[ed. note: The first part of this essay/column was originally published in October, 2018 and is republished in its original form]

A snowflake fell, and then another, and another.  But they were not liberals, and it was not 2016. It was November 2004 in Kyiv, Ukraine.  We were living in the Ukrainian Village in Chicago at the time in the aftermath of what was, at the time, a particularly dispiriting election.  Democrat John Kerry had rushed to concede with all the alacrity and vigor of a Swift Boat captain reporting for duty, even as evidence of massive election fraud began seeping under his hotel room door, particularly in the deciding state of Ohio.  This after Florida in 2000–and Georgia in 2002, where Saxby Chambliss mysteriously made up a double-digit deficit in the election eve polls on Election Day to give the Republicans control of the Senate, with a file called “hack_georgia” later found on a Diebold voting machine there, the beginnings of a good thing for Georgia Republicans.  

This would be the same Diebold whose CEO promised to “deliver Ohio for Bush” in 2004, as did, apparently the ruling Secretary of State, who, among many other things, had to be blocked by the courts from rejecting Democratic voter registrations based on the weight of the paper they were printed on, and who went on to a seat of honor on Trump’s ignominious “voter fraud” commission.  Hundreds of voters reported voting for Kerry only to see their votes cast for Bush, and those were just those who were paying attention.

Then there were the huge discrepancies between the exit poll and “actual” results, and a lot of hand-waving by so-called experts to explain this away, just-so stories about the “shy Bush voter” (sound familiar?) or the “Republicans who won’t talk to exit pollsters because they don’t like or trust the media,” even, incredibly, claims–against decades of evidence to the contrary–that the exits were flawed because Republicans vote later in the day than Democrats, and therefore the polling missed a late surge of GOP supporters, a sure tell as to how desperate the pollsters were to avoid the obvious alternative explanation.  All while ignoring the volume of hard evidence that exit polls routinely overstate the percentage of Republican minority voters, while routinely missing many cell-only early voters, who are overwhelmingly younger and more Democratic, as early voting continues to grow and continues to be more Democratic in general.  As a survey veteran whose work has been called the “gold standard” of new media research, I was not impressed.  You can read the post-mortem analysis of the 2004 election by the exit pollsters here–see if you can find anything harder than “possible” or “likely” with regard to these conjectures, followed by no “corroboration,” as post-Kavanaugh Republicans like to say. 

In fact, as you’ll see from the report, the level of “overstatement of Democratic support” in the exits was highly unusual–it did not occur in either the election before or the election after.  Where were all those “shy Republicans” then?  Didn’t they vote? Occam’s razor would have a field day slicing this up; instead it was used as tautological proof that there was “nothing to see here.”  Shockingly/not shockingly, the political/media establishment determined the “solution” to the exit polling problem was to undemocratically ban sharing top-line exit poll results with the public going forward, lest said public start to think our elections are on less than on the up and up.  Today only 28 states even conduct and publish exit poll results of any kind. If you ask John Kerry privately today if he should have conceded so quickly, you might be surprised by the answer, but in the end it was only a small number of Congressmen and Congresswomen (thirty-two in all), all but four African-American, Hispanic, and/or female, who, based on centuries of unlimited exposure to the elements, not to mention the damning Conyers report, found the olfactory presence of ghosts and rodentia in the machinery too strong to ignore, and refused to confirm the official results.

Into this late November damp arachnoid miasma, news from a small eastern European country came like a bracing blast of fresh, cold air.  For its first decade of independence, Ukraine had been ruled by Soviet apparatchiks, but the attendant burgeoning corruption had forced its leader to step aside, and his handpicked successor, one Viktor Yanukovych (yes, that Yanukovych) was facing serious, determined opposition.  Ukraine was as important to Vladimir Putin then as it is now, and so he launched a pilot of what has now become a highly sophisticated program of interference in other countries’ elections.  Like an emergent virus trying to develop a successful parasitic relationship with its host, this first sally was clumsy at best. The campaign created a frisson of interest in the US (and much more than that in the Village) when his foot soldiers deployed traditional Russian statecraft and poisoned the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko.  However, not only did Yushchenko survive, but the attack left his face permanently and grotesquely scarred, a highly effective 24/7/365 product placement for the fray.  As in the US, on Election Day, the Ukrainians deployed exit pollers. As in our country, those pollers found a serious discrepancy between the exits and the official results.  And there the parallels end, and the stories diverge.

The Ukrainians refused to accept the results. Instead hundreds of thousands descended on the capital and declared, in the face of bitter sub-zero temperatures, that they would not leave until the election was rerun (even now, I tear up at the memory).  Women from all over the country, including the “rebellious” east, daily cooked vats of food and brought them, along with coats, blankets, and toiletries, to the city, often trudging through deep snow drifts to do so.  Here in the United States, in Chicago where I lived, there were dozens of meetings and rallies. Yushchenko himself came to the city, accompanied by Vitali Klitschko (the [even] bigger one), to seek advice and support from the world’s oldest democracy that had inspired him.

