I don’t want to be a boring old fart who constantly bitches about the younger generation. So I’ll just relate the facts.

The neoliberal administrator is giving a big talk today. He announces a tuition hike, and major additional cuts in personnel, course offerings, and every single service we offer. Really brutal stuff. The union leaders, the faculty respond trying to explain why this is a terrible idea.

Then a student gets up to speak. Given that I’m a naive, sweet summer child with retardation-level ingenuity, I thought she’d say, “Excuse me but why should I pay more in tuition to get less in return?” Our students don’t come from wealth. They don’t even come from solid middle class. They all work, they all carry college loan debt. So you’d think they should care about tuition hikes.

Well, ha ha.

The student says, “I don’t mind paying more in tuition but not if I keep being exposed to hate crimes on campus.”

Which hate crime has this young, white, female student experienced on our campus?

The visit by a local preacher who usually shows up around Easter to talk about Jesus in front of the library.

This is the first time the neoliberal administrator is giving a talk since last June, and this absolute tool is wasting the very limited Q&A time to bleat about the bloody preacher. I mean, you know? Obviously, the administrator seized on the subject of this atrocious hate crime with glee because he doesn’t want to answer real questions. Now his argument that students don’t mind austerity has proof.

And I’m thinking, you know what? I already have every degree I wanted. I have zero debt. My family has an excellent income. My kid is guaranteed free college tuition anywhere in the state. And a good college fund for out of state schooling. I’m sitting pretty by any measure. Why should I care about these people when they don’t care about themselves?

I got up and left. Let them boil in outrage over the preacher as they get robbed. I received a big translation order, so I’m going to go work on that, make more money. It’s impossible to keep caring for people who are so deluded.

Russians release videos of atrocities they commit at strategic moments. The atrocities are a daily occurrence but the release of the videos is always timed.

Here’s what explains the explosion in torture and beheading videos right now:

The Russian offensive that started in November failed. It failed so badly that even domestically it can’t be sold as anything but a mega defeat. The only person on the planet who still believes this offensive can be turned around is Tucker Carlson.

Now Ukraine is preparing a counteroffensive. Russians are terrified of it. All they talk about on their propaganda TV is this counteroffensive. So they engage in psychological warfare to sap Ukrainians’ psychological resources by releasing these videos. Ukrainians get angry, they feel devastated, and leek energy.

There’s a lesson in this. People who want to take away something important from us always try to sap our energy first. They do outrageous things, we react angrily, and then they are in a stronger position to go after what they really want.

Imagine, a virus that hits some ethnic groups while mysteriously sparing others. Sounds completely unbelievable, doesn’t it?

Twitter changed its algorithm and now boosts people who get into “conversations” instead of those who get likes and retweets:

This is very bad for users because it rewards nasty bickering.

There are other news that are good. Links in tweets are no longer penalized and images aren’t rewarded. Read the thread for more.

Writers who are immigrants tend to be wounded people. Their wound is immigration itself, and as writers they are complex enough to feel the wound.

I’m not saying that every immigrant necessarily perceives immigration as catastrophic. There are exceptions.* But look, we all agree that moving house or having a friend die is major life trauma. So why shouldn’t moving country, abandoning your language, and having your whole country die to you not be an even bigger calamity?

This is why there are so many woke immigrant writers. They hate their new country but don’t know why. So they latch on to the explanation provided by the newspapers and TV. Immigration can’t possibly be a bad thing, so it’s got to be structural injustices that are causing the pain. These poor people rave against racism-sexism-somethingphobia because it’s easier to attribute their suffering to the ills that matter to the locals. It makes

So far, I’ve only seen Eastern European writers manage to avoid this form of dishonesty and grieve their emigration as it deserves to be grieved. Grieving, by the way, doesn’t mean that you are sorry you did it and that you want to go back. It simply means that people aren’t vacuum cleaners, and you can’t switch them off by pressing a button.

I felt an immigrant’s grief not when I moved from Ukraine to Canada but when I went from Canada to the US. It was very hard. The buildings were ugly, the sky hung in a crooked way, the air smelled disgusting, everything was wrong. I now love this country but it took years to figure out how to do that. I wouldn’t blame anybody for failing. Not because this is a bad country – it’s a wonderful one – but because it’s really hard to disgorge a country and ingest another one instead.

Vesna Goldsworthy has spent a couple of decades writing about immigrant grief. In her novel The Iron Curtain: A Love Story, a young woman called Milena leaves Serbia in 1985 to come to the UK, and she just absolutely hates it. The reason why the Iron Curtain makes an appearance in the story is to explain why the protagonist can’t go back. But all the Soviet-bloc stuff in the novel is uninteresting. It’s all been done a million times, and Goldsworthy has nothing new to add. It’s the description of the immigrant malaise that makes the novel.

