If the game we were playing was looking really well-dressed for the Friday-night mixer at the country club in 1957, damn if Tucker Carlson wouldn’t be the winner, with that perfect navy blazer and its brass buttons, with that white Oxford-cloth Brooks Bros. button-down, the repp tie, the Bass Weejuns.
What a sartorial triumph he would be.
And, let’s see, the Republican Party he’d be representing the foreign policy of would be first and foremost so anti-Russian it would make your head spin.
It would be so pro-NATO that the accent he would be affecting would put the mid-Atlantic in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
He’d be the proud representative of the internationalist and integrationist wing of the GOP, the ones who, like songwriter John Prine’s southern Ohio grandfather, “voted for Eisenhower, ‘cause Lincoln won the War.”
Oops. We are the unfortunate ones who survived until 2024, and the appalling sight of a Republican Party grown so crazily insular and, dare I say the truth, anti-American that one of its primary and extremely nicely dressed adherents makes a point of traveling to Moscow to interview the dictator of Russia in a televised spectacle so appallingly fawning that even the would-be czar himself wonders afterward about its lack of teeth.
“Sincerely speaking, I didn’t fully enjoy this interview,” Putin said of his visit with the former Fox News host.
“To be honest, I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions. I was not just prepared for this.”
Apparently Putin hadn’t been fully briefed about the fact that the preppie American TV yakker had gone all Kremlin in recent years, and was not about to put up a pious Yankee front expressing any annoyances about Russian war crimes in its two-year invasion of Ukraine or about Putin’s own proclivities for murdering his political opponents once he has locked them up in Arctic Circle gulags.
Me, I don’t want to live in a world in which our country turns its back on both its traditional allies in Western Europe and more scarily on the parts of that continent that have broken with the old Soviet menace and tried to make something of a democracy divorced from Russia themselves.
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I simply don’t understand what it is in the currently elected GOP leadership, not to mention in the possible election of their presidential standard-bearer, that could let America devolve into the kind of country that could turn a blind eye to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s so weak. It’s so un-American.
Not knowing what to do about that sad fact, I’ll leave us with a quote from Sophie Pinkham’s take in a recent New York Review of Books story about the Ukrainian writer Yevgenia Belorusets’ new book “War Diary”:
“On March 14, 2022, she writes: ‘I think the attack on Kyiv was a signal, a sign that no one in Ukraine can go to sleep thinking that they are safe in their house or apartment, The rockets breach the walls of the houses like the skin of the body. The whole idea of a house, of shelter and protection, is called into question.’
“A country needs a closed sky like a house needs a roof; it is unfathomable that missiles can rain down on you at home, just as it is absurd to imagine snow falling in your bedroom. But to ‘close the sky’ would have been to risk open war with nuclear-armed Russia, and Europe and the U.S. declined.”
I don’t want a nuclear war with Russia any more than you do.
But why, really, do I, after all these years, want my country to capitulate to the insane desires of a Russian dictator?
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com