Fresh (edit)

Just have to say. You know how one note or one brush stroke or one extra word can make something that's discordant become suddenly harmonious. Today I took a walk around a Globa Park and what had seemed to me previously like a micro dystopia (see the first entry) took on a surprisingly fresh image for me.
Being a holiday weekend it was busy, and I think it must have been all the people there strolling, drinking beer on benches, etc. that served as the unifying element to make that mess make sense. I was struck by how vividly the symmetry of the aqua theater cut. It made me think about the Guernica, which is not all unpleasent. Even the garish colors of the play structures seemed like extensions of the enjoyment of the children attached to them. The naked trees were in all the right places. It wasn't worn out; it was charming.

Dancing Shoes

In my last post I posited U.S.-Russian relations as a sub-category of a larger ideological conflict that the U.S. is fully engaged in. Russia as a means, but definitely not the end.
For Ukraine, the story is of course quite different. Russia may not be the Alpha (after all it's in Kyiv where can most definitely trace the origins of the Slavic peoples) but it's certainly the form and content, and could very well be its Omega.
With the Orange Revolution of 2004, Ukraine was fastening its blinders looking West. In the aftermath of the Orange party's complete failure to provide the treasures they promised, and the subsequent dissolution of that fragile political unity, belief and pursuit of Western-modeled democracy (and culture) has waned substantially. As a host of Ukrainian political figures tug at the fabric of a nation that becomes poorer and poorer as the economic crisis continues to ravage, the power-vacuum has opened wider than ever. Government ineptitude, political disunity, and bureaucratic squabble are taken as a granted in contemporary Ukraine. As the hryvnia falls against the dollar, people lose jobs, roads are left unpaved, and week after week the Eurocup 2012 bid looks to be in jeopardy, Ukrainians lack faith in political leadership to save their country. It's only natural then, why the antithesis of this power void, the obvious and celebrated complete consolidation of power in Russia, has grown increasingly alluring to many Ukrainians. Next door, in Russia they have a sterling historical precedent of how one man's power and bulldozing of opposition can dig a Slavic country out of recession and back to resurgence.

During my time in Ukraine many people have met my expectation of Russian perception by voicing their distaste for the brand of totalitarianism that seems to many to be emanating from the Kremlin. They see what happened in Georgia as a kind of ominous indication of the kind of Russia they might face in the future in Crimea, home to the Russian fleet and distinctly pro-Russian (even anti-Ukrainian) nationalism. And when Russia decided to turn off Ukraine's natural gas supply, albeit Ukraine was/is failing in payment, they saw this as a sort of reminder by Russia what little power Ukraine has if it decides to find new dancing partners.
However, connected by their Slavic blood, their language, and centuries of intimate history (regardless of its atrocities), Ukraine and Russia are sisters, and right now lil' sis' is seriously reconsidering her Western flirtations and looking up to big sis' again because she gets her shit done. Regardless of the fact that Russia's taking it as hard as everyone else right now, the West can't hope to provide the power of example so strongly as (Mother) Russia.

From Obama with Love

Earlier this week the Associated Press ran a story which described top-level diplomatic personnel delivering a personal letter from President Obama to Dmitri Medvedev, apparently a reply to an earlier letter from the Russian president. It sent a kind of refreshing shiver through my forearms, a wave of Bond-inspired romanticism to think that heads of great states still really send communiques in this way, and I could only picture Medvedev (Putin?) using some kind of solid gold and unwieldy letter opener to cleanly release the surely eloquent prose of Obama. Regardless, it's safe to assume that although these messages didn't begin "Dear Dima/Barry," they are nevertheless the beginning of a dialogue that wishes to soften the tone of recent antagonism coming from both sides. And as brand-new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva this week we will see the kind of tone that is set for the new Washington relations with the not so new, (temporarily?) resurgent Moscow.
Against all sense and political-correctness I hope that Hillary Clinton leaves Switzerland having swapped some karate chops with Putin's cohort. If I'm being honest, I have to say that the slow heating up of the old (new) Cold War has been kind of, well...fun.
If only because all the rhetoric seems shallow, if only because I think Russia's power rests on a gas-supply bubble that is not sustainable in the long-run, that is liable to burst (or is already bursting), and because Westerners are deluding themselves when they evaluate Russia's ability to actually menace the West (Georgia being the full reflection of its aggression), having Russia as a villain seems like something of old-fashioned entertainment. There's something less than real about the stakes with Russia, there's a certain playful nostalgia in the news barbs channeling between Washington and Moscow, and I can't help but suppress images of Bond seducing nefarious Natashas in a game where ultimately only henchmen and cronies get killed but the world nevertheless remains the same.
Ultimately, why I can trivialize the rekindling of Soviet and Yankee confrontation as, in part, as nothing more than a melodrama willingly created by both sides, is because it's a distraction. A distraction from conflict(s) with stakes exponentially higher. As the world knows, America's true battle, of foreign policy and armies (and economy and ideology), is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon... Monsters created by (mostly) wayward American action in the Muslim world, and generating a conflict that sadly no Bond or Bourne or secret missions could possibly hope to alter because they the enemies are too ambiguous and the plots are shaded with too much uncertainty and ideological complexity.
As much as I want to romanticize the letter from Obama to Medvedev, I have to forget that little fact that it wasn't about Russia's nuclear capabilities (a la the 1960s) it was Iran's, and specifically, will you Russia help us with this little Iran problem. Maybe it isn't true for Russia, but at the end of most of America's movies there's only two characters "Us" and "Them", and here Russia comes with Us. If Russia is America's opponent its only because its an unwilling participant, at best, and naughty disruptor, at worst, in the U.S. attempt to gain ground in its Muslim quagmire by unification of pro-West allies --not because it's the actual bully we want to confront.