The Ukrainian thinker and politician Arestovych was always very pro-Western, very “America is the strongest, badassiest, most admirable powerhouse ever”, very “rah rah NATO”. I like him but I always found this wide-eyed stanning for America, and especially its capacity to lead, to be childish and superficial.

Well, now the dude has spent 4 months in the US, talking to politicians, visiting think tanks and speaking to a wide variety of audiences. And it changed him completely. Now he’s all in the “this is the fall of the Roman Empire all over again” mood. He says (and I agree) that Putin’s biggest regret is that he didn’t invade Lithuania instead of Ukraine. There Russia would have had its triumphant 3-day war and no NATO would interfere. Because there is no bloody NATO! And the US isn’t about to reveal its vision for the new global order because it has no vision.

My Ukrainian book isn’t really about Spanish literature at all. It’s about this. It’s about the deep philosophical problems we are experiencing in the West. I don’t think things are in the least hopeless but this is a difficult moment and it would be a mistake to deny that.

After Arestovych spends a few more months in the US, he’ll start noticing the positive stuff and acquire a more balanced view. For now, though, he’s in complete dismay of a person whose dearly held illusions were crushed.

In the meantime, Zelensky is meeting Latin American leaders in Argentina. This is absolutely fantastic. Since the Cold War, nobody but Russia paid any attention to Latin America, and the result has been terrible for the region. The idea that there is some pouty, anti-Western “Global South” was invented in Russia and spread for lack of anything better.

Latin America is not “Global South”. It’s part of the West and is proud of belonging to the Western Civilization. If the US won’t bring Latin America into the fold of civilized Western regions, it’s good that Ukraine is trying.

This mystery novel was free on this month’s Amazon Free Reads, and it caught my eye because it’s about forensic linguistics. The main character is an FBI agent who analyzes idiolects – or individual speech patterns – to identify criminals.

Idiolects are a fascinating subject, and there are some very interesting bits about speech idiosyncrasies in the novel. Also a few great insights into fake versus legitimate suicide notes. Did you know, for example, that fake suicide notes often deal in lofty, abstract concepts while real ones tend to address trivial daily stuff? That happens because suicidal people don’t know how to prioritize problems and distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t.

The plot is excellent: a serial killer, a dysfunctional family, small-town drama.

Unfortunately, Labuskes’ writing is poor. It often happens that authors who can write are incapable of coming up with an interesting story, while those who can plot are impotent, mumbly writers. Labuskes has no ear for the language, and as a result, the story doesn’t land as strongly as it could. Everything ends up kind of smudged, lost in imprecise, watered-down phrases.

But again, a great plot. Plus, forensic linguists and idiolects. Zero wokeness. Serial killers, FBI agents. These are big positives for a book.

You do gain wisdom with age, though. When I was choosing a restaurant for our office Christmas party (which I call exactly that, and screw political correctness), I purposefully chose a pizza parlor located on the first floor of a fancy new apartment building.

Whenever there was a heavy pause and I needed to make small talk, I’d say, “Can you guess how much an apartment in this building costs? $720,000! Isn’t that insane?” Then an animated conversation would ensue, and I’d be left off the hook. I did it with 3 different groups at the event, and it went great.

I’m reading a mystery novel, and, again, the incessant “they” to refer to the unknown murderer is very annoying. How did Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and all the other brilliant mystery writers manage to create so many excellent novels without theying everything to death?

The English language somehow existed until now without this ugliness. Why do we have to torture it because of our generation’s fixation on “misgendering”?

P.S. At least, a character who is an FBI agent refers to the elusive killer as “this son of a bitch” and not “this gender-fluid child of an unsavory canine parent”. For now.

A funny thing about organizing a Christmas lunch for colleagues is that after the lunch everybody wants to call you and gossip about the other people who were present. You think you’ve done your duty by socializing during lunch but then you are regaled with more sociability.

The first round of editing on my Ukrainian book already came back, which is incredibly fast. There will be one more round, and then I’ll get proofs. I’m stunned, veritably stunned, by the effectiveness of these Ukrainian editors.

By the way, I’ll never be able to publish a book in Spain. Not for any ideological reasons but because I have no connections and know no useful people. And in Ukraine, where nobody knows me from Adam, I found two very interested publishers immediately.

In the US, the publishing process is very honest and non-corrupt, but the Hispanic world is still not catching up.

