Clarissa's Blog

This is only one of the nightmare scenarios where the lie about depression-causing chemical imbalances leads.

Russians got very scared when the genocide in Bucha and Irpin became widely known. They were ready to negotiate, ready to start powering down the invasion. But then they saw that there were going to be no consequences. Nobody was going to punish them in any way. The world would say, “oh, how bad” and move on. Russians get emboldened with every new mass grave that gets discovered with zero consequences for the perpetrators.

I finally figured out why my plan to bring somebody from Ukraine to teach Russian at my university collapsed. I thought everybody knew that Russian is spoken not only in Russia. When I request an Arabic instructor, I get people from many different countries. Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait. So why shouldn’t a list of Russian teachers include people from Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova?

But it turns out that there are different departments within the organization that work separately and don’t intersect. Ukraine is part of the European department. But Russia isn’t. It’s on the list for Asian countries. As a result, it’s impossible to have a list of instructors that are from Ukraine and Russia. It’s either one or the other.

I should have remembered that Russia isn’t considered a European country from back in my grad school days. I needed to take classes in an additional foreign language. I suggested Russian but was told that my program was in European languages, and Russian didn’t count. I ended up taking English lit because English is a foreign language to me.

In short, it’s all my own fault.

I was doing a quiz on national flags with my niece and discovered that if I hear the name of a country, it’s easier for me to remember what the flag is than to see a flag and associate it with a country. I can go from a word to an image a lot more easily than I can from an image to a word.

For instance, I didn’t recognize the Mexican flag. But right now, I say “Mexican flag” and I can see it perfectly in my mind’s eye.

I have no idea if I told this story before. If you already read it on this blog, please disregard this post. But I discovered that people are unaware of the story and even find it hard to believe, so I want to share it.

After Nazi Germany was defeated, the British government decided to give a gift to Stalin. The gift consisted of 30,000 kossack soldiers who had fought against the Soviets in the 1920s and then found refuge in Europe. The British government just handed them over, like they were unwanted furniture. The wives and the kids were handed over, too Stalin sent them to the concentration camps. Almost all of them died. You can read the story in detail in Solzhenitsyn, for example.

In any case, some of these cossacks knew what was coming. They knew that Stalin had a long memory and that the Brits would hand them off easily. So they ran. A bunch of them ended up in Canada, in the North of Quebec under the theory that nobody would look for them here, in the wilderness. They were right. Those who reached Quebec survived. They founded the little wooden church you can see in the picture. There’s a little cemetery next to the church. My father is now buried here, and there are all the graves of these cossacks. “A graduate of the Odessa law school, class of 1914,” proudly says a headstone of one of them, born in 1891 and dead in 1965.

Why my father would have wanted to be buried next to the cossacks, who knows? But it’s a very restful, beautiful place.

I now have two plans for retirement. Both are expensive, and I’m not saying I’ll be able to afford them. I’m saying both look equally attractive, that’s all.

One plan is to retire to Naples, Florida. I’m going to feel chic all the time, so that’s good.

The other plan is to retire to Rawdon, Quebec. I will feel the opposite of chic but it’s very woodsy and almost as cold as I need it to be.

So the choice is between beautiful nature and beautiful shopping opportunities.

For the past 6 years, Russian mercenary troops have been active in 18 countries of Subsaharan Africa. They engage in violence, create chaos, disrupt elections, and conduct targeted killings. Russian military presence in Africa keeps growing.

This started right after President Obama allowed the Russian conquest of the Crimea (which was NOT conducted “without a single shot fired”; you’ve been lied to) to take place. And right after the New York Times assured us that there’s a civil war, not an invasion, happening in Ukraine and Ukrainians are all Nazis anyway.

So why are Russians are so active in Africa? What’s the point? There are three crucial goals to this engagement.

1. Africa has natural resources that are important for modern technology. Controlling them is lucrative.

2. Creating chaos in Africa and preventing Subsaharan countries from enjoying peace and living better lives sends streams of desperate migrants to Europe. This keeps Europe occupied and too weak and busy to notice much else.

But these are marginal benefits. The most important goal is always and only:

3. To be more important in the world than Americans. Or anybody else. That’s the nature of the narcissistic injury I keep talking about. Nothing is ever enough. Nothing satisfies. Killing Ukrainians, torturing Africans, starving Venezuelans – it’s all good fun but it’s never enough.

There’s something really malignant and ominous happening in the world. But we never hear about it. We never hear about the really important stuff. I wonder why that is.

Russians are now organizing guided tours among the ruins of the Mariupol drama theater where 600 civilians were murdered recently by Russian airstrikes. I saw a video. The tour guide is youngish, nice-looking. She giggles and looks excited to be there.

I remember when I first came to Canada, there was this commercial on TV. Maybe some of you will remember it. There was this really obese little boy sitting at the table. I had never seen this kind of obesity before, so it was already a shock. The boy was eating something covered in a thick layer of barbecue sauce. His face, his hands, everything was completely grimy because of that sauce.

I was so horrified by the ad that I never tried barbecue sauce. Always avoided it because even hearing the words made me want to gag. I have no idea what the commercial was trying to sell. Napkins, detergent, paper towels? Maybe even barbecue sauce, although I don’t think anybody could be crazy enough to see those images as appetizing. But I conceived a decades-long disgust of barbecue sauce.

Finally, twenty years later I closed the Gestalt by tasting barbecue sauce in Canada today and discovering that it’s quite nice.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’ve been crossing the border into Canada for 20 years. Back then, we had paper declaration forms we’d fill out. Remember those?

Now instead of the paper declarations, there are beautiful, sleek machines at the airport. And there’s an app. You can’t enter Canada without the app. But the app and the machine didn’t make the process of entering the country faster or easier. To the contrary. Yesterday, I arrived in a 40% empty airplane from Chicago and waited in a line the likes of which I hadn’t seen in 20 years. It took 1 hour 45 minutes to cross the border. I’m a citizen, I had all the paperwork, the vaccine passport, the negative COVID test. And yet it took this insane amount of time. In 1998, it had taken less than half this time actually to go through the immigration process at that border. Surely, it shouldn’t be easier to immigrate than come home as a citizen.

I’m all for technology making things easier. But it often doesn’t. Here it clearly did not because I’m telling you, this is the first time in two decades that I’ve seen anything similar at this border control. You go through all these apps and machines but at the end of the line, you still end up having the exact same conversation with the exact same tired border officer that you always did. All I’m suggesting is that we throw away the technology and go straight to the conversation.

And by the way, at that same airport, the process of crossing the border back to the US isn’t encumbered by apps and machines, and it goes in a flash. Let’s keep that in mind before some enterprising fellow gets a contract to build some stupid app that will create massive delays and make everybody’s lives harder.