Following the recent street protests in Russia, international attention has been focused on the country’s political scene. A young person tuning in to the news coverage might be confused by all the long names ending with –ov and –sky, and the series of heads that resemble slabs of meat, lumpy potatoes or some other comestible. Too much of the commentary is targeted at initiates; beginners need a jumping on point. After all, today’s 20 year olds were barely crawling the last time Vladimir Zhirinovsky scored serious headlines in the West. So strap on your shapka and let’s go!

Part I:   THE ESTABLISHMENT

VLADIMIR PUTIN: In 1999, when V.V. Putin was appointed prime minister by the celebrated disco dancer Borya Yeltsin, many articles appeared in the press noting that all he had to show for a long stint as a KGB agent in the 70s and 80s was a bronze medal from the Stasi- the implication being that he was a lightweight, a gray mediocrity, etc. Nobody remembers that stuff now. He is a master of political chess, and- whether you like him or not- compares favorably with most (perhaps all) Russian leaders of the past 100 years.

DMITRI MEDVEDEV: An elusive, mystical figure who has shown world-historic levels of personal restraint since winning the presidency in 2008. Indeed, he is very possibly the first man in history to rise to supreme office and then volunteer to return power to his predecessor. Historians shall ponder his enigma for centuries to come.

That’s all you need to know about the establishment. Now let’s get down to the parties of disgruntlement.

Part II: THE UPRISING

THE PROTESTORS: Russia has experienced anti-Putin protests for years, but until 2011 the crowds consisted of marginal types such as communist pensioners, rabid nationalists and international chess grandmasters. This changed in the aftermath of last year’s Duma elections which were widely viewed as rigged. There is nothing new in that criticism, but- perhaps inspired by events in the Middle East- individuals who look surprisingly middle class have started to object. Alas for them, the opposition is completely useless.

Part III: THE OPPOSITION

GENNADY ZYUGANOV: In all the breathless Western media coverage of Russia’s street protests what most journalists have neglected to mention is that the largest and best-organized opposition force in Russia is… THE COMMUNIST PARTY. That’s right, the party of Stalin and Brezhnev, which has a long tradition of tyranny and disastrous economic policies! Gennady Zyuganov has run the show since 1993, when everybody with talent and ambition abandoned the party to make $$$$. His is the saggy-jowled face of stagnation, the root vegetable-shaped head of hopelessness.

VLADIMIR ZHIRINOVSKY: A professional clown from Kazakhstan famous for his long-running performance as a radical nationalist. Not to be confused with an actual idiot, Zhirinovsky studied Turkish at Moscow State University’s Institute of Asian and African Countries, then law (also at MSU) and finally landed himself a PhD in philosophy (also at MSU, although he attained that last qualification in the 90s when standards had slipped). Impressively, he has never once broken character in twenty years of playing “Zhirik”, the burly, brawling politician-buffoon. Slyly subverts the very concept of “opposition” by endorsing everything Putin stands for whenever called upon to vote in the Duma.

MIKHAIL PROKHOROV: Russia’s third-richest man- worth $18 billion according to Forbes- and yet he has never shared any of his coin with me, the swine. Owner of SNOB, the magazine of Russian bourgeois self-satisfaction, and the New Jersey Nets basketball team. When he declared his candidacy I assumed he was a Kremlin double agent, however the numerous sympathetic articles about disgraced 90s billionaires that have appeared in SNOB lead me to suspect he is sincere in his opposition to Putin. Apparently not joking when he floated the idea of making the loathed ex- billionaire and current convict Mikhail Khodorkovsky his prime minister, this goes some way to explaining the 3% support he currently enjoys in the polls.

SERGEI MIRONOV: Some dude with a beard who, last time he ran for president, said he would vote for Putin rather than himself. Now supposedly an actual gen-u-wine enemy of the establishment, he poses absolutely no threat whatsoever.

BONUS MENTION:

GRIGORY YAVLINSKY: When he was disqualified from running for president following the discovery of thousands of forged signatures on his application, this was reported around the world as something significant, possibly an act of skullduggery on the part of the establishment. In fact, Yavlinsky is a has-been with miniscule support among Russians, even if he means well. Fun fact: in 1990, while still a member of the Communist Party, he co-authored a surrealist manifesto masquerading as a serious proposal to transform the USSR into a market economy in 500 days!

CONCLUSION:

Of course, many blame Putin for preventing a viable opposition from emerging on Russia’s political scene over the last twelve years. If that is true, he has been highly successful- I mean, presented with that selection of candidates, who would you vote for? Be honest, now.

Originally published at RIA- Novosti, the home of awesome

Recently I was browsing in a used book store when I stumbled upon a soldier’s Japanese phrasebook from World War II. Between faded orange covers I found a treasure trove of fascinating words and phrases- certainly it’s the most useful text published by the U.S. War Department I’ve encountered since that pamphlet on sexual hygiene for GIs I found in a Texas ghost town a few years back. It does lack for detailed diagrams of human genitalia, however.

Like most phrasebooks it contains all the standard terminology related to greetings, asking for directions and finding lodgings, but the structure and at least half of the language is strictly determined by the context of war. Thus it begins not with “Hello” and “My name is…” but rather a set of “Emergency Expressions” the very first of which is:

Help! ta-SKET-ay!

Now that is definitely useful, so long as you are talking to friendly Koreans or “Formosans” and not a platoon of Japanese soldiers. Other handy emergency expressions include:

Where are American soldiers? Ah- may-ree-ka no hay-ee-TA-ee wa DOAK-o-nee ee-MA-ska?

Are they our enemies? KA-ray-ra wa tek-ee DESS-ka?

And:

Don’t shoot! OO-tsoo-na!

