By Eric Valentine
When choosing the lesser of two evils, keep in mind you are still choosing evil.
It’s time for our five-year sociopolitical self-check—the colonoscopy of how you vote, why you vote that way and, more importantly, why the heck you let others see or know anything about that intentionally secret process. It gets messy in there!
The litmus test for this political science issue this year is the Russia-Ukraine War, brought to you for free by every news organization on the planet, including Wood River Weekly. It pits judo master and bareback, bare-chest equestrian Vladmir Putin against Hunter Biden … wait, no … some politician whose name we can’t pronounce … I mean … some Ukrainian actor-comedian turned politician. Wait, aren’t all politicians actor-comedians in a way?
So I contact my dear friend Anna Y, whose family defected from the Soviet Union when she was 14. She grew up in the Ukraine, but not speaking Ukrainian. She spoke Russian. I asked her whose team she’s on now. Her answer? “Eric, I’m first and last a Jew.”
OK, so back to political science …
Meanwhile, as I satire, Ukrainians are quickly dying—or becoming Russian slowly—and Russians are gearing up for 15 years in prison thanks to having a conscience and protesting this unnecessary, immoral war. I can say that this war is unnecessary and immoral because all wars are unnecessary and immoral. Yep, you read me right, but don’t be upset with me; it’s not my or a new idea.
So, whose side you take in this Super Blow Up depends on the narrative you follow. But all narratives “beg the question”—that means they assume something that isn’t necessarily true, or even relevant, yet develop an argument or line of reasoning that relies on that assumption to work. It’s like a polyp—something extra that isn’t dangerous, unless it turns into cancer of course.
Putin’s narrative is a Cold War plotline—one that recalls the millions of Russian lives lost thanks to Nazi incursion. And, it’s a territorial timeline that understands Russia as an ever-expanding, ever-contracting geography protecting Western civilization from Mongol invasion, Muslim terrorism, and Western civilization itself.
For Volodymyr Zelenskyy (I promise that’s how you spell the name), the narrative is a cultural one wherein he plays far more than the starring role. Like a tinier Hugh Jackman, he did the same sort of rom-com stuff. And like a more-Baltic Tyler Perry, he was the media mogul who actually ran the show. Zelenskyy is not Ronald Reagan the B-movie actor, he is Ronald Reagan the 40th President of the United States—part puppet perhaps, part patriot too.
To the Russian military, Zelenskyy said, “And when you will be attacking us, you will see our faces, not our backs.” To the Russian people he talked about a region in Russia he is accused of wanting to bomb. He asked what should he bomb, the parks where he grew up, the pubs where he spoke Russian?
And therein lies the rub, an “irony curtain” if you will. Zelenskyy, a Jew whose grandfather lost a father and three siblings in the Holocaust, is like Anna Y, both a product of being Russian and not being Russian.
So, although my Facebook profile won’t be flying the blue and gold flag of Ukraine—the country that according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in 2021, the second most corrupt in Europe, ahead of Russia—I do condemn Russian aggression and offer one idea for sanctions: For all people publicly praising the Ukrainian resistance and the heroics of Ukraine’s president to go to the voting booths of 2022 through 2024 and remember two things:
- Ukraine is the country Donald Trump threatened to withhold military funding from unless it could produce corruption information about Hunter Biden.
- President Zelenskyy is the Ukrainian leader whom Trump threatened to produce that information—information that has still never emerged.
Finally, a pandemic we can all agree upon: one that mandates we take a mask off, even if we have a red cap on.