Sponsored by the Chicago Humanities Festival, "Conversation with Maddow" got through to me in a big way. I had thought there were few consequences that could affect me now -- except maybe canceling Social Security and Medicare. If the piped gas is shut off in Valier, I might not be able to survive. If they shut off the electricity (and for all I know it is generated as much by gas as by wind though we have forests of wind turbines) I will no longer have use of this computer and therefore access to the Internet, but I can get by, simply by sleeping when it is dark, reading and writing when it's daylight. But without gas heat, which is much cheaper and more dependable than electricity here, I will not be able to stay in winter. I could use wood for a while. Maybe some resourceful person could reopen the pockets of coal that were used historically.
I happened to watch this show, not because I was looking for it, but because the childish Repubs have shut down the hearings I had expected to watch. As it turns out, the Maddow talk was far more valuable and specific to my life. Here's the link.
Maddow is wired like me, in that when she begins to wonder about something, she does research which results in writing. So when she began to wonder what motivates so virulently the politics of Russia and that little modern Mongol jack o'lantern, Putin, she used her expertise in statistics (which I do not have) to look at the geographical area of Russia, post-USSR, their economy and their population. What she discovered needs to be separated out, but it is not complex.
The area is huge and the weather is severe, so the country has some of the same difficulties as Montana and the other Plains states of the North American continent. But the population is various, more attached to region and independent culture than to the Russian nexus, in some places (like vast Siberia) more like China than Russia. More importantly, the people are not educated or experienced in a modern way and the infrastructure for the internet is not there, even if the leadership were not afraid of it. The industrial revolution depends upon railroads, like the early American West, but without the waterway through the land that was provided by the Mississippi drainage complex when the glaciers melted.
The economy has based almost entirely on oil and gas, which the land has in abundance. Putin is after the "Middle East", not their oil and gas which is abundant (https://www.geoexpro.com/articles/2010/07/why-so-much-oil-in-the-middle-east), but because there is enormous expertise there about how to extract and refine them. Much of this technological know-how came from the US and some from Alberta -- wherever Texans go. The article linked is an explanation of why there is so much oil in the Middle East which is a good grounding in time and place. The causes go back to Gondwana and the Tethys Sea, ur-geological forces.
All along I've been talking about the value of discrepancy: a plus on one side and a minus on the other, underlying trade of resource for money, which creates political forces. First, Russia has a population way bigger than its economy which is much smaller than the economies of individual European nations. Second, it has a limited set of resources, mostly just oil and gas. (Nothing I've read so far has discussed Ukraine in terms of it being a breadbasket, which was what Stalin considered a resource so valuable that he starved the peasants to death in order to capture the wheat.)
Putin, in his horseback belligerence, knows that in order to get his oil and gas out of the ground, he will have to capture European and American expertise. He has weaponized his resources by letting Europe become dependent on his pipelines and by owning the Russian industry through Russian mobbed-up oligarchs. America knows this and uses sanctions to control Russia. Thus Putin reaches out to the US mafia, in which Trump has been embedded since birth to a mafia family, to get control of the politics that motivates those sanctions. Much of it is humanitarian, alien to Mafia thinking. Alternatively, Putin is trying to extract oil and gas from the Arctic Sea and other sources, but can't do it -- can't get the stuff out of the ground -- without Western equipment and talent.
The American mafia has not had much to do with resource development except for building Manhattan out of steel and cement, which have their own complexities. They are quick to learn the psychological machinations of the Russian mob, such as controlling fear, rage, and dependence of enemies. Elections were easy-peasy.
Europe is really a kind of geological extrusion of Eurasia, broken by inland seas, isthmuses, islands, and peninsulas. Their various eco-cultures grew into nations that --between trade, war, and competition among thrones -- formed the Western world. Then, when they managed through Empire to control enormous sources of wealth, they had the critical mass for technological and scientific development that spread through that empire. The humanities sort of got dragged along in the wake of development. Eastern Siberia and Western China have rich local cultures, but have not been participants in the planetary story.
So what Rachel with her clear mind and ability to look at these issues from a new angle has given us is a suggestion about where to go from here. For me, it's a doubling back. In 1956 I was taking social studies in Jefferson High School in Portland, OR, from Carlie Gilstrap. Google brings up references to a remarkable woman from a remarkable family. Here's a link to one anecdote. https://books.google.com/books?id=CFFsINatr64C&pg=PA252&lpg=PA252&dq=%22Carlie+Gilstrap%22&source=bl&ots=9C1w7d_QaD&sig=ACfU3U1qxYy5wMGrrK1K-yVno5IMzpdx0A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwihw8SEtbXlAhWLtp4KHUWoDJoQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Carlie%20Gilstrap%22&f=false
Gilstrap had us all deeply involved in the fate of Hungary. ee cummings was not there, but his poem hit us dead on. It's still relevant.
Thanksgiving, (1945)
a monstering horror swallows
this unworld me by you
as the god of our fathers' father bows
to a which that walks like a who
but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy
announces night & day
"all poor little peoples that want to be free
just trust in the u s a"
suddenly uprose hungary
and she gave a terrible cry
"no slave's unlife shall murder me
for i will freely die"
she cried so high thermopylae
heard her and marathon
and all prehuman history
and finally The UN
"be quiet little hungary
and do as you are bid
a good kind bear is angary
we fear for the quo pro quid"
uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps "i'm busy right now"
so rah-rah-rah democracy
let's all be as thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)
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