Today I woke up to news that we’ve gone back in time to the twentieth century. I guess I thought the era of naked aggression aimed at amassing land and treasure was over. At least in what we euphemistically call “the west” or “first world” or whatever it is people say when they mean socially and economically modern.
What’s going on in Ukraine feels anachronistic, an act of belligerence out of time. A cry for relevance. A yearning for a time when military might, deployed to subjugate comparatively weak enemies was used to brandish bravado and signal to the world that a country was relevant. That others were in its sphere, kowtowed to their whims. It’s plain pathetic. Desperate is another word that comes to mind.
But it’s not that simple is it? Putin’s ego and deep-seated fear of permanent irrelevance isn’t the only story. There are millions of people on the losing end of this gambit. Over the next days, weeks, months, however long this goes on, they will be the extras in our televised experience of this belligerence. We’ll watch it all the same way we experience war movies and thrillers – rooting for the good (us, whatever that means to you), cursing the bad (Putin), and expressing utter indifference to the people for which this thing is real. Real bombs, real guns, real tanks in the street, real people dying, real people suffering, real people hiding in fear, real people separated from family, real people who only want to live their lives and have a chance at some semblance of fulfillment wherever they can find it.
We should never lose sight of what’s really at stake when we experience these stories unfolding a world away. It’s sad but poetic in a way. It’s similar to the way morons will say the quiet part of a nefarious ploy out loud. The Republican Party, for one, is famous for those kinds of slips, though their constituency chooses not to notice. Real power is vested in the threat of force without having to use it in overt ways. I thought we were in an era of soft power. Morons who are stuck in the past haven’t gotten that memo.
In junior high or maybe late elementary school, when boys are still in early stages of adult development, physical toughness and strength is a source of coolness. It manifests in performance signaling to the rest of the class that they are leaders, desirous objects in the delicate social hierarchy. As they grow, physical toughness gets supplanted by mental acuity, prevailing notions of beauty, adherence to leading edge notions of cool from mostly underground sources. It’s why the trope of the bully who peaks early and gets left behind in some dead end town is so prevalent in our national lore.
The same cycle of evolution, I thought, was guiding modern international affairs, but I neglected to fully appreciate how Putin thinks like a child. The Soviet Union was a prized toy, and I guess he thinks the collective west took it away from him, so now he’s hell-bent on getting it back. He’s the child we all left behind in that dead end place when we stopped thinking about strength and belligerence as virtues, and started focusing on more important things. He needs to be the tough guy again. It’s the only role he knows how to play. Meanwhile, most of the nation he presides over has remained relatively poor while Putin’s juvenile-macho cronies have mined the country’s wealth and parked that money overseas in luxury goods and services. The ultimate child’s dream – everything and more.
GLAZ 