you feel profound compassion and want to help. And there is a way you can help. Please leave links to articles that caught your attention, questions, blogging suggestions, etc. This is what helps me because it creates a bridge towards the future.

Tomorrow will be a very difficult day. I will get through it because that’s what I do, and you will help me emerge on the other side. You are all great people and I’m very happy to have you in my life.

P.S. It’s also a great idea to leave jokes. But not videos because I don’t like videos.

Tomorrow is the first-year anniversary of my son’s death. My mother has never referred to him with his name or called him her grandson. Every time I tried talking about Eric to her, she told me to “turn over this leaf,” “forget about it and move on,” and “concentrate on having another baby.”

All week long she has been insistently recommending that N and I watch a certain movie that would distract us and help us have a good time. Last night we started watching the movie. The protagonist, a woman who has the same name as me, and her husband had a baby who died right after being born. The grieving parents realized that their life has no meaning and started going nuts, trying to slaughter each other. The moral of the story is that, in spite of being professionally successful and living in a big, beautiful house, these people have a thwarted meaningless existence because their baby died.

I didn’t know how to explain to N what possessed me to put on this movie at this particular point in time. We spent half the night crying. 

The reason why I’m writing these posts is that if I don’t share these stories, they will keep poisoning me from the inside. I wanted to spend today and tomorrow thinking about my son and the great love he brought to our lives. Instead, I’m crying because of my mother’s wanton cruelty towards me. This cruelty has been life-long and has accompanied me throughout my life.

Grandmother Klarissa, my father’s mother, died when I was 7. My love for her was profound. A child needs an adult woman’s love, and that love I could only get from her. This love has carried be forward my entire life.

Grandmother Klarissa and my mother were in a constant tug of war over me, over my father, over the correct way of living. There was a long-standing vendetta between them, but I was a small child and it mattered to me that with grandmother I felt loved. That was unusual and special to me. When she died at the age of 54 of leukemia, I was distraught. Nobody talked to me about my grief or about her death. I had to cope with the loss on my own, biting down on my tears in silence. I didn’t get to go to the funeral and her death was mentioned to me casually, in passing. To this day, I can’t think about her death without tears.

When I turned 9, my grandfather gave me a colorful box that he had asked his friend to paint just for me. The box contained my grandmother’s jewelry. It had been crafted according to her own special design. Grandfather told me that this was my grandmother’s legacy, that I would grow up and wear her jewelry and be beautiful and brilliant, just like she had been. He said that if I wore her jewelry, it would be as if a part of her had never died. Klarissa died when my sister was just a baby, so they never had a relationship, but of course there was a gift of jewelry from grandmother for her, too.

I got married at 19. When I left for the honeymoon with my husband, I left the keys from my new apartment to my mother. Repairmen were coming over, and somebody had to unlock the door for them. I hid grandmother’s jewelry very well in the apartment. But when I came home, the box was nowhere to be found. I walked over to my parents’ place and asked my mother about the jewelry. She giggled.

“This is so funny,” she said. “Look what happened. I was out with my friend Galya and she was buying jewelry. And I thought I wanted jewelry, too, and it’s not fair that I can’t buy anything. So I went to your place and looked for your grandmother’s jewelry. You hid it really well, but I still found it. Ha, ha! Then I took it to a jewelry store. I asked them to dig out the precious stones and melt the whole thing. I also gave them the rings your grandfather gave to your sister. They are so ugly anyways! So that’s what the people at the jewelry shop did. And they made this gold chain for me out of it. It’s way thicker than my friend Galya’s chain.”

I didn’t have words to say anything. I just wanted her to stop.

“But you won’t tell your father, right?” she continued. “This will upset him because it was his mother’s jewelry. You don’t want to hurt your father, do you? Don’t you love him? He will be shattered! You couldn’t do this to your own Dad, could you?”

I went home and cried for weeks. But I never told my father because I didn’t want to hurt him.

I apologize for the preceding post which looks like it was written by an inveterate inebriate. I had a meeting, 3 lectures, two more meetings, and two appointments scheduled back-to-back, so everything had to be done on the run. I haven’t even had time to eat since 9 am today. Here are some things I have wanted to share all day:

– Now that I don’t use PowerPoint, students started noticing my outfits. All day today I’ve been hearing variations on “Professor, you are rocking this outfit!” from students. I dig that because I agree I was rocking my outfit today. Of course, my sister would slaughter me if she saw me go to work in it but while she isn’t here, I can indulge. The outfit features a black skirt with embroidered white flowers and a bright-red blouse with a mountain of frills.

– People on the Book Club hated the Teaching Naked book as much as I did. This makes me happy because it means I’m on the same wavelength with my colleagues.

– I almost brought students to tears with the harrowing tale of Jews expelled from Spain and the importance of Spain giving them citizenship 500 years later.

– I’m now making coq au vin because we have an enormous quantity of alcohol left after the party, and there isn’t anybody here to drink it.

– Tonight I will do no more work. Instead, I will continue reading Wolitzer’s The Interestings. I’ve already read about half of it. I will finish it but getting through her very pretentious and cloying style of writing is getting to me. A review will follow but it will not be extremely kind.

– Nothing is more disgusting than those whiteboards where you have to write with a marker and then use a stinky chemical liquid to wash off the writing. Who is the enemy of humanity that keeps buying these evil things for college classrooms?

I think that’s it for now. And what was your day like?

The conference is being moved from Montreal to Oxford. And I mean, who doesn’t any to go to Oxford? So in considering it.