All Englishmen in the eighteenth century were known throughout the Western world for their insubordination, their insolence, their stubborn unwillingness to be governed. Any reputation the North American colonists had for their unruliness and contempt for authority came principally from their Englishness. —Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Greetings from the far left coast.
A friend asked if I am in any book groups. She is in several and says the best thing about them is that she ends up reading good books she would not have read otherwise. It is a fair point and I get it, but my experience has been different.
I replied that I may have been in a book group once briefly long ago. It didn’t take. There were always too many books I wanted to be reading other than what the group was reading. There will never be time to read everything that I come across on my own or have recommended by friends familiar with my interests. I fear I may have come off like a genuine pseudo-intellectual when I followed up with a list of books in the stack I am presently reading.
Cinema Department. Amanda (2018). Directed by Mikhaël Hers. With Vincent Lacoste, Isaure Multrier, and Stacy Martin.
I checked out Amanda because Lacoste was good in Victoria with Virginie Efira, reviewed in the June 1 newsletter. It turns out the film also has Stacy Martin, who plays a young actress Jean-Luc Godard falls in love with and marries in Godard Mon Amour (2017), with Louis Garrel as Godard.
David (Lacoste) is an easy-going young fellow of no particular ambition. He has a job managing an apartment building and works part-time trimming trees in Paris parks. David is very close to his sister, an English teacher, and his seven-year-old niece Amanda (Multrier). Amanda's father was a fling and not part of the picture. There is also a budding love interest with a young woman (Martin) who moves into the apartment building David manages.
Their lives are upended when the sister is killed and the young woman and another friend are seriously wounded in a terrorist attack. Devastated by the loss of his sister, David finds himself having to make decisions affecting his equally devastated niece, first of all in the matter of who might serve as her guardian. The only relatives are David, terrified by the prospect of raising a young girl, his aunt, and his mother in London, who has never met her granddaughter and whom David barely remembers, his parents having split up when he was young, he and his sister raised by their father, now deceased.
The segment with the terrorist attack is handled with restraint rare in contemporary film, showing enough to be intensely emotional and dramatic without any gratuitous fixation on blood and gore. So are the difficulties David and Amanda experience getting on with life. Amanda is an moving, deeply resonant film, well done in every respect. It would be easy to cast it as a feel-good movie, but there is far more to it than that.
Running department. Saturday's run went so well I posted a note on Facebook informing friends that my cranky knee continues to trend in the right direction. It was a nice seven-mile run south on 34th from Washington to Clinton, across railroad tracks at 13th Pl & Gideon overpass, along the path by the tracks down to the river at Portland Opera for a little music to pick up the run, across the Willamette at Tilikum Bridge, north along the waterfront to Hawthorne Bridge, and home. One of those runs where I felt a little melancholy at the end because it was already over.
On Monday I discovered that I had written in precipitous haste when the knee exhibited a bad attitude almost from the start. The better part of valor was to break off the planned four-mile run just shy of a mile and a half. That was disappointing. Things looked up again on Wednesday when I made it through the customary four miles. The knee was so-so, better than Monday, not as good as Saturday but good enough. I was grateful for that. We will see what happens tomorrow when I hope to run the same route as last Saturday.
The mysterious case of the vanishing Secret Service texts. The head of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General informed the heads of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees that Secret Service text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, have vanished. DHS reportedly claims the texts were erased as part of a device-replacement program (Maria Sacchettian, Carol D. Leonnig, Secret Service erased texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021 official says, Washington Post, July 14, 2022). January 5. January 6. Two very special days. Poof. Gone. Into the aether. Quelle coïncidence, as the French say. Bien sûr. Kind of makes one wonder if there was anything about what happened in the car when the Secret Service agent refused to allow Trump to join his mob at the Capitol. And much else.
In the May 15 newsletter I cited an report from Ukraine by Tim Judah. "The legacy of this war," he wrote, "is that millions of Ukrainians now hate Russia and Russians with a passion that, for many, was not so strong even after the annexation of Crimea and the creation of the two pseudo-states in Luhansk and Donetsk by Russia in 2014" (The Russian Terror, The New York Review, May 26, 2022).