Milena’s disgust with the UK seems exaggerated and lacking in motive. But the reason why her suffering seems spurious is because we aren’t used to linking emigration and grief. It’s convenient to have a highly mobile workforce that can be dragged around at will. So we pretend that immigrants can only be upset about not being able to get shuffled around faster and more easily. What else can they possibly be unhappy about? Everybody piled on Trump when he said the quiet part out loud but deep inside we all think that nobody can possibly be attached to the shithole countries that immigrants come from. If only it weren’t for structural racism and patriarchy, our widely accepted narrative goes, all immigrants would be blissfully happy.

Multiculturalism passionately despises culture precisely because it believes culture is extremely easy to leave behind. It’s an oxymoron to have “multi” and “culture” joined in one word.

* Children of cold, insensitive, almost sociopathic mothers tend to be such exceptions. N is an example.

A writer who grew up in Socialist Serbia and ended up working in British academia:

Daughter of a self-managed workers’ paradise, I excel at my job. I criticize and self-criticize, I censor and self-censor, I compose self-assessment sheets about self-managed time, I sit on teaching and research committees, I attend meetings and take notes, I know that literature has hidden and insidious meanings. […] My communist upbringing, my upbringing in communism—to be able to live with myself without believing in anything I say, to be able to accept things without asking too many questions—has certainly stood me in good stead throughout my working life.

In the art of the long meeting, British university workers easily outdid anything I’d encountered in my socialist upbringing. The sessions were often longer than the communist plenaries, the acronyms just as plentiful, the put-downs just as complicatedly veiled in oblique metaphor, the passions just as high, even if the stakes were often infinitesimal.

Vesna Goldsworthy, Chernobyl Strawberries

Obviously, she’s exaggerating but there’s definitely something to the analogy.

Here’s proof that people love neoliberalism and wouldn’t let it go. The recent race for Mayor of Chicago was won by an ultra neoliberal BLMster, a fanatical proponent of de-funding public services, supported by the pro-lockdown teacher union that is in favor of dramatically downsizing public education.

After the Chicago riots of 2020, after the terrible increases in violent crime, after the worst lockdowns in the nation, after thousands of black kids in Chicago were thrown out of locked schools and into illiteracy / depression / gang life… people go and vote for more of the same.

Voter turnout was something like 35%, so most people couldn’t get assed to care either way.

As I said before, Gary Gerstle’s book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order is the best I’ve read on neoliberalism. Ever. And I’ve read obsessively on the topic starting in the late 1990s. (For obvious reasons, given that I lived in Ukraine back then).

The book is amazingly well-written. It simply is never boring. The writing is very accessible and never gets bogged down in unnecessary details. Gerstle has a rare talent to explain very complicated things clearly. The book is non-partisan, measured, and calm.

But.

There is one subject that invariably turns Gerstle into a bleating lunatic, warping his judgment and making him erupt in strings of boring, overly excited slogans. He’s American, so we can all figure out what that subject is. But if you skip those parts, it’s a brilliant book.

Gary Gerstle believes that the degree to which the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump resonated with the masses is proof that the neoliberal order has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

I think he’s wrong.

Neoliberalism, by its nature, glamorizes dissent. And by doing so renders it impotent.

Think about the commercialization of Che Guevara portraits. That’s a perfect example. Or armchair Communists at Berkeley. This is another example. Nobody calls themselves “a neoliberal.” It’s not prestigious or cool. Being a revolutionary is. Drain the swamp! Down with the 1%! You feel edgy and important, even though absolutely nothing whatsoever is actually achieved.

Ranting and raving against “the system” while doing absolutely everything to keep it in place is the favorite neoliberal pastime. Yes, Trump and Sanders loudly denounced neoliberalism. But what has either of them actually done against it? Absolutely nothing.

To the contrary, they have created an illusion that attending the BLM / Trump rallies (which are the exact same thing) means actually doing something to thwart the system. But it’s the opposite. These carnavalesque events help both the participants and the outraged spectators who watch them on TV to let off steam and reconcile themselves to reality.

In a less cartoonish way, my posts about neoliberalism serve the same purpose for me. But at least I’m honest in that I’m not ready to let neoliberalism go. It simply won’t go until we want it to, and I think we don’t. It’s too much fun.

I chair a department that offers 8 languages.

I’m developing three new courses for the next academic year.

I work as a translator and interpreter.

I’m writing a book in Ukrainian.

I’m writing an article in Spanish.

I’m writing a book chapter in English.

I serve on the executive board of two scholarly associations.

I do a lot of public speaking.

I read voraciously in 4 languages.

I take online classes in Spain and Ukraine.

I paint.

I cook.

I have an intense relationship with my husband.

And with all this, I’m still struggling with letting Klara go as she enters the first major stage of separation. I’m aware that I struggle, which by itself guarantees that I won’t torture her too much with my resistance. The scary situations are when the mother doesn’t struggle because she internally forbade the separation.

We hear a lot of talk about young people’s failure to launch but it’s not their failure. Nor is it the fault of the “bad economy” because nobody heard of this issue in, say, Dickensian England with its much harsher economic circumstances. It’s the failure of parents to let go. I’m saying honestly that it’s very hard. I have a very full life, yet I still feel the loss.