Only once this type of thing is out of the way does the War Department get down to teaching the basics of polite conversation such as:

Good morning o-ha- YO

And

Will you have a cigarette? Ta-ba-ko o DOAZ-o?

Frequently the phrasebook offers both polite and imperative forms for the same expression. According to the foreword you should be respectful when addressing prisoners in the officer class, but bark at their underlings- that’s the Japanese way, apparently. Thus, when interrogating gentlemen of breeding you say this:

Please tell the truth hoant-o no ko-TOE o eet-TAY KOO-DA-sa-EE

But when it comes to enlisted men, you say this:

Tell the truth! Hoant-o no ko-TOE o ee-YAY!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no polite form is supplied for the following:

Obey or I’ll fire! Kee-ka NA-eet-o OO-tsoo-zo!

Of course, there are long lists of vocabulary dedicated to rank, terrain and military hardware. A lot of the combat stuff would not be very useful today however…unless you are attacked by a rogue member of the apocalyptic Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo:

I was gassed doak-oo-GA-soo nee ya-RA-ret-ah

I was surprised to find that Section 3 was filled with detailed terminology related to fine dining:

I want it- – koo-da-SA-ee
Cooked or boiled nee-TAY
Raw NA-ma-day
Rare na-MA ya-kee-nee SHTAY
Well done YO-koo YA-ee-tay
Baked or fried YA-ee-tay
Fried in deep fat ah-GET-ay
Roasted RO-sto shtay

War is hell but evidently that doesn’t stop you from squeezing in a good meal whenever you can.

Next come “health” words, which for seriously wounded soldiers would surely have meant the difference between life and death, e.g.:

I am hurt in the crotch/privates ma-TA ga ee-TA-ee
Stop the bleeding shook-KETS o-toe-MAY-yo
Quick! HA-ya-koo!

In conclusion, I’d say that the U.S. War Department did an excellent job of putting together this little phrasebook. The only thing that’s missing is a section dedicated to prostitution, which would have been very useful for some of the GIs, I’m sure. Oh yes, and also: “Where did all these severed heads come from?” an essential phrase for any English speaker en route to Nanking while it was under Japanese occupation in 1937. But then again, America wasn’t in the war yet. Heck, there wasn’t even a war on!

As evocative of a soldier’s reality as any memoir or novel, the War Department’s Japanese phrasebook made me thankful I was born in a different time, and did not have to face death in a hostile jungle. Which reminds me: my well-thumbed copy came to me with the previous owner’s name still penciled on the cover: Captain Pilch. Thus as I flick through its well-thumbed pages (the Captain clearly saw a lot of combat) I draw even closer to that moment in history and ask myself: Did the captain survive? Which phrases did he use the most? Could the Japanese understand him? There’s no way to know. But I am grateful to the Captain for his notations, such as REI for zero which the War Department omitted even though Eastern mathematicians were using it in their calculations long before the turn of the first millennium.

Who knows, perhaps this book even saved Captain Pilch’s life! And just on the off chance that he is still knocking around, aged 95 or so, I have a request to make. On the front cover the phrasebook is marked RESTRICTED. The first page elaborates that “… restricted material may be given to any person known to be in service of the United States and to persons of undoubted loyalty and discretion who are cooperating in government work…” But otherwise that’s it.

Now I’ll admit that since anybody could have constructed this phrasebook out of a big enough dictionary, I don’t quite understand why the War Department felt the need to keep its contents confidential. But I shall defer to their wisdom. So don’t tell anyone I told you all this stuff, OK? For Captain Pilch’s sake (and mine, I suppose).

Unless you happen to know for certain that the RESTRICTED classification has been lifted. In which case tell anyone you like.

Originally published at RIA- Novosti, the home of awesome

The year 2011 was an alarming one for dictators, as a series of mass uprisings toppled several authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. The so-called “Arab Spring” inspired wild hopes, with some optimists even declaring that the 20th century phenomenon of the dictator was finished, and a new era of democracy was dawning- just like in Eastern Europe in 1989. True? False? Let’s survey the Year in Dictators and find out!

The action started in Tunisia in late 2010, when a man named Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated to protest the rule of President Ben Ali, and immediately triggered a mass uprising. By January, the hitherto unassailable dictator was in exile in Saudi Arabia and lots of politicians and journalists were pretending to know something about the country. Tunisians are secular, they told us, so don’t worry about religious radicals coming to power! A few months later, an Islamist party won 30% or so of the vote, making it the largest bloc in Tunisia’s parliament, with great influence over the country’s new constitution. Awesome! Which brings us to…

Egypt – not only the most populous country in the Arab world but also home to the University of Al- Azhar, the world’s most important center of Islamic learning. Starting in February, a series of protests led to the downfall of long term dictator Hosni Mubarak, who learned that America is only your friend until she isn’t, as Obama urged his nation’s faithful ally of three decades to stand down so that some reactionary, authoritarian anti-Semitic types could take over. Well that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s obviously what was going to happen, and it’s what’s happening right now. Awesome!

Then there’s Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi learned the hard way that it doesn’t pay to give up your weapons of mass destruction, or to hang out with Tony Blair. After 41 years of doing his own thang, he was faced by an immensely incompetent uprising which would have failed had not a NATO mission led by Britain and France with major support from the US eventually assisted an unappealing mob of ex-Al Qaeda men and other unlovely sorts in killing the Brother Leader. At least 50,000 people died in a haphazard military campaign that was supposedly waged to save lives, and which had nothing to do with regime change, HONEST! It’s hard to say what’s going on there now because the media isn’t doing much reporting, but I do hear that Gaddafi’s son is yet to see a lawyer after weeks in captivity and that polygamy is now legal. Awesome (if you’re a dude)!