This sentiment is echoed in an article at The Atlantic by Ukrainian journalist Veronika Melkozerova, The title says it all: The Hate I Feel (July 12, 2022). A woman named Natalya got in touch with Melkozerova after reading some of her stories about evacuees from Mariupol They met in Kyiv.
The prior few weeks had been a catalog of horrors for Natalya. Her hometown had been subject to unending bombing; her apartment had been destroyed by shelling; her 21-year-old son had, much like 1 million other Ukrainians, been forcibly taken to Russia; her elderly mother was caught in territory occupied by Russia and its proxies; she’d watched as her friends and neighbors either died from starvation, dehydration, or the brutal cold, or were shot and killed by Russian snipers.
Natalya was accompanied by her husband and stepdaughter. Despite the specter of Mariupol, they were calm and happy, in some ways ordinary tourists, particularly keen to see a tourist attraction called the Glass Bridge. On their way they passed an exhibition of destroyed Russian tanks and other vehicles that had been commandeered by Ukrainian forces when the attack on Kyiv was turned back.
Natalya froze for a moment. Then she rummaged through her handbag, took out her lipstick, and rushed to the nearest vehicle, a mobile missile launcher. Burn, Russia, as you’ve burnt my Mariupol, she wrote in red.
No one, including me, tried to stop her.
Melkozerova puts Natalya's act in broader context:
For the past several months, since Russian forces launched their latest invasion of Ukraine, we have tried to stay humane, to be better than our enemy. All of us at Mykhailivska Square that day knew that it was wrong to wish for an entire country to burn. But Natalya’s words spoke for us. We cannot stay the perfect victim—liberal, forgiving, kind. Secretly, we yearn for revenge. Well, perhaps not so secretly now.
Each day brings fresh reports of Russian attacks on civilian targets, often in towns and areas where there is no fighting, where there is no Ukrainian military presence. This is, as Anne Applebaum writes, a terrorist intimidation campaign (Russia’s War Against Ukraine Has Turned Into Terrorism, The Atlantic, July 13, 2022).
On the night of July 1 Russian bombers struck three targets in Serhiivka. The bombs hit a nine-story apartment building, a recreational center, and a boarding house. Applebaum was told by a prosecutor collecting evidence of war crimes that there are no military objects in Serhiivka. The nearest military installation is five kilometers away. "Even if Serhiivka had any strategic assets," writes Applebaum, "the use of an imprecise Kh-22 missile [an anti-ship missile produced in the 1960s, designed to hit warships] on a residential area would have constituted a war crime, a deliberate attack on civilians."
Jonathan V. Last addresses implications actions of this kind have for the prospect of bringing an end to the war. He reports that Antony Blinken said in a statement on Wednesday that Russia has deported 900,000 to 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens in a systemic "filtration" operation, many to isolated regions in Russia's far east. Russian forces have taken thousands of children from Ukrainian orphanages and placed them up for adoption in Russia.
“Forced deportation” and “filtration” are euphemisms for industrial-scale kidnapping and ethnic cleansing. I will leave it to others to debate how close to the line of genocide this is. (There Can Be No Negotiated Settlement, The Bulwark, July 15, 2022)
Russia's conduct of the war makes a negotiated settlement that allows Putin a partial victory with Russia retaining control of Ukrainian territory impossible from Ukraine's perspective.
No country could swallow that after what the Russians have done to them.
This is not a moral argument. This is not a question about should. It is realpolitik. And understanding this reality is central to planning what the West should be doing with Ukraine right now—and preparing to do next.
The West has two options. Continue supporting Ukraine despite high energy and food prices, or pull back and leave Ukraine to fight Russia on its own.
This is not a choice that can be incentivized. It is a fact. And Western diplomacy ought to recognize it as such, much as we recognize that Vladimir Putin cannot be incentivized.
Which means that the only thing the West should be focusing on is victory.
The Jacobin published a discussion on the realist school of international relations in the form of an interview with Daniel Bessner, Joff Hanauer Honors Associate Professor in Western Civilization in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and contributing editor at Jacobin. I pass this along without further comment for anyone who might find the topic of interest.
New blog post: Further Adventures with the January 6 Committee. July 14, 2022. Tuesday's public hearing conducted by the January 6 committee brought no bombshell revelations, just the ongoing, steady accretion of testimony and evidence that is being woven into a coherent and convincing narrative… read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: View from the deck, evening, July 9, 2022
