The gentle reader may recall the series of posts in the spring of last year in which I argued that the pestilence is a biological weapon designed and launched deliberately to destabilize the West, where even a single death is a matter of public concern, by a totalitarian regime prepared to sustain such casualties in the millions especially when its own population is 1.4 billion.
Every time I look at a newspaper, I feel like the soldier in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the tinder box.
I am not writing this on pagan Lemuria or on what to the Catholics in Italy is Ognisanti, in other words, on All Saints’ Day, but apparently on what is now a Russian state holiday called Bailiffs’ Day.
The gentle reader would be rightly shocked if, after last week’s dramatic personal appeal in this space, his unruly correspondent changed tack and let fly with something about Russian shenanigans in West Africa.
This week my wife is expected to give birth to our child. How can I not recall the moment in my beloved Pasternak’s Spektorsky, when the poet says….
As there is little hope that the gentle reader can recall a post of mine from four years ago, I will quote its closing paragraph. That week I had just returned from London from the funeral of a close friend where I came across an old acquaintance – novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of The Girl at the Lion d’Or and other light masterpieces – and this led me to reminisce about our last meeting many years earlier, at a Chinese restaurant of my choosing.
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.
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.