There was unrest elsewhere in the Middle East, but not much change. Bahrain held firm. I think something happened in the Yemen, but nobody reports on it that much. Let me Google it…

….no, the president is still hanging on, although he’s supposed to be gone by February. In Syria Bashar Assad has responded to unrest like a proper dictator and killed lots of his own people. Will his regime fall in 2012? I have no idea. But having seen what happened to Gaddafi he has a pretty strong motivation to keep on killing.

And that’s it for the alleged Brave New World of democracy. Elsewhere, 2011 was not bad at all for dictators. Consider the ex-USSR for instance:

In Turkmenistan former dentist Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov switched the portraits of his predecessor Turkmenbashi for his own years ago and nobody noticed any difference.

In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov has ruled with an iron fist since the country was part of the USSR. His repressive system is working well, and the jails are nice and full.

In Tajikistan, ex-collective farm boss Emomali Rakhmon is still rocking the presidential palace. Not long ago he banned all religious education for those below the age of 18; he’d rather everybody read his own books about Zoroaster.

In Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev continues as president of the country his daddy used to run.

In Kazakhstan, oblivious to the lessons of Libya, Nursultan Nazarbayev recently started hanging out with Tony Blair. Blair denies he is making any money from the friendship, but the Kazakhs claim he already has a gleaming new office in Astana, the capital.

Meanwhile I hear Africa still has some dictators, and there are also a few dodgy fellows knocking about in Latin America. North Korea just swapped one psycho for his puffy faced son, while China remains a one party state. Russia which although not a dictatorship is certainly authoritarian, recently experienced some uprisings but the challengers Mr. Putin faces for the presidency in 2012 are (as usual) discredited frauds and rich dilettantes doomed to failure.

Authoritarian rule is the norm rather than the exception in human history and even in liberal democracies many yearn to impose their will on others. In the EU for instance, whenever the public makes the wrong decision in a referendum, their leaders make them vote again until they get it right!  In the Middle East meanwhile I suspect that secular dictators are about to be replaced by religious dictators- plus ca change, and all that.

Happy New Dictators!

Originally published at RIA Novosti, the home of the awesome

Sometime around the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a long period of abject Western media failure regarding the Putin phenomenon began. Journalists were so busy making fatuous comparisons to Stalin or hyping The New Cold War™ that they refused to address why the president was so popular in Russia. I suspect this is because many of them missed the 1990s, when Americans and Europeans had enjoyed near godlike status. Yeltsin had been no catastrophe for them, even if he was for 99.99% of everybody else.

However, Putin was genuinely popular and until a few weeks ago seemed unassailable. A generous man might read this as proof of success: that life in Russia has improved to the point where citizens are no longer willing to accept corruption in exchange for stability. When I lived in Russia, I attended some entirely futile anti-government rallies comprised of pensioners, punks and nationalists; the latest protests are larger, much more diverse and the Kremlin obviously hasn’t decided what to do about them…yet.
It’s ironic, meanwhile, that these demands for democracy are occurring twenty years after the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus unilaterally declared the USSR dead, thus overriding the democratically expressed will of the majority of soviet citizens who had voted in referenda earlier that year for the Soviet Union to remain united (assuming we can trust those results, of course).

That two decade anniversary also makes me think of the erstwhile soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe which had seized their liberty in 1989. All of these countries- from Estonia to Bulgaria- almost immediately applied to join the EU, membership of which is now making them, ironically, less free again.

Of course, there’s a world of difference between the totalitarian USSR and the impotent, soft authoritarian EU. But how the citizens of these nations, who are still resentful of Moscow’s long dominance of their internal politics, can so freely submit to oversight of their national budgets by an unelected cabal in Brussels, or worse, meekly acquiesce as entire populations are forced to vote again whenever a referendum in the EU brings the wrong result… well, it blows my mind, man.

I come from a small country. I understand the advantages of an alliance with a bigger neighbor. But I am not seduced by the vague, utopian EU goal of ‘ever closer union’ and I don’t subscribe to the comic fantasy that the EU could ever rival the USA or China as a world power. The fear/shame stigma surrounding nationalism is largely a continental issue, not a British one. Thus while passport free travel is nice and Brussels surely provides pleasant sinecures for national politicians who can’t be bothered with elections any more, I fail to see the point of surrendering to the Franco-German axis at its heart.

So what is its appeal? Let’s ask Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor:

“There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for man, as long as he remains free, than to find someone to bow down to as soon as possible.”

Hmm…

Well now that makes me think of Egypt, where following the so-called Arab Spring, a majority of Egyptians have just voted for reactionary parties such as The Muslim Brotherhood or worse, the Salafists. Of course, this is not surprising if you consider that Egypt is a very traditional, pious society, which has been governed for decades by a corrupt military junta. Who were the people going to vote for, the parties that claim to embody the Will of Allah; or that wee man with the moustache who used to lurk about the UN?

It has been vaguely amusing (while also pathetic), to watch the American leaders and bien pensant media types who were so wrong about the meaning of the uprising now argue that political power will make the Brotherhood, which has over eighty years of hardcore Islamist pronouncements behind it, less radical. Such stupidity is nothing new. Apologists denied the obvious extremism of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin for a long time. In the 60s, many European lefties loved Mao. One of Jimmy Carter’s advisors compared the Ayatollah Khomeini to Gandhi. Don’t worry, say the useful idiots, it will all be OK.

Not likely. Remember the 2004 uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan? Well, in Ukraine the guy who (allegedly?) stole the election is now president, while the “heroes” who defeated him are either a) in prison or b) in disgrace. In 2008 Georgia’s president launched an attack on his own citizens and lost one third of his country’s territory. As for Kyrgyzstan… well… yeah.

Thus, when I watch the rallies in Russia, I celebrate the protestors’ loss of fear, but wolves are always waiting in the wings. And yet for all that, sometimes things actually do improve. However fatuous the EU may be in its goals and deeds, it’s far better to be forced to submit to Merkozy than to be devoured by Stalin, if that’s the choice history offers you.

