I had known Pierre only slightly, and my wife still less, as the acquaintance largely predated her arrival in my life, but it was Pierre on whom the story she told at dinner pivoted. As the guests had been challenged to recount the “oddest” of their experiences, I debuted with the bizarre personal episode posted here last week. And Olga, likewise dredging her memory, came out with the tale of Pierre.
The other night, at a dinner party, our host asked the guests to recount the oddest experience they had ever had, and I told the story of how I obtained my residence permit. It was a document I did not need because, as a British subject and hence an EC national, I was as legally entitled to live here as any Italian citizen.
It’s a curious paradox that in the West, with its cultural affinity for individualism, weapons are usually anonymous. Who can name the designer of the F-22 or the inventor of the M-16? The collectivist Russians, by contrast, name their arms after their authors, and even when a fighter plane built for Stalin happens to be the brainchild of an Armenian (Mikoyan) and a Jew (Gurevich), it still bears the name MiG.
The existence of Coke and Pepsi as two competing brands of the same fizz always put a powerful argument in the mouths of those Russians who would claim that America’s avowed attachment to pluralism is a facade.
Let me be honest with the gentle reader. The idea of this post has been plagiarized by me from a site called EUvsDISINFO, where an article with the above title appeared a few days ago. I do not often plagiarize, which says less about my morals as a scholar than about the state of modern journalism, but I found that article exceptionally interesting.
In Les Visiteurs, one of my favorite movies of all time – I once showed it to Dr. Fleming, who said, after an astonished pause, that “this is the most reactionary film I’ve ever seen” – there is a moment when the hero, a medieval knight who has stumbled into the twentieth century, is being shown the Larousse encyclopedia entry on his illustrious family. “Who is this?” he asks about a descendant of his who lived in the eighteenth century. “Oh, he was a famous revolutionary.” And what does that mean, the knight persists. “He wanted to kill the king.”...
September must be allegory month, and fittingly one of the films now the talk of the Venice Film Festival is an offering from the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky entitled “Dear Comrades.” Its subject is the massacre of striking workers at Novocherkassk, a city near Rostov-on-Don, in 1962, and in fairness it ought to be said that a 2012 TV miniseries, entitled “Once Upon a Time in Rostov,” had done that subject ample justice, notwithstanding that it was made in the first year of what will enter history books as Putin’s Terror. But Konchalovsky regards himself as an artist, and hence...
“No matter how totalitarian is Putin,” one of our readers has asked in response to last week’s post, “is there any other way to keep Russia from falling into the hegemonic abyss represented by our deracinated Western leaders?” The question, to me, is hardly new, at least when raised rhetorically.
The gentle reader did not comment on last week’s post, so I follow the famous orchestra conductor’s advice to slow down if the audience finds your tempo sluggish. With regard to old icons – the “figure” of my metaphor, as a literary critic would say, current news being its “ground” – my meaning was clear enough, I think.
Disinformation, which we Russians lovingly nickname deza, differs from ordinary misinformation in that it is planted or spread knowingly, with malice aforethought and the intent to deceive. This looks good on paper, until a piece of fake news is actually before us and we start mulling it over, and then what is patently a case of carelessness or even of fraudulent intent may begin to take on the configurations of a gospel truth. That fake, after all, has not come out of nowhere. That fake is almost always a palimpsest of earlier fakes, and as one’s mind keeps burrowing deeper...
