A friend wrote that he had been lent a sailboat and would be moored in Venice over the weekend, and would I want to dine in his company? With the insouciance born of longstanding habit I replied that I would with pleasure, if only he coughs up the money I need to get there
In today’s totalitarian Russia, women are in the vanguard of political repression, and the funny thing is that, were I to paint portraits of some of them, the gentle reader would doubtless be able to relate their traits to his own experience and recognize in one of them the figure of the woman who runs the music department of a college near his house…
Do black lives matter? Clearly, if the story of the Rwandan genocide to which I alluded here a couple of weeks ago is any indication, they do not.
Omens are plentiful these days. As reported here a year ago, the Oak of Mamre, in whose shadow Abraham invited the angels to rest in Genesis, is all dried up. Now a red calf born in Jerusalem has “undergone extensive examination by rabbinical experts” who have concluded that it is indeed the Red Heifer of biblical prophecy….
So it would seem that the gloriously rational chimera, on which the hopes of many a totalitarian ruler are presently pinned, has landed. AI, we are told, is here to enslave populations in places like China or Russia, to win elections in places like the U.S. and Great Britain, and to do just about everything else except make a good cup of tea.
It’s a sobering recollection, actually, in the time of coronavirus, which is said to have carried away some 300,000 lives, mainly of the elderly or the infirm, in the span of a hundred days, causing a global commotion unseen since the last world war. Yet during the same hundred days, in the spring of 1994, nearly one million people died in Rwanda…
Stalin is said to have told Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, that if she kept making a nuisance of herself he would “appoint another Lenin’s widow.” Similarly, Bashar Assad is the Kremlin’s exarch in Syria because the Russians have appointed him to this position, and if he continues to make a nuisance of himself he may be replaced with another, better Bashar Assad.
The Kremlin has seized the opportunity to advance the plan of tagging the population – “bio objects,” if the gentle reader recalls my post of July 11 last year, is the official term on the government’s websites – to turn its citizens into what we might call “smartserfs,” eventual inmates of a “smartgulag.”
Let us turn to the more lighthearted side of life. While democracy groans and totalitarianism gloats, there is plenty of comedy out there to enjoy.
The Chinese fortune cookie with a Russian message inside, which I strove to decipher in last week’s post, is beginning to crumble.