As for Egypt, however, I’m considerably less optimistic.

Originally published at RIA Novosti, home of the awesome.

For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus,playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.

What is the mechanism behind this? I don’t care. I note only that the links in the chain of music and memory are almost always forged accidentally- standing in a shop, watching TV, sitting in a café. When I was travelling in Central Asia a few years ago however I decided to conduct an experiment- I would intentionally fuse some music with the landscape to use as an aid to memory later.

That was the plan at least. Unfortunately as I came up with this idea the day before leaving, I had no time to reorganize my MP3 player and so the music I brought with me was just stuff I had picked up recently- Television, Bonnie Prince Billy, Arcade Fire and a few others. Immediately after I arrived I was too overloaded on sensations to listen to any of it. And besides, I hate earphones. Playing the tracks back now, they evoke nothing. However, the Black Eyed Peas’ criminally awful My Humps-which was playing everywhere in Turkmenistan- immediately transports me back to that shitty nightclub in Turkmenabat where a fat girl with a moustache kept bumping into me on the dance floor. Then there’s the acoustic version of Hotel California, which summons unpleasant memories of the gruesome meat market in Balkanabat, from which I fled into a night that stank of burning petrol and despair. But those two fusions were all accidental- like Rock Me Amadeus on the ferry. Maybe that’s just the way it works and the experiment was doomed from the start.

But there was an exception, a moment when my plan transformed a song and the contents of my skull forever, giving me one of the most amazing musical experiences of my life. This is how it happened: I was standing on the edge of a vast pit of fire inthe depths of the Kara Kum desert.  In that abandoned nocturnal wasteland, the burning hole seemed almost mythical, even though it was just a crater accidentally created by Soviet engineers digging for gas, and then set on fire by a nomad worried the methane odor was poisoning his sheep. At that moment however, it was as awe-inspiring as the Mouth of Hell itself. After gazing into it transfixed for about fifteen minutes, I realized no photograph could do the hole justice, and the memory would rapidly fade. Suddenly I remembered my plan, to fuse a song with a landscape. I searched through the MP3 player and found some Rammstein- infernal yes, but rather redundant when confronted with an actual pit of fire. Next came Roy Orbison’s In Dreams. Immediately I stopped- this song was already rich with meaning, memory and images for me. Nevertheless, mysterious and perfect as it is, I knew it could absorb more. Better yet I thought the bizarre contrast between eerie 60s pop and satanic inferno would give me an authentic, almost classical surrealist experience, like something straight out of Andre Breton’s manifesto.

But as soon as the Big O started singing in his lower, ghostly register the experience went way beyond surreal. There was no bizarre collision, but rather the music actually fused with the moment, with the desert, the night sky, the dancing flames and the epic emptiness. In fact, as the song continued I realized that that strange, miniature symphony of obsession and dark longing had never sounded so haunting, so piercing, so perfect. I played, and replayed, lost in the song, the heat, fire and darkness. Clearly I had just discovered the perfect conditions for listening to Roy Orbison: on the edge of a pit of fire, in a void. My friend Joe appeared at the edge of the hole. I called him over – I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t suffering from an aural hallucination brought on by the psychic deprivation of the desert. Joe stood there, entranced by the fire and the music, playing and replaying the track. When he finally gave me back the earphones he was wide-eyed:

‘That was almost a shamanistic experience,’ he said.

I understood what he meant. Songs for Orbison were incantations of power, gateways to other worlds. This meek, shy man with a passion for radio-controlled airplanes sang of dream realities where his fantasies came true, where the grim world he inhabited was transcended, even replaced. In Dreams makes this urge to cross into a better world explicit in the lyrics, but even in apparently mindless pop such as Pretty Woman Orbison describes an individual who, by the power of his will and growl, can force a woman to do his bidding- like a medium summoning the dead at a seance. There is always something slippery going on in Orbison’s songs, and he is not always opening the door he thinks he is. I’m not sure which door I’d stepped through, myself. There were no intoxicants in my system, but high on music and fire and the desert and the bottomless sky I was now somewhere else entirely. I spent over an hour wandering through the burning dream palaces of Roy Orbison. Then, I’m not sure what happened. Something moved me to step back from the pit of fire. I turned and saw a hill. It was blacker than the sand, blacker than the night sky, an eerie pyramid of negation in time and space. I was close to where Zoroaster, the world’s first apocalyptic prophet had heard God talking and founded a religion that had dominated Iran for a millennium before the Islamic conquest. Perhaps, perhaps if I climbed that mountain… well, what exactly?

I switched off the music and started walking. The hill was about half a mile away across a flat plain, but it seemed to take an eternity to reach it. It took even longer to climb. And once I reached the top I wondered what I was doing there: there was no hole in the sky through which I might perceive the color out of space. Mildly disappointed I descended and returned to the camp, where my friends were waiting.

Between my ears however, deep in the meat in my skull, Roy Orbison, the Great Shaman of the Kara Kum Desert now lurked, imprisoned forever, waiting to be released like a djinn from his bottle only when I played that song. And when I do, he summons the flames again, and the desert and the darkness, and I step into that burning dream palace, and spend a little more time wandering its corridors and rooms. And the world is transformed- for two minutes and fifty seconds, at least.

In memoriam Roy Orbison (1936-1988) and Barbara Orbison (1950-2011)

In June 2009, I found myself glued to the TV set, watching the crowds in Tehran protesting the rigged reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran. I was amazed that things seemed to be falling apart so quickly for the motley crew of thugs, thieves, killers and millenarian fantasists that run the country. After all, their despotic regime was only 30 years old, and at that age the USSR was in the full, terrifying flower of Stalinism. It would be another four decades before it collapsed due to institutional senility and internal decay.

