Stalin in Lipstick

Sarah Palin's folksiness is viewed by right-wing demagogues as being somehow natural, down-home and in touch with "Joe Six-Pack." Leaving aside this shameless exhibition of cheap populism and the unproven connection between how folksy you are and how qualified you are to be Vice-President of the United States (and quite possibly President), there is a sharper edge to the Palin persona than most observers will allow.

For every attempt to construct yourself as a small-town hockey mom involves the Othering of something else, in this case the vague image of the East Coast liberal elite. This is an old trope in American politics, as old as John Adams being portrayed as an aloof British royalist in contrast with Jefferson as the farmer. We need to look no further than the Folkster-in-Chief himself, George W. Bush, playing this game against the wind-surfing, French-loving, swiss cheese-eating John Kerry, who never stood a chance.

But the situation is fundamentally different four years later. Bush and Kerry were essentially the same: both patrician politicians from New England who went to Yale. Bush, scion of an American political dynasty, was cynically and hypocritically deploying a discourse of simplicity that Karl Rove had taught him. Palin, by contrast, is the Real Thing. She really does come from a small town, and one as peripheral to the nation's centres of power (Washington and New York) as you can possibly get. She really wants to bring some "Wasilla Main Street" spirit to the cocktail-party crowd, gosh darn it.

Here's where the Republican Party's ideology comes out from underneath all the political games and rears its ugly, ugly head. Rudy Giuliani's deplorable RNC speech included this remarkable statement: "I'm sorry -- I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough." The use of the word cosmopolitan reveals, at long last, the Other the Republicans are attacking. It has both a cultural aspect (multiculturalism and the valuation of difference) and a spatial aspect (small towns vs. big cities), and I would go so far as to say that it's the organising principle of the Republican vision of America.

What does this sound like? Surprisingly, another set of ideologues constructed "cosmopolitanism" as their main enemy a long time ago...they were the Leninist-Stalinists. Consider this call to action from a 1949 article by one F. Chernov: "Bourgeois cosmopolitanism is chiefly aimed against patriotism. Therefore the goal of further education, development and cultivation of Soviet patriotism demands a resolute struggle against cosmopolitanism and absolute victory over such disgraceful vestiges of bourgeois ideology as cringing and servility towards the capitalist West." Anyone who lived in the Soviet bloc is familiar with this language, which did the same rhetorical work as the Giuliani-Palin discourse. The "rootless" big-city bourgeois interests (which often included familiar Others like the Jews) were pitted against the Soviet village full of patriotic peasants. Of course Soviet policies, which destroyed the Russian peasantry, were no better for the village than the Republicans' big business-friendly policies are for "Main Street." But that was never the point. The Soviet and Republican ideologies are not mere abstractions; both Palin and Stalin (who also hailed from a small town at the outskirts of the Russian Empire, in this case Georgia) believe every doggone word they say.

The attack on cosmopolitanism is at the heart of any attempt to build the kind of ignorant patriotism that allows a small band of poorly educated, mediocre bureaucrats to enslave a great nation and its people. This is what Stalin did, and this is what the Republicans are doing. What comes out of big cities and universities (freedom of expression in culture and the arts, intelligent political criticism) always threatens this project. This is why "Professor Obama" can't be President. The only acceptable leadership figures are truly mediocre bureaucrats like the mayor of Wasilla who not only exhibit but celebrate their mediocrity.
Stalin was a man of extremely limited intellectual capacity and brutish cultural taste. One need only compare the kind of literature he promoted, which came to be known as "Soviet realism," with Sarah Palin saying that her favourite author is a columnist for Runner's World Magazine and her inquiry about banning books at the Wasilla Library, to realise the danger we are in. Stalin, an embodiment of mediocrity, ended up ruling the country of Tolstoy and Chaikovsky. Palin could very well end up running a country as rich in culture and intellectual diversity as America, which has the best universities and the most Nobel Prize winners in the world. This simply cannot happen.

It's time to embrace cosmopolitanism and difference as the best way to resist the tyranny of mediocrity. It's time to stop eating Palin's bullshit, excuse me mooseshit, by the spoonful.

Saakashvilli's Gamble, Or We Are Not All Georgians Now

There is an odd sense of deja vu about the Russia-Georgia War that takes us back not ten years to the obscure Balkan violence of Bosnia and Kosovo but twenty years to the Era of Big Statements, to Afghanistan, "Evil Empire," and "tearing down this wall." The phrase "Cold War" is on everyone's lips, and in the West the old rhetoric has been dutifully dusted off by sanctimonious warriors like John McCain, who declared, echoing the post-9/11 solidarity other nations expressed towards America, "We are all Georgians now." This is patently disingenuous, since McCain, Bush and the U.S. military have no intention and no way of defending Georgia with anything more than words.

Of course we should all be concerned about Russia, and no one likes Putin's authoritarian streak and the revival of Red Square parades. But this is not about Putin or Russia, who has been playing its hand in a familiar scenario on its borders for a long time now. The story is Saakashvili's gamble and the hapless role the United States played in this foreign policy trainwreck. The article below, by a Moscow-based correspondent for the Atlantic, lays it out with startling clarity:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200808u/georgia-russia-war

This war is, to boil it down to the very essentials, about a very old piece of shrewd realpolitik. Stalin's redrawing of boundaries to include disparate ethnic minorities (like importing Russians into Moldova and, in this case, separating Ossetia into two provinces, one inside Georgia and the other inside Russia) ensured that nationalist aspirations would always stumble on internal conflicts. The situation on the eve of this war-du-jour was like that in many other places: a tense stand-off between the Russophile Ossetes and Abkhaz and a brash, ambitious and Western-backed Georgian leader. This prophetic travel journal from a Slate correspondent only a few months ago gives an impression of what life was like before the tanks started rolling in:

http://www.slate.com/id/2197134/entry/2191589/

Saakashvili, whose human rights record has been unimpressive since the Rose Revolution swept him into power in 2003, ostensibly as a beacon of freedom in a lawless region, was emboldened by the Americans' rhetoric of promoting democracy etc. He gladly committed Georgian troops to assist in the invasion of Iraq (an irony that makes Russian propagandists salivate) and expected a commitment in return. Not McCain's vacuous pronouncements or humanitarian aid, but concrete help, a NATO bid and commitment from the West to keep the Russians at bay. When he finally moved for endgame and attacked, he was bitterly surprised to find that he had been let down and lashed out at his erstwhile American friends. Where were they now, when it counted, he wondered as his country burned.

I have a humble suggestion for Saakashvili and for others like him, trying to walk the tightrope of 21st-century geopolitics. They should watch a small film that came out of Romania in 2007 to win a prize at Cannes. California Dreamin' tells the story of a group of American soldiers on their way to Kosovo who are stopped in a small Romanian village in the middle of nowhere. At once the locals try to use the Americans to their benefit: the workers go on strike, the mayor wants to befriend them as leverage against a corrupt gangster, and everyone remembers how, for 50 years, the Americans were always going to "come and save us," from the Nazis, the Russians, and from themselves. Better late than never, right? But all the Americans are interested in is passing through, and they do so as soon as they can, leaving behind the villagers to tear each other apart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG21tT2eE2w

The lesson is not easy to follow, and Bush/McCain's assurances were all too tempting for Saakashvili. What we are left with is a ruined country, a bellicose and unstable Russia, thousands of deaths, and the same tired, hollow threats and promises.