Dog days
Biden's inner circle increasingly under the lens in the U.S., Orban's unilateral "diplomacy" trips to Kyiv and then Moscow, elections in the UK and France. And some football, of course.
This year I failed to plan any kind of summer activities for my now teenagers, which is, in the grand scheme of things fine. One is old enough to plan his own summer, the middle child is desperate to earn some money (a good thing) and is working on figuring that out, and the youngest…well, it occurred to me on Friday morning that an emergency trip to a fabulous local art supply store was in order. A rather painful investment in some high-quality watercolours, paints, and paper, and I have been able to get her off her screens for several hours a day creating these wonderful bursts of joy which I plan to hang up all over the apartment. As one does. The fruit in particular seemed just perfect for this early July period, a time when even the most workaholic Americans stop working for more than a few days. Emails go unanswered for days at a time. A wonderful thing. This is commonplace in Europe throughout most of the summer, when working is the exception rather than the norm as soon as the thermometer shows anything above 30C. My dad landed back in Arizona this week to 113F and sent me a photo of an enormous pick-up truck covered in gigantic flagpoles stuck around the vehicle, Trump, USA, etc., with a giant flag covering the back of the truck saying simply “FUCK BIDEN” and then in fine print, “and fuck you for voting for him too”. It felt like a metaphor for just about everything at the moment. And as someone who has been living in Europe for too long, my first thought was not the politics of it at all, but rather how the traffic police let the guy drive around with six feet of flag poles attached to his car. And then I remembered. In the American west, traffic stops are almost as rare as snow falling in the desert.
This week it has been quiet in my phone in the sense that I do not have more grocery cards to distribute and I am receiving some but not a huge amount of requests. I suspect this summer period means many are going back to Ukraine for a few weeks to visit loved ones and do things like fill their cavities for cheaper. So I have had more time to ponder the larger questions, which seem to loom out there in a surreal way, not directly impacting (yet) our daily lives, and yet you go online, and the drama takes on a life of its own. I thought it would be useful to simply highlight what I have been reading and listening to in order to better inform myself.
This podcast interview with Julia Ioffe by Puck is a good overview of how the rest of the world is watching the mess unfold in the White House.
If you haven’t seen it already, do read this profile piece by veteran journalist Olivia Nuzzi who in her own words often works for months on a single story. This piece caused quite the uproar inside team Biden. But I think it is important, because if something is so obvious to even the most ordinary observer, it is an insult to our collective intelligence to pretend one can just wish it away.
The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden
Then there is this opinion piece which CNN just published, written by David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama.
Opinion: Biden’s Defiant Delusion
I haven’t watched it myself, but Biden did a sit-down interview in an attempt to make up for the now infamous debate. One thing became very clear in the tidbits I did see. This race is person for him. And yet, it should be about the country. That means acknowledging that for the good of the country you need to step down and let someone younger run who has a better chance of running against Trump. If you care about Democratic politics and the country. Also if you care about your own legacy, you would think you could be convinced to step aside now rather than after defeat in November. The ironic thing in all of this is we have a convicted felon running for president and that isn’t making the headlines at all as long as the sitting president does not change his mind about running for a second term in his 80s. In short — what a clusterfuck.
And yet, maybe ordinary Americans will see the country was actually being governed by people whose names are not known to us all, and that very little changes in their day-to-day based on the senility of the person holding the highest office. Maybe. In the Puck podcast, Julia mentions Jake Sullivan and the oversized role he is playing as NSA especially on all things foreign affairs. Which means, as I interpreted her comments, that America’s Ukraine policy is essentially being determined by text message between an unelected official and Zelensky’s inner circle. Which is…not exactly massively comforting, to be honest.
In short, this is a tweet I would not have expected a month ago, and yet, here we are.