Eh?

Like most Britons, I long ago accepted that our island home is a small, increasingly insignificant place, populated by a mild-mannered people who meekly submit to the highest degree of government surveillance in the Western world. Our public services are mediocre and our TV is largely rubbish. The notion that the ineffectual clique of ex-public schoolboys running this minor power could mastermind an uprising in Iran- or would even want to- was definitely worth a chuckle or two.

What I had forgotten, of course, is that in the Middle East people have very long memories. The Iranians recall the days when Britain had an empire, and stern, ascetic men fond of a good spanking liked to fiddle with the internal politics of faraway places. To the Iranians, apparently, Albion is still perfidious, the “Little Satan” manipulating the oafish Great Satan of America into doing its bidding: a bit like the Elders of Zion, only even more devious.

Jeez, I thought, those Mullahs have got to catch up with the times… watch a bit of UK reality TV or something. Those imperial guys might as well be aliens for all they have in common with their descendants. Didn’t the Iranians notice that the last time they kidnapped a bunch of British soldiers some of them burst into tears?

On the other hand, I thought, this should make those “experts,” who doubt that Ahmadinejad & co. are serious about all the apocalyptic stuff, think again. If the Iranians can believe this about the UK, then the notion that the Hidden Imam is about to return any day now and usher in the End Times is eminently plausible by comparison.

Of course, it’s very likely that the regime didn’t really think Britain was responsible, but was merely indulging in the usual scapegoating that occurs whenever rotten, tyrannical regimes seek to explain to their people why living/political/economic conditions are so awful: it’s the Jews! It’s the Americans! No, wait, it’s the Jews and the Americans! And the British!

Thus, when I learned on Tuesday that a mob had stormed the UK Embassy in Tehran I assumed that the Mullahs had been whipping up yet another anti-British frenzy to cover their own wickedness and incompetence.

And yet, as I read commentary on the rampage, I discovered that this time the Masters of Iran might actually have genuine cause to be angry at Britain. Apparently, following the latest report from the UN stating what has been obvious to everyone for, oh, the last eight or nine years or so (that Iran is actively seeking nuclear weapons) the British government banned all Iranian banks from trading in London, which, according to people who understand economics better than I do, will have disastrous consequences for Iranian access to European markets.

Now that does sound annoying, especially as the Iranian economy is already a disaster area. Of course, there’s not much behind the threats of “serious consequences” that were made by the small bald man who purports to be Britain’s foreign secretary. But the real attack on Iran has already been launched.

What next? I don’t know, although I suspect that the system built by the Ayatollah Khomeini will totter on for a while, before it collapses in on itself, or perishes in fire and blood. Given that Iran is home to a truly ancient civilization, and was (probably) the birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster, who may have been the inventor of linear time, the idea of apocalypse and many other concepts common to Judaism, Christianity, Islam (and by extension much of mankind)… I kind of have high hopes for the place. Certainly the Iranians deserve much better leadership than is provided by the current crop of bearded obscurantists.

Meanwhile, I find myself struggling with a strange stirring in my breast. It’s not quite pride, but it’s definitely a sensation of surprise, possibly even pleasure. For some time now, the UK has been a world leader in meaningless gesture politics, particularly when it comes to environmentalism and the developing world. But this action on the Iranian banks, well it just might have actual consequences for that most pernicious of regimes. Certainly the Mullahs are peeved.

Rule Britannia! Hail (The Little) Satan!

Originally published @ RIA Novosti, the home of awesome

I recently took a press trip to Scotland, where I spent four nights in four different hotels. All four were delightful (Edinburgh’s The Balmoral, The Fairmont St Andrews, a Taymouth Estate cottage, and Edinburgh’s The George Hotel) and I recommend each of them highly with one caveat: stay more than one night. Or at least, if you stay a single evening, stay later than 9am the next day. In the attempt to see as much of England’s Canada (only sassy) as possible, my group was forced to ignore this simple guideline, with the result I discovered the one thing I do worse than packing is re-packing and in the process acquired a strange sympathy for the higher-end rock bands of the world (we’re talking at least Kings of Leon level).

Anyone who’s been on a press trip knows it’s essentially summer camp with alcohol: every day offers a full schedule of activities and you even have minders to make sure you don’t wander off (this is often a necessary task, particularly once the aforementioned alcohol makes an appearance). Typically you stay in one place your entire visit, with the result that when you arrive you unpack, then you happily go where people tell you to for a few days, then on the last night return to your room very late (like summer camp, you want to stay up and say goodbye to the other campers, plus now you can drink openly), pass out, wake up, realize you need to catch an airport shuttle in 10 minutes, stuff everything in your bag, and just barely make the flight back to a world where you are again responsible for amusing yourself.

Scotland was different because every day there was an early departure, meaning each day everything was crammed in the bag. This was fine (if wrinkly) on the first two days, but as the ratio of clean to dirty clothes shifted it became increasingly disgusting, creating the strange juxtaposition of me being at four- and five-star hotels — check out the links to the property websites and fill with envy — while hoping I was remembering to take clothes from the washed compartment of the suitcase, so that the concierge didn’t come up to me and say, “I just wanted to bring to your attention that you smell like a heavily used jockstrap left in a locker for an entire July weekend. You were aware of this already? Very good, sir.”

And I realized, “This must be what Angus Young goes through.” Because the AC/DC guitarist stays at very nice hotels for very brief amounts of time while touring and I have to believe there are nights he’s going to get the schoolboy outfit laundered and he’s about to call housekeeping but flips on the TV and Keeping Up With the Kardashians is on — disturbingly, everywhere I travel the Kardashians seem to be on; happily, they become more tolerable dubbed in German — and he thinks, “You know, the Kardashians have been leaving me behind recently” so he sits down and next thing he knows they’re loading up the bus and he thinks, “Eh, I’ll do laundry next tour stop” but at the next stop they’re showing 16 and Pregnant and he muses, “Well, I do enjoy the miracle of barely legal birth” so he sits down and before you know it there’s a filthy little Australian desperately trying to convince Ritz-Carlton security he’s not a homeless person by humming the opening riff to “Thunderstruck.”

