The other day, sorting through some files, I came across a notebook of mine from exactly thirty years ago, a foppish little thing from Smythson of Bond Street, its robin’s-blue pages and black leather binding lending it the air of authority so becoming an unsuccessful writer in his prime.
“Reckless fantasies of confrontation” was a favorite phrase of Soviet propaganda. Washington, went the argument, is a trigger-happy bully and all men of good will, meaning everybody on the Kremlin payroll, must unite in the face of such fantasies if holocaust is to be avoided.
Of all the fascinating and historically important details of last weekend’s elections to Russia’s “parliament,” by far the most remarkable is the result in Chechnya, where the Kremlin Gauleiter Ramzan Kadyrov received 99.7% of the vote.
Hammered as he is by the new Stalinism of “critical race theory” upon the anvil of the old Stalinism of “political correctness,” a denizen of the West may be tempted to lament that his days as a free man and a free thinker are over. He may even compare his position as an individual in society to that of a dissident under an authoritarian regime, if not Stalin’s Russia then at least its modern reincarnation, and conclude that the fat lady has sung and the opera’s over.
Even the dialectically materialist children’s books of my Soviet youth nurtured the idea of an “animal kingdom,” the realm where the lion was tsar. Presumably this autocrat ruled in consultation with his ministers, other imposing mammals like the elephant and the buffalo, and of course the principal temptation for a youthful intellect was to arrange the whole planetary zoo on the lines of the Table of Ranks introduced in 1722 by Peter the Great, whereby every citizen held a civilian rank corresponding to its military equivalent.
Life is rife with disappointments, none more bewildering, perhaps, than the crash of adolescent illusions. Ever since the distant days of youth I have had a soft spot for the nostalgia of the Russian gypsy song, those early twentieth-century laments that, rather like a gypsy fortune teller, seemed to foretell the impending loss of our homeland and of our liberty.
In a world growing evermore progressive – I suspect the Gadarene swine thought this tendency marvelous as they went off the cliff – one has to work hard to stay in place.
Summertime and the living’s not just not easy, but when, even in the shade, it gets hot enough to fry an egg sunny side up it’s pretty much impossible. July, as the gentle reader may have read, was globally the hottest month since records began, and it now looks like August will be even hotter. You just can’t beat this kind of heat with mint juleps.
“The staff of life,” meaning bread, apparently gained wide currency in English in the wake of a misquotation of the Book of Psalms by a seventeenth-century Nonconformist, though I note that Jonathan Swift had used it some decades earlier. “Bread is the staff of life,” wrote the great English satirist, as therein is contained, “inclusive, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding and custard.”
We’re now in what British journos call the Silly Season, and what could be sillier than the silly invitation for silly President Zelensky of Ukraine from silly U.S. President Biden to come and see him in Washington at the end of August, when Congress is in recess and there’s nobody to say they’re being silly?