And then there is Europe. France is voting for the second time today. Too early to share any results here. The UK just elected a Labour government, kicking out the Tories after many years. The rich are upset the new left-leaning government wants to introduce VAT tax on private school bills. But in general, it is hard to see how the country could be governed worse than what the Conservatives did over the past decade. Never say never, I know. As one friend living in France observed, it is interesting that while the continent lurches to the right, and quite dramatically, the UK is doing exactly the opposite. Perhaps this is all a result of the disaster that was Brexit. Let’s see what a modern leftist government can do to change what has become a hugely unequal society in the UK.
Here in Central Europe, all eyes have been on Hungary’s Orban, who took it upon himself (Hungary recently took over the six-month rotating presidency of the EU) to unilaterally travel to Kyiv and then Moscow, without any EU or NATO mandate to do so. He is widely viewed as a Putin operative within Europe, which raises very important questions about what he shared in Moscow and what he will come back with. In short, like a drop of oil in water, Orban is a big problem for the EU and he is not going anywhere. Some very good, detailed commentary on Orban’s trip to Moscow following an interview he gave on the flight out of Russia here.
I would agree. I imagine he loves being the useful idiot because he sees his mission as a disruptor of all things EU and western and his own personal values align much more with war criminal Putin than the policymakers in Brussels. So, that is, in short, a problem the EU has yet to come up with a solution for. Due to the nature of the alliance, one small, arguably irrelevant country can create big headaches when not everyone is on the same page. And here we are.
Meanwhile, it is as if the news out of Ukraine has gone silent. Continued attacks on Ukraine by Russia, innocent civilians killed. Ukraine continues to hit targets inside Russia, things blow themselves up. I came across this Meduza translation of what I think is an important story about a Ukrainian journalist who is no longer allowed to report from the front. Ukraine’s own censorship of what is allowed to be told out of wartime Ukraine is itself an under-reported story, I suppose for obvious reasons.
I still have the occasional conversation with Ukrainians who arrived recently or travel back and forth, and the gist of many, when I ask about the mood at home, or how everyone is coming, beyond the complaints about electricity being cut for hours a day, is something along the lines of “you cannot believe what is going on” referring to what I imagine to be a sort of every man and woman for him/herself to survive this period of war. Clearly hinting towards corruption without specifics. An eye roll. And when you ask, when will it all end? No one can give you an answer. That is the part that worries me the most. Will a war next door become our new normal? Will we just accept it? I suppose, yes.
And then this pops in my inbox. And you realise it is a lot more than just newspaper headlines. These are ordinary Ukrainians lives forever altered by the horrors of a war waged by a neighbour controlled by a tyrant who does not care how many innocent people, of any nationality, die. How we got to the point of letting one human being have so much power over millions of others is something I will never understand. You would think in the modern age we would have come up with a better means of dealing with autocratic bullies. And yet…
If you would like to help support our efforts at Cards for Ukraine, the best way to do so is to please make a donation via our website. We are a zero overhead project. Mario and I are 100% volunteers, so each €50 you donate goes directly into €50 of groceries in the form of a gift card sent to a Ukrainian family in need. I recently spoke with a mom of three who waited patiently for her Hofer card to arrive by mail after signing up on our website, thinking it would never be her turn. She told me it arrived at a moment of great financial stress, and was really such a pleasant surprise. €50 these days does not buy much, but it is a tiny cushion or bridge for people who often arrive with zero safety net. Those who quickly accept their new reality, search for jobs and affordable housing, they move on. But many, perhaps often for psychological reasons, do not move so quickly. They are frozen in a cycle of trying to survive on the bare minimum the Austrian government provides to Ukrainians here under EU “temporary protection” who ask for financial support and are then by default prohibited from working full-time while on that support. And just like any economist will tell us, long-term unemployment has its own issues. It becomes a cycle. So whether it is newly arrived families or those here already for a while and struggling to figure it all out, we continue to help in this little way for as long as we can. That depends on all of you.
Thank you.
For those of you in North American not really following the “football” over here: it is down to four teams — France, Spain, England and the Netherlands. Turkey lost last night to the Netherlands in the quarter finals amid scandals over its fans using something I had never heard of before, they call it a “wolf” sign and it is banned in Austria as a fascist symbol. More on that controversy here.