But enough about the struggle to remain hygienic on the road. The trip was to celebrate the Year of Active Scotland, with the result the activities included landyachting with Blown Away Experiences, off-roading with Highland Safari, and riding zip lines/discovering heights are freaky even with a safety harness at Go Ape, but for me the two most memorable activities were golfing at Musselburgh and canoeing at Kenmore. I think this is because golf and canoeing have been two activities that, while never staples in my life, make regular appearances and inevitably conclude with me being embarrassed and/or wet.

I’ll start with Musselburgh. Scotland is the birthplace of golf — while others came up with the concept of whacking balls with sticks, the Scots said, “Let’s hit it in a hole”, because they are a frugal people and the thought of wasting all those freaking balls made them apoplectic — and Musselburgh is the world’s oldest golf course (a claim is also made by St Andrews). It has hosted multiple British Opens, though none since the turn of last century. It is surrounded by a very much in-use horse racing track and, sadly, while horse racing and golf do not occur simultaneously to provide golfers with the chance to drill jockeys, on the fourth hole you play over part of the track. To increase the sense of history, we used hickory sticks as golfers might have done a hundred years ago (there were only five clubs at that point, which definitely minimizes agonizing over which iron to use).

And within a single shot, I was reminded of something: golf is as addictive as meth, only more expensive and damaging to your mental health. Because golfing in Scotland is a completely different experience than golfing in the states. Here are three characteristics most courses I have played in the United States have shared:

1. They are dry.

2. They are relatively wind-free.

3. You don’t randomly have people walking their dogs across them.

Not the case in Scotland. With rain both so frequent and unpredictable, if you needed perfect dryness you’d never pick up a club. (The upside to that rainfall? You haven’t seen a true green until you’ve played on their grass.) And the wind is continuous (if also unpredictable), with the result my high-arcing drives inevitably went from “impressive” to “uh-oh.” And finally, due to right of way laws, people and their pets can walk the course, so that in addition to trying to adjust to playing with hickory instead of titanium and facing monsoons, before each swing I had to remind myself, “Let’s make sure we don’t kill any locals.”

And yet, as I adjusted my already shaky game to the new environment, I fell into my usual pattern: I play poorly, I play worse, I get frustrated, I play much worse, I get so frustrated I stop trying, I relax, I hit a good shot, I get excited and reengage, I revert to step one. Indeed, in this case my best shot was my first one, as without any warmup I was asked to start the group and, with my first swing, managed to reach the green (a modest accomplishment, but one I have often failed to match). I urge anyone who has any real interest in golf to play in Scotland at least once, if only so when you go back to your regular course you’ll have an excuse next time you shank one. (“That would have been perfect at St Andrews.”)

I have a similarly complicated relationship with canoeing. My grandparents used to live near a stream, then I was required to do it for the Boy Scouts, and once the entire office did it during my days as an editor at Maxim. (And yes, Boy Scouting did prepare me for that position, notably when I earned my Hoochie Mama merit badge.) Whatever the location, it generally ended the same way: with me comically falling in the water. Still, I enjoyed it, particularly the Maxim trip, when we all cleverly decided to drink as we canoed, with the result that our journey occasionally had to stop for members who were having a little trouble, in the sense they’d lost consciousness and tumbled into the water. I also went into the drink; humiliatingly, I did so while sober.

Hence I was apprehensive when our group went canoeing in the incredibly picturesque community of Kenmore on a trek organized by Wilderness Scotland. The rainy weather had resulted in a unexpectedly swift ride (something akin to whitewater canoeing), with the result that soon after starting our planned route had to be altered, in the sense we were supposed to go six miles but after six-tenths of a mile most of our canoes had flipped, leaving much of our group cold, wet, and, in one case, being violently smashed against the rocks. Miraculously, my canoe was not one of the capsized ones, as aided by a German writer with rafting experience we managed to make it to the shore. Upon landing we turned to see that members of the group were stranded on both sides of the river, in at least one case watching as their canoe hurtled on down the river without them.

We briefly considered continuing on, but our leader Biscuit — yes, we were led by a man called Biscuit; I should note he was the only Scot I encountered named after a carbohydrate — decided we should just call the trip a success, in the sense that all of us were alive. And so we wandered ashore to wait for the van and immediately stumbled upon one of the castles used to film the Judi Dench/Billy Connolly film Mrs. Brown and eventually the soaked group members were able to fortify themselves by putting on dry clothes and consuming whisky. (While still unsoaked myself, I also consumed whisky, because I am a team player.)

And enough rambling about childhood canoeing traumas and my struggles to remain clean on the road. Here are a few valuable lessons I acquired about Scotland:

1. One of the things most impressive about Scotland is the sheer number of castles — it’s a place where if you fall into a river, odds are good you’ll wash ashore by at least a country estate. Indeed, much of the country reminded me a bit of Munich, because they both boast so much architecture that seems like something out of Disney’s Enchanted Kingdom and their local residents have an insatiable need for sausage.

2. Apparently you’re not supposed to drink whisky neat, but instead add a “drop” of water to open the flavor. (Note: “Drop” is a vague enough term to suit your individual needs.) That said, if you reach the point you can barely taste it at all, you’ve drowned it, boyo, and you might as well switch to appletinis.

3. Yes, it is supposed to be spelled “whisky”; the “e” doesn’t enter the equation until you’ve traveled far enough west to reach Ireland.

