Speaking of punditry, I’m going on the Romanenko show again today to talk about Zelensky’s mishandled visit to the US:
We are going live at 12:15 US Central Time. I’m very sad for those who won’t be able to understand. Give it a click anyway because if viewership grows, we’ll be likelier to get English subtitles.
P.S. It’s getting a bit delayed because a spirited debate over the Volyn massacre is going on. One of the participants speaks Polish but all I can understand is that she is saying something about Russian hedgehogs. Or at least that’s what it sounds like.
I must now be prepared to do a public appearance at any moment, so I’m always overdressed, heavily made up and bedazzled with all sorts of jewelry. Colleagues and students look at me like I’m weird, and I probably am in this ready-for-TV getup at 8 o’clock in the morning.
I always secretly wanted to be a pundit, and the dream is coming true in this unexpected way.
I guess I picked up on how everybody in the family felt about it, you know? Russian wasn’t anybody’s native language. I couldn’t point to anybody in the family and say, we speak it because it’s grandma’s language or mom’s or great-grandpa’s. One side of the family spoke Ukrainian. The other spoke Yiddish and Ukrainian. My father spoke English to us. And I don’t mean occasionally. He spoke only English. Which, let me tell you, wasn’t only highly unusual and onerous but quite dangerous in the USSR, especially for a Jew.
And so imagine that all of this is going on, the whole family switched to a language that’s new to them, many family members having trouble speaking it, having to look for words, the most intellectual family member just avoiding it altogether in a very pointed way. And nobody is explaining what happened. Clearly, something happened but nobody wants to say.
And at that very same time, I go to school and we are literally persecuted, even as small kids, with how the Russian language is the most beautiful, the most expressive, the most wonderful, with the richest vocabulary on the planet, and so on and on, all day, every day.
At home there were always stories about the Russian people. That they were dirty, uncultured. The aunt who married a Russian dude could never live it down. It was a bit like marrying a convict, nothing to feel proud of. My grandpa once visited the family of the hapless son-in-law in Russia and we never heard the end of it. The grandpa was a Holodomor survivor, which I didn’t know then. We weren’t allowed even to think this word. But I now know what grandpa was really trying to say with his anecdotes about the semi-savage Russian relatives who had never seen a fork and washed once a month.
So what I’m trying to say is, I’m the first generation on my mother’s side and the second on my father’s to speak Russian, and that happened as a result of horrific things. Some of the worst stuff in history. I didn’t know about it as a child but I knew that something was up.
You can’t escape your language. I spent a lifetime trying and it’s still there. We are not blank slates. The weight of history is upon us, and that’s neither good nor bad. It simply is.
I loved this question, thank you. Always eager to answer deep questions like this one.
That’s great! Crime has been defeated thanks to the Biden administration. If only everything were so easy.
But who knows, maybe it is.
BREAKING: Another huge Donald Trump lie explodes as new statistics from the FBI show a dramatic decline in violent crimes this past year — despite MAGA claims of an imaginary crime wave.
And it gets even better…
According to the data, murder and non-negligent manslaughter plummeted by close to 12% between 2022 and 2023, a drop that constitutes the largest in decades.
Rapes dropped by over 9% and violent crime overall dropped by 3%. Property crime dropped by 2.4%.
I have so many talks that I often have no time to look up the topic until an hour before the actual talk. Sometimes, the talk begins and the listeners say they’d rather do Q&A, which I welcome.
The only “green borscht” I know of is the Russian soup called щи. I never made it but I do know that the original recipe is very complicated. You must use pickled cabbage, then freeze the whole thing and thaw it 3 days later. I don’t put pickled cabbage in soups, and the whole thing sounds weird to me.
A real borscht must have beets, cabbage, and potatoes. Anything else is not a borscht, and I insist on this statement. It’s like “vegan Schnitzel” or “meatless pot roast.” A true abomination, in my view.
You know what’s in your heart. Are you living in the marriage of your dreams? Clearly not if the question comes up.
What counts, what doesn’t count are childish questions. An adult would ask, why isn’t my personal life working? How can I improve the situation? Where am I failing and why? That you even formulated the question this way is a huge red flag. This is not how adults think about themselves.
I highly recommend looking into what keeps you trapped in the childish persona. That is probably the root of the problems, be they personal or professional.
There is a connection between these “emotional affairs” and psychological immaturity. The participants need to feel that they have transgressed the mandate of a strict adult. It’s a teenage rebellion of sorts. There’s no strict parent any more but they still need the dynamic because they don’t know how to manage their lives as adults, without fear of punishment and occasional clandestine sorties into the freedom they see as forbidden fruit.
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