The Cost of Living
On Tucker Carlson's Walter Duranty routine.
When we say someone is ‘drinking the Kool-Aid,’ we mean their blind or obsequious loyalty to a person or a cause will end in their ruin.
The sad irony: the origins of this phrase neglect the facts. A factual error took on a life of its own. Try steering the phrase to the truth. Too late! Nobody will listen. Perhaps they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.
As you may know, the phrase comes from the Jonestown Massacre, Guyana, in 1978. Cult leader Jim Jones, or rather his minions, murdered U.S. representative Leo Ryan and his party in nearby Port Kaituma.
The mad mullah Jones, ever the brave soul, suggested he and his 900-odd followers switch themselves off in a vainglorious ‘revolutionary suicide.’ (What, I ask, would be revolutionary about suicide?) Residents of the Peoples Temple commune filled their red party cups with a grape-flavoured beverage laced with cyanide.
Rescuers later found some 918 bodies, many of them children, piled beneath their feet. Strewn like confetti were empty packets of Flavor Aid. Thanks to American exceptionalism—that famed susceptibility to marketing and advertising—Kool-Aid, a superior and better-known product, earned its rather dreary association with gullibility and mass suicide.
Speaking of the gullible and credulous, Tucker Carlson recently visited Moscow. During this sojourn, Tucker marvelled at the Russian capital’s cleanliness and order. So pristine was this encampment of the saints, Tucker declared himself ‘radicalised’.
“It is so much cleaner and safer and prettier, aesthetically, its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States,” said Tucker. “How did that happen?”
The question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious. Moscow is home to Russia’s 500-odd oligarchs. Why would this imperial capital be anything less than agreeable? Tucker, my friend, please visit Sofia in Bulgaria to marvel at fleets of shimmering Bentleys swanning along licked-clean streets. Then visit any provincial village. The beer is under a pound; the Rakia is home-brewed, and the thirty-somethings look fifty-something.
Tucker’s wide-eyed discovery that oligarchs live comfortably is worthy of a prize. But not the Pulitzer—The Lead Paint Prize.
Last week, Tucker interviewed the Big Man. I say, ‘big man.’ Putin is five-feet-five. He pretends he’s taller. Putin’s aides pretend he’s a cloud-tickling five-feet-seven. Putin’s press pretends he’s five-feet-seven. When snow falls in Moscow, Putin is the last to know. Honestly, though, his height doesn’t bother him.
Another historical English lesson for you. As with ‘drinking the Kool-Aid,’ the term ‘Napoleon Complex’ comes from faulty origins.
We say Napoleon Complex to describe a short man compensating for his lacking stature with aggression and domineering, primate theatrics.
In 1803, the celebrated English cartoonist, James Gillray, brushed fiction into fact with his characterisation of ‘Little Bone’, an insolent, impish brat prone to tantrums and tipping over furniture. Ask anyone anywhere what they know about Napoleon: He was angry and short.
But Napoleon was 5’2 in what were then French inches. He stood at between 5’6 and 5’7. By today’s standards, he’s no giant. But back then, Napoleon was as tall or taller than the average 19th-century Frenchman.
One thing is for sure: Napoleon towered over Putin. Perhaps we should transfer his namesake complex to the pitiful little pygmy in the Kremlin.
To return to the point: Tucker later visited a Russian supermarket. Here, in the noble tradition of American tourism, Tucker adopts the role of American Abroad. Excluding present company, Americans are not typically known for their worldliness.
If you’re unfamiliar with this stridulous, amateur tour guide, here’s the gist. Visit Paris, Sevilla, Rome, or anywhere on the European continent and you’ll encounter the American Abroad. This well-meaning, harmless character is a walking Wikipedia: “Did you know those public bathrooms over there are open to the public? Apparently, they built those public bathrooms in 1864, for public use. Incredible.” Harold means well. But he could talk a glass eye into a coma.
Tucker then surveys all that Putin the Great has gifted the glorious Russian nation. That is—a mid-range supermarket in a Moscow shopping centre. Thumbing a loaf of bread, Tucker apes the American Abroad: “They bake this bread right here—in store!”
I know the standard American diet is Pavlovian pigswill washed down with sugar water, but fresh bread in a supermarket should not provoke such starry eyes.