4. I briefly visited Scotland once before over a decade ago. Having now been back, I can confirm what I said after that first stay: there are few, if any, things on this planet more inspiring than a drive along the Scottish coast.

5. The same gentleman who lectured me about the water drop in whisky also informed me that Scots will bust out the kilts and go commando for friends’ bachelor parties. So if it’s the middle of the night on the Las Vegas strip and you see a group of kilted Scotsmen approaching, do not give any kilts a playful flip unless that’s really something you want to see.

6. Have you ever been in Scotland and wound up at 3am watching Team America with a German writer who explains at great length why people’s eyes actually need more UV rays, so if you find yourself looking at the sun, you don’t need to turn away immediately? Because I have and wanted to see if this is just the sort of thing you can expect if you visit.

7. Related to this, did you know Germans use the sound “quack” both for ducks and frogs? That’s insane.

8. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I wish I could drink carbonated bubble gum,” I cannot recommend the soda Irn-Bru highly enough.

For more information on travel to Scotland (and many pretty pictures), visit www.conventionscotland.com.

Recently I travelled 3700 miles by car, from Massachusetts to Minnesota, then south to Missouri, and back again. Allowing for the time spent in Minneapolis, the journeyed portion of the trip was only six days. A little over 600 miles a day with many halts and a few wrong turns. It is a small accomplishment I understand, in this modern age, or in the larger scheme of things–even in my own life–but was done for reasons important to me. I had hoped for some perspective on what was to be, and was indeed, a great event, and found more than enough to please me.

All of it is territory I have travelled many times previously. Yet I had never before seen the sculpted hills of Wisconsin in October, when the crop has been cleared away and the greater care for the soil, achieved by those devoted farmers, is so splendidly naked to the eye beneath the delicate contour and weave of their machines.

Driving the snaked and narrow roads of West Virginia just ahead of a truck ladened with gypsum all in a rush was somewhat new to me. Any driver might know that sense of imminent demise even on the interstate highway. But caught in a twisting tunnel between trees and cliff, where repeatedly turning off to the side was of no help as another truck was quickly there again, or else I was soon caught at the rear of a logging truck making a laborious climb with a string of other drivers behind me. Frustration blinds. Thus I cannot say that West Virginia has added to my sense of proportions in life on this trip.

I have many times seen the corduroy fields of autumn-dried cornrows cut down to the nub by enormous combines, but never quite so vast as this, nor so exactly inscribed and angled against a thinned horizon pressed between ambers and amethyst–not just as I saw on old route 50 during my return over the surreal flatness of central Illinois.

The lines of perspective are drawn there for any to see. A golden section can be found by a simple turn or tilt of the head. That perfect ratio so common to the plains, so blatant, will draw the eye without effort.

The fierce and more vast beauties of the ocean are less appealing to me perhaps because all perspective there is so easily lost.

Horizons in Iowa are trimmed by the dark edging of trees, planted to resist still ungoverned winds, which become a far distant crack between earth and sky, with perspectives between eye and the infinite keyed by the isolated islands of farmhouse, silo and shade tree. But never before had I witnessed those house-sized harvest combines work their way in October against the standing armies of desiccated stalks like alien creatures in the crepuscular night, their eyes aglow, one after the other creeping steadily across the vastness of the plain–though it is all just a normal part an evening and of the ageless need of the farmer to beat time and the coming of wet weather.

It was good to see and be reminded of where my meals come from.

My knowledge of farming is akin to my knowledge of magic. It is as little as the land is large. How may such enormities of purpose be judged by such small personal prejudices. I love magic, and I love to eat.

And I was on my way to a wedding.

Though Minneapolis is at the heart of this land, my daughter has not married ‘a son of the middle border,’ but a townsman–from a Mississippi river town–a common heritage to her own. Those who work the soil of the land above the rivers are less than five percent of us, after all–and part of the afore mentioned magic. But the groom and his family are no less Mid-westerners and I was happy for the chance to travel to the celebration of their vows. More than happy, with half of my own family so deeply rooted there.

My daughter is also the child of her mother, and all of the heritage that follows there, of course, but what I found dear on this journey was that she had gone to that particular territory to marry where her father’s fathers had roamed and farmed and married and raised their own families, and died. Poor Irishmen, all, escaping a holocaust, and coming to find a future, which had now become my own past and a portion of her past. I might equally find some inspiration in the Mississippi itself, where one great grandfather was a pilot and steamboat captain, or in nearby Duluth, where another forefather captained a tugboat on Lake Superior. But this is just about her own father who is quite taken with the Great Plains and the perspectives of an earth so broad and deep that it bends to the eye alone.

And thus I had the opportunity to visit the cemetery in Keokuk where many of her father’s people are buried in the ‘middle Catholic’ section which is properly between the ‘old Catholic’ and the ‘New Catholic’ divisions, of course, and thereby be reminded of the marriages that have made me, and my daughter too.

But as much as I love the closeness and detail of river towns, I am more overawed by the prairie.

Though the weather was near perfect during the ten days, I have in the past witnessed the coming of summer storms there, and once stood with my children to watch the flash and grumble of a mountain of cloud grow where no mountain should be, the roiled ceiling illuminated with a dozen strikes at once from end to end until its mass at last swallowed our small part of the earth below in a black torrent of rain. By any comparison, storms in the east occur in a narrow spectrum divided and sectioned as much by trees and hills as by window frames.

And we have walked the leveled field of an ancient mountain where its ghost arose in a mountainous cloud to rest as a crown on mere heads of grass, unaware of weight or scale.

The careless speak of billions and trillions of this or that. To stand at the edge of mere hundreds and be overwhelmed by the immensity of it is more humbling to me even than to stand in the dark of night and stare into the stars. Those cold bits are remote and uncaring. But the soil at your hand has texture and the smell of flourishing, and it rises beneath your feet without moving–by deception–and then runs way as fast as the eye can see. The lands of the prairie are latitudinous, marked by longitudinal roads which disappear by merely stooping. The deafening silence of the stars alone are nothing against song of the cricket, and comforting sough of the wind.