Another really annoying new fad is that students refer to Hispanic politicians and writers as “they.” I’m struggling to understand sentences like, “Augusto Pinochet was a dictator of Chile and they are best known for…” or “in their book Jorge Volpi describes their experience…”

Drives me up a wall.

I made butter chicken using what was promised to be an authentic Indian recipe.

Result?

It tastes like what borscht would probably taste like if made by an Indian person. I mean, it’s not bad. It just isn’t Indian.

In other gastronomic news, Klara says that pelmeni only taste right when N makes them. Yes, pelmeni are Russian. But how does he manage to make them more authentic? These are store-bought pelmeni. You throw them into boiling water and then fish them and once they float to the service. I stood and observed N make the pelmeni. There was no secret move. Still, Klara always knows when I made them and says they taste disgusting.

And by the way, it’s not all non-white people who awaken the Great American monomania. It’s only the non-white people who can be seen as miserable, pathetic, deprived. Only the non-white abjection hits the pleasure centers of the American brain and awakens the savior instinct which is the whole point.

A black department chair asked at our recent anti-racism workshop, “You make it sound like I personally am a racist. Is that what you are saying?”

“Yes,” the presenter responded without skipping a beat. “You absolutely are.”

The black department chair isn’t pathetic. She’s a scholar, a full professor in Gucci eyeglasses. That by itself makes her a white supremacist because “black” and “white” are emotional categories. If a non-white person doesn’t provoke delicious feelings of guilt and anger, that person becomes an enemy. And so what are you going to do to preserve the worldview in which non-white people are sad and downtrodden victims? You are unconsciously going to do everything to keep them down. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve repeated at these anti-racist meetings that most of our black students are from normal middle-class families. They aren’t illiterate idiots incapable of googling “office hours” to find out what this expression means.

The black department chair has two children in high school. They will go to college and get treated like mental invalids. Will that help them succeed in life? Clearly, it won’t. Time and again, I see professors “of color” ask in absolute shock, “Are you trying to save that my achievements aren’t real and I wasn’t hired on merit but because of how I look?” These are successful people who are deliberately beaten down to make us all feel good about ourselves.

I spent all day yesterday trying to talk to people about the video of the 3 Ivy college presidents saying that calling for a genocide of Jews is not against their code of conduct. And the tenor of the discussions showed me that people honestly don’t understand what’s going on.

Every person I spoke with kept asking, “But why do they hate Jews? Why do they like Palestinians more?”

The question shows that people don’t understand America. America is like one of my older colleagues who is very upset that VCRs were removed from the classrooms a decade ago and she can no longer show her video tapes in class. Whenever we go to lunch as a group, it doesn’t matter what we are talking about, she’ll find an opportunity to kvetch about her video tapes.

“These budget cuts are ridiculous!” we say.

“Yes!” she responds. “We spent all the money on fancy new equipment, and now there’s no money. If we’d stayed with the VCRs, like I always said, we wouldn’t have this problem now.”

“The election in Argentina was really something!” one of us exclaims.

“I used to show this great video about Argentina in class,” the older colleague replies didactically, “and now I can’t because there’s no VCR.”

This is a harmless, if tedious, eccentricity, and we sometimes mention all sorts of topics just to see how she’ll manage to bring them back to the subject of video tapes. And she does it effortlessly every time.

Americans are like that. They have a favorite idée fixe, and no matter what you bring up, they always refer it back to their unscratcheable itch. Nobody cares about Israel or Palestine. They are stand-ins for this American monomania. Those college presidents weren’t talking about Israel. They were deep in their version of my colleague’s VCR fixation.

People who are from here already know what I’m talking about but folks from elsewhere are still confused. The great American monomania is the race question. Yes, in Israel, Jews and Palestinians look the same. But as I said, nobody cares about Israel. In the US, Jews are white and anti-Jews are not. And you can’t side with white people over non-white people. In yesterday’s video, Elise Stefanik was asking the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn to side with whites against non-whites. And you can’t do that. It brings back America’s biggest intolerable affect, its biggest sacred wound.

I’m not from here, so I think Americans should get over it. My ancestors in Ukraine were bought, owned and sold, and I have no words to convey how over it I am. It’s a curious fact that means absolutely nothing to me. But… telling people to get over their foundational traumas is a waste of time. I deeply love and admire Americans and I very much hope they’ll calm down already. A lot is being thrown away over this unnecessary fixation. But it will take as long as it will take.

In the meantime, I think I’ll call my VCR colleague and ask her to lunch. After all, there are worse obsessions to have than hers.