And yet, and as usual, words fail the latter-day Walter Duranty. For a shopping cart of essentials, Russians pay—quelle surprise—a quarter of the price Americans stump up. Tucker neglects to mention that Sergey and Anya make one-fifth of what Bob and Maria take home. He neglects to mention that Russians spend half their paltry pay packets on food. Russians are poorer than those Mexicans clawing beneath razor wire on the Rio Grande.
But the facts don’t matter. There are two Russias.
The Russia resident in Tucker’s mind is a resurgent superpower led by a shirtless, horse-riding, bear-hunting He-Man reviving not only Greater Russia but Christendom and Western civilisation. Putin, like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, is a renegade genius whose results are solid, even if his methods are unsound.
And then there’s the Russia resident in reality. Ironically, and unamusingly, the despair deaths that shunted Trump into the White House blight Russia, too. Since the chaotic 1990s, Russians, especially young Russian men, have drunk drugged brawled stabbed and clubbed themselves and their fellow Russians into premature graves. Between 1992 and 2009, Russia lost seven million people.
Many have given into despair. They’ve walked before speeding trains. They’ve hanged themselves from willowy rafters. They’ve stepped off high-rise rooftops. They’ve succumbed, in early middle age, to heart attacks and strokes. A Russian man hits middle age by 30. He can expect to die in his mid-sixties—earlier than his Soviet ancestors.
And then there’s the birth rate. Even in these reluctant times, the Russian birthrate resembles an unspoken national suicide pact. No more Russians were born in April 2022 than Russians were born when the Nazis were poking MP40s in their faces.
Putin the Great hasn’t arrested this slide. He’s made it terminal. Over the last three years, Russia has lost two million more people than would be normal. Around one million young, educated men and women have fled abroad. At home, women now outnumber men by ten million—a demographic atom bomb.
Meanwhile, Putin has fed 300,000 of their brothers, their sons, and their friends into his Ukrainian meat grinder.
Tucker’s sordid little saga reminds me of my favourite film—Apocalypse Now. In the final act, the major’s boat emerges from the delta, landing on Colonel Kurtz’s Aztec-style jungle compound. Greeting the numerically, physically, mentally and spiritually depleted crew is a Haight-Ashbury hippie photographer.
Played by Dennis Hopper, this wigged-out true believer breaks into a Shakespearean sonnet, revealing the ‘poet-warrior’ with whom he is enraptured—Colonel Kurtz. The visitors, encircled by native arrows and spears, don’t flinch. Around the compound, the heads of those who outstayed their welcome rest on spikes.
“The heads,” says Hopper. “You’re looking at the heads. Sometimes he goes too far. But… He’s the first one to admit it.”
I wonder, I wonder what Tucker Carlson makes of the murder of Putin’s chief critic, Alexei Navalny.
A permanent pain in Putin’s arse, Navalny returned from exile to a certain fate. He survived poisoning, persecution, and prison, spending the last few years in solitary confinement. His crimes? An unflinching criticism of that physical, mental, and moral pygmy in the Kremlin.
On Friday morning, Navalny, laughing and defiant to the end, was switched off by a lesser life form.
If you must pin to your chest the deeds and bravery of another, then his name is not Vladimir Putin. His name was Alexei Navalny.
Last Week at Oxford Sour:
Pulling Teeth
George Orwell wrote that England is a family with the wrong members in charge. As I work through the Everyman essay collection—an elephantine tome of 1,500 buttery pages—it appears Orwell was right then, and he’s right now. Here in Great Britain, in this boiler room pretending to be a country, we…
I admit I was impressed with the Moscow subway station but it is only one subway station in one Russian city, and the heroic agricultural worker artwork did not impress me and the glowering portrait of Lenin was nauseating. I have an aversion to Russia and Russians that may be genetic in origin considering my Polish, Czech and Slovak ancestry, and have no desire to listen to Vlad Shortstacky interviewed for 2 hours and spew his Russian nationalist version of history and current events. That said I wouldn't put Tucker Carlson in the Duranty depths of depravity; you may consider him ingenuous in Moscow but not malicious.
I am a fan of Tucker, so it grieves me to see him make such a colossal blunder. Ive listened to a broad political spectrum of analysis of his interview. It appears to me that his intentions and words are twisted by a media. It's common knowledge that the elites truly despise him. He has made many powerful enemies. Hence, his popularity with the average American.
However, I fear that his meteoric success and freedom has lead him to fly to close to the sun. Regardless of his intentions, he has given the media a powerful weapon. He has been portrayed as a traitor to America, unpatriotic. This can be a poison pill that's difficult to overcome in the minds of average Americans.