This land was written upon before any relative of mine came by. Trailed by foot and pony, and before that by massive herds of buffalo. Those paths may still lie just beneath the straight lines of the surveyor’s grid followed now by roads between squared miles. Perhaps from the air one might see the palimpsest of ancient ways where fields have been left fallow by unsettled probates or poor stewardship.

Nearer the great river, the land tumbles, with muscles bared. The graves of my father and father’s people rise within sight of the prairie, but the place is so hedged by oaks and beech that it could be anywhere east of there. True, the gray teeth of the tombstones are at least irregular–a modest acceptance of the differences of those beneath. But their resting place is not awesome. It lacks perspective, I thought.

Within moments I am away again to the more generous splay of fields, not empty, but full in fact, where stars may be found at night to fall, or to be fallen.

Like many children of the Cold War, I grew up anxious about Nuclear Armageddon, so when Gorbachev eased relations between the USSR and the West I was grateful. For many years I viewed him as a hero, pure and simple. It was not until I moved to Russia that I realized his reforms had been intended to strengthen the USSR, not destroy it.

Oops.

Gorbachev had a rough ride in his homeland in the 1990s, where he was almost universally despised. These days he appears to have settled into the role of Russia’s Jimmy Carter: well- meaning, not quite forgiven, but no threat. He may criticize the government, but that won’t stop Putin from inviting him to the Kremlin for tea. And like many former heads of state, Gorbachev roams the globe, talking to groups of strangers for ca$h.

Everybody needs to make a living, and at least Gorbachev is sincere. I think he is anyway. I don’t know anyone who’s heard him talk, although in the late 90s my brother bumped into him in the men’s room in the student bar at King’s College, Cambridge. “He’s a little guy,” my brother reported.

This Monday, Gorbachev was in Juarez, Mexico, as one of the keynote speakers at “Juárez Competitiva,” a two-week event intended to stress the work of international manufacturers based in the city and not the torture, kidnapping, beheading and copious killing that occurs on a daily basis.

Of course, Russia went through a period of extreme lawlessness in the 90s, and like Mexico, suffers from rampant corruption. Nor are Russians any strangers to terrorist atrocities, thanks to the unstable situation in the Caucasus. On the surface then, Gorbachev was a good choice: he could draw interesting parallels and perhaps offer some advice.

Except… well, according to the El Paso Times he spoke mostly about his own achievements as head of the USSR, and said little about Mexico. However the Times also reports that:

“…Gorbachev offered words of encouragement that resonated with the audience. ‘I wish you optimism because your goals are so big that they will require an enormous effort,’ he said. ‘The role of young people will be decisive in the national struggle to destroy the challenges you face. Do not despair or panic.’”

After that, an audience member asked how to deal with corruption. Truth be told, Gorbachev probably isn’t the guy to ask. He completely fumbled his own anti-corruption drive in the USSR. He fired Dinmukhamed Konayev, head of the Kazakh Communist Party and replaced him with an ethnic Russian who had never worked in Kazakhstan. Riots ensued. In Turkmenistan, he replaced Mukhamednazar Gapurov with Saparmurat Niyazov, who subsequently mutated into Turkmenbashi, one of the most demented dictators in recent history. Not much of a judge of character, our Gorbachev.

But I digress.

Anyway, Gorbachev’s solution to the corruption problem was startlingly simple:

“I think everything will depend on the type of leader we elect and on replacing a lot of people.”

True, true, except that it isn’t. In Mexico, if the wrong guy gets elected, the cartels will kill him, his family and set fire to his Chihuahua, just for good measure. In Russia, people have been complaining about corruption for centuries and holding elections has done nothing to solve the problem. And thus I wonder: did Gorbachev really believe what he said, or did he just feel obliged to say something upbeat?

Well, I’ve been to Russia and I’ve been to Juarez. And I can tell you that during the single day I spent in Juarez, I experienced more fear than I ever did in ten years in Russia. When you’re up against an army that kidnaps civilians, a dysfunctional government riddled with crooks and butchers, and criminals who execute school kids and clergymen for kicks, well, your vote isn’t worth a damn.

On the other hand, if, like Putin in Chechnya you “waste them in the outhouse,” and then co-opt one side to fight as your proxy against the other, well you might get somewhere. Corruption and violence will continue, but at more manageable levels. The Mexican government is not capable of this, so the drug war will continue until one side triumphs over the other, or the cartels grow tired of fighting and settle on a truce of some sort. The government will either collude with them or stand helpless on the sidelines. Innocent people will continue to die.

Can you imagine Gorbachev saying something like that? Me neither. Never mind, his audience went home satisfied. Here’s the El Paso Times again:

Alberto Becerra, president of Juárez’s Rotary Club, said that it was inspiring to meet a world leader who helped bring positive changes to the global landscape.

“Despite the fact that he doesn’t know many things about our country, he knows that what we need is optimism and a strong desire to change things,” he said. “It is timely to come and inject us with optimism.”

Some people like drinks, others love heroin. Still others choose optimism: whatever helps you make it through the night, my friend.

Originally published @ RIA- Novosti, home of awesomeness. And check this out while you’re at it.

10. Speculating how far it was to India

9. Having a three-way race, with the Pinta taking the lead

8. Passing around suggestive drawings of Queen Isabella

7. Polishing the mizzenmast

6. Buffing the plank

5. Waxing the harpoon

4. Oiling the cannon

3. Wondering if they’d get Columbus Day off

2. Holding their weekly ‘couples only’ dance

1. Sudoku! Sudoku! Sudoku!
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.