Media Wars in Ukraine

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

We are experiencing a fascinating media kerfuffle in Ukraine right now. A famous Russian liberal and anti-Putin journalist Yulia Latynina had an on-air debate with the famous Jewish Ukrainian journalist Portnikov, and guess who got drubbed within an inch of their life in that dialogue?

Now, Latynina is very anti-Putin and lives in exile. She’s as anti-regime as a Russian can be. But her anti-Putinism – just like Navalny’s, just like every Russian anti-Putinist’s – is limited to the belief that as soon as the people of Russia understand how much money Putin has stolen, they’ll immediately overthrow the regime.

For 20 years, Russian anti-Putinists have been doing their darndest to demonstrate that Putin steals. One would have to be deaf, blind, and in a coma to not get the message. But the more Putin steals and the more obscene is the luxury in which he lives, the more he is loved in Russia. The “he steals” narrative, however, refuses to die, reminding me of the Dems’ unhealthy attachment to the “Bush lied” slogan that lost them the 2004 election. Yes, I’m that old, I still remember all that.

Beyond this “Putin steals” message, Latynina eagerly mouths every imperialistic Russian slogan. “Russians and Ukrainians are brothers, this is a civil war, Ukraine never had its own culture, etc.” The funny side of this situation is that her own imperialism got her into a sea of trouble. She decided to engage in a public dialogue with a Ukrainian journalist whose knowledge of history is sublime. She expected Portnikov to play the role of a subservient, uneducated country bumpkin that she expects every Ukrainian to be. As a result, he unleashed on her a torrent of information while she clapped her eyes and bleated “yes, but” incoherently.

“Turn on YouTube!” I texted my husband during the show. “Portnikov is committing unnatural sexual acts against Latynina.”

Aside from the specifics of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it was highly enjoyable to see smug ignorance getting crushed by knowledge and competence. The saddest thing about stupid people is that they don’t know they are stupid. It’s the high-IQ folks who have the intelligence to be aware of their intellectual limitations and would never enter a debate with a specialist on a subject of which they know nothing.

The New Executed Renaissance

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

52 Ukrainian writers and translators have been killed by Russia so far in the current war.

The moment Ukrainian culture enters into a period of flourishing, Russians organize yet another Executed Renaissance. This is a term that was first introduced to describe the murder of pretty much the entirety of the Ukrainian cultural elite during Stalinism. Nothing remotely similar happened to Russian artists, of course. Stalin only killed writers who wrote in Russian if they a) insulted him personally and b) were Jewish. Everybody else – no matter how countercultural – lived and remained free. They wouldn’t get published and would experience penury, but the Russian-language Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, etc could be as anti-regime as they wanted, and nobody touched them.

At the time when the executions of Ukrainian artists began, there were about 250 of them. At the end of Stalin’s murderous wave, only about 30 remained alive. And still, they managed to preserve the culture and the literature. It’s an incredible story of how people save their culture from extermination in the midst of one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes in history.

Today, we are experiencing the extermination of Ukrainian culture by Stalin’s fans and followers all over again.

Generational Conflict

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

I took a day off with the goal of spending it in my underwear. But Klara decided not to go to camp, and as a result I cooked, cleaned and did the laundry while she spent the day in her underwear.

The Guilty Verdict

~ Clarissa ~ 71 Comments

Hey, did you hear? Trump was found guilty of the unnamed crime we are all wondering about.

Pure Coincidence

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Book Notes: E.M. Delafield’s The Way We Are

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

The Way We Are was published 2 years before E.M. Delafield’s smash hit The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), and one can very clearly see how the writer’s mastery of her craft develops between the two novels.

The Way We Are starts from a setup that is identical to the one we see in the later novel. There’s a provincial lady – Laura Temple – her nice but boring husband, two kids, three servants who keep quitting at the most inopportune time, fussy neighbors, silly activities at the Women’s Institute, and intractable flower bulbs. In The Way We Are, Delafield hadn’t yet found the winning strategy of narrating the life of her provincial heroine in the first person. It’s the charming inner voice of the main character that makes The Diary of a Provincial Lady so irresistible but The Way We Are is narrated in a clumsy third-person. To compensate for the shallowness of what a third-person narrative can transmit about a character like Laura, Delafield involves her in an incongruous and poorly written love affair that is completely absent from the later rewriting. The Dairy of the Provincial Lady is interesting without the added romantic complexities because the interest in the nobel resides in the narrative voice.

None of this means that The Way We Are is a bad novel. It’s less skilled than its successor but that’s normal in an author who grows and improves. Delafield’s novels are much more relatable for today’s women than any other author of the interwar or post-WWII era that I’ve read. This happens because Delafield’s characters are much wealthier than those of Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor and others. Today we don’t have servants, like Delafield’s provincial ladies did, but we have appliances that give us the same degree of freedom from domestic drudgery. If you are a 30+ married woman with children, there’s zero reason for you not to be reading Delafield.

In spite of being mega relatable, Delafield’s novels give a perfect glimpse into the life in the late 1920s in Great Britain. Plus, the author has a beautiful sense of humor. Oh, just go ahead and read the novel already. I promise you’ll have a good time.

Comment Section Change

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Readers, I’m trying to change settings so that I don’t have manually to approve anonymous comments. Since WordPress is pushing people into the anonymous function in some way, I’m trying to make things easier for everyone.

Please leave an anonymous comment to see if this new method works.

An Obvious Hoax

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

Nobody needed an investigation to prove that  Jews don’t write the plural of “family” with an apostrophe.

No New Wars

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

I heard a snippet from the Trump speech at the Libertarian convention (which speech his supporters are stanning for in embarrassing and needy ways), and he said, “I’m proud to be the only president in 70 years who started no new wars.” This is very cryptic because Biden started no wars either.

I’m beginning to understand the neediness of Trump supporters because if this is the kind of stuff they are being given, the desperation is the only normal response.

The raptures about the extraordinary political skilfulness of the Trump speech are cringe. All he did was try to bribe potential voters in exactly the same way that the Dems do by offering reparations. If this is skilful, you deserve all you get, honestly.

Before the Biden supporters perk up, folks, your candidate spoke to black students at a college recently and told them they are in danger of being murdered by whites just because they are black. You’ve got nothing to celebrate here. What Biden did in that speech is immensely worse.