The Kimono Kerfuffle

in

The work of re-educators is never done. Too much is at stake — power, jobs, research grants, the thrill of the chase, the drama of victimhood — for the process to be brought to any sort of close. So microaggression, an abomination so new that spellcheck can only heckle, becomes a thing, like all those new things — such as “privilege” as a verb, cis and that and all the rest — designed not to encourage people to think harder and wider, but to impose one narrow script, inventive only in the various ways it finds to deliver the same message about an oppressive, unregenerate America where old monsters still roam.

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Narcissus and Echo

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When the established order collapses, those who live among the ruins often take comfort from the hope that someone will turn up to tell them what comes next. With a dysfunctional and humiliated Germany struggling to come to terms with a military defeat that it still did not understand, there was nothing very remarkable about the views of the young, down-at-heel Ph.D. who, in early 1922, complained in an article for his hometown newspaper that “salvation cannot come from Berlin,” the shamed and shameful symbol of old Reich and new Weimar. But all was not lost: “Sometimes it looks as though a new sun is about to rise in the south.”

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A “Normal” Narva

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Vladimir Putin doesn’t take much interest in the rights of Russians at home, but when it comes to the millions of Russians stranded in a sudden abroad after the collapse of the USSR, it’s a different matter. In a speech last year, he made clear that his idea of a wider “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) came with a threat: “our country will . . . defend the rights of . . . our compatriots abroad, using the entire range of available means.”

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Strangers in a Shared Land

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“We could have been Bosnia,” said Eerik-Niiles Kross, a center-right Estonian politician, former intelligence chief—and much more besides. He didn’t have to tell me why. Estonians remain haunted by the memory of their doomed interwar republic. It inspired their drive for independence from the Soviet Union, but it reminds them that what was lost can never be truly restored.

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History lessons

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For a one-man play to work, it needs a very, very good script-writer. Back in the early 1990s, I saw Patrick Stewart’s A Christmas Carol. I would watch Stewart in just about anything, but with Dickens supplying the words, well, it was the best of times. Ronald Keaton has yet to reach the heights of the great Shakespearian, Starfleet captain, and mutant mentor. But this familiar presence on the Chicago stage and quite a bit more besides (manager, director, playwright, fund-raiser, composer, singer) often turned to the best for many of the lines deployed in his single-handed Churchill at New York’s New World Stages. He adapted the script from Churchill’s own words (and from a Reagan-era TV play by James C. Humes, an assiduous laborer in the Churchill mines).

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A Most Curious Country It Was

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There was a time, a time not long after history ended, when the narrative was clear. The Soviet Union collapsed, followed by a period too close to chaos for comfort. Finally Putin, picked out from backstage, and promising a firmer hand on the tiller; if no one was sure of the course he would set, how bad could it be? The past was past, after all. In 2006, Peter Pomerantsev, the British son of Soviet-era émigrés, flew into Moscow set on a career in Russian TV. His book tells what happened next.

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