It was an unusually mild winter in Chicago that year, a portent of things to come. I remember one march and rally in particular I attended that took place along the Magnificent Mile.  I was the only American-American in the group, and so was asked to share some words of wisdom. It was hard to know what to say, as I surveyed my fellow countrymen and women trundling indifferently past us, to and fro, shopping as always (which, to be fair, was what we were told to do to keep the terrorists from winning), and as I imagined our National Mall in similarly mild conditions, empty, and thought of those hundreds of thousands standing in the bitter cold, by now with snipers trained on them–just waiting for the word–I have to say I was ashamed, looking out at those faces, many of them newly arrived in our country, whose homeland had never tasted the rewards of democracy, whose fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers, were nevertheless now risking their lives for it, while we… All I could do was tell them that as a citizen of the country that had first championed the ideals they were fighting for, I was proud of them, and I hoped their example would inspire us in return.

Has it? The Ukrainians got their rerun election, and with international observers monitoring every move (including some from the Ukrainian Village), Yushchenko was declared the clear winner.  But when I think of that experience, what always comes to mind is those thousands and thousands of Ukrainians, standing quietly or chanting, under cold, clear starry winter nights, night after night after night.  And I think of a winter like that in our country, when George Washington gathered his dispirited troops at Valley Forge to regroup after many a dark night of the soul, steeling themselves for the dawn.

Clausewitz famously observed that “politics is war by other means.”  If so, what is the political equivalent of a military defeat? In the times we live in, who we are, how we behave, I’d say defeat is retreat, letting things happen that shouldn’t.  We let dirty tricks happen, starting in 1968, when candidate Nixon sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks and was rewarded with the White House. We let lizard-brain manipulations gain their first national foothold in 1980 in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where Ronald Reagan made his first stop after claiming the Republican nomination, then let them flourish, in the absence of resistance, as the bear galloped through the woods, Willie Horton rampaged, and white hands were thrown up in rage.  We let Florida happen in 2000. We let Georgia happen in 2002. We let Ohio, and perhaps the entire election, happen in 2004.  We let Karl Rove and ALEC set up a shadow government at the state level, a new confederacy throttling the laboratories of democracy that were the ramparts of federalism, replacing them with cookie-cutter legislative operations backed by dark money, unconstitutionally denying our fellow citizens their most fundamental right as Americans, the right to vote, and have that vote count no more or less than any other.  And so far, we’ve let the darkest and most undemocratic election of all, steered by the dictatorial kleptocratic country that has been our–and Ukraine’s–most implacable enemy for decades, happen.  In its aftermath, some of us, remembering those dispiriting, inspiring days of November 2004 in Chicago and Kyiv, found ourselves wondering, who was it who looked into Pootie-Poot’s soul and found something there he liked–Kerry or Bush?

All told, one could make the case that we’ve waited much longer than Washington did to stare into that dark winter abyss. You could make the case that our string of defeats extends right through the equivalent of Gettysburg, if Hancock and his men had left the field to binge-watch cable shows on Facebook.  The bottom line: we cannot afford–ever again–to commit the sin of complacency, and in a battle whose stakes are this high, voting alone is highly unlikely to be enough.  What should we do in addition or instead?  We have some thoughts, a lot of them actually, which we’ll share in Part II of this piece.

швидко вперед

“Go f*** yourself, Russian warship”
     — Ukrainian Snake Island defenders

At the time we wrote the article you just read, our first for our new site, we were headed into the mid-term elections, and our fear was that Russian interference was going to be even stronger and more effective than in 2016 and that once again, we, the people, would stand by and do nothing but take another step down the Road To Perdition we were watching on Netflix (again)–frankly, you can see from the “Maidan 2018” t-shirt advertised above what we feared was actually going to be necessary.

Picking up the narrative from Part 1, here’s how the promised Part 2 began:

After the winter of Valley Forge, George Washington and his troops had to fight on for another five years to secure the independence of our nation.  After the Ukrainian people overturned the “election” of Vladimir Putin’s puppet Viktor Yanukovych, they went through trials of their own.  True winner Viktor Yushchenko had a falling out with his chief ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, who became the standard bearer for their party.  Yanukovych hired a guy named Paul Manafort, who came highly recommended, along with his deputy Rick Gates.  They hatched a plan worthy of their pedigree, manufacturing evidence of fraud against Tymoshenko, which Yanukovych used not only to win the next presidential election, but also to–you guessed it–lock her up! lock her up! lock her up!

But when Yanukovych broke the fundamental promise he made during the campaign to seek membership in the EU, and was on the verge, instead, of signing a binding agreement that would steer the country decisively towards his Russian masters and against the West, the Ukrainian people rose up once more, at which point narratives diverged again. To Putin and his stealthily growing fanbase in America (which would reach unprecedented, double digit percentages within the Republican Party by 2017), the Ukrainians were now (a-ha!) anti-democratic fascists because they were trying to “overthrow” a “legitimately elected democratic government.”

To the Ukrainians, when someone they voted into office not only broke a fundamental promise he made, but did the opposite of what he said he would, for no reason that could be smudged into an “evolutionarily” legitimate volte-face (it’s not like Putin was offering the Ukrainians a better deal than they were likely to get from the EU–au contraire), he was no longer legitimately elected, he was elected under false pretenses, by fraud. Imagine how different our democracy would be, how different we might feel about it, about our country, if politicians were held to at least the same standards of truth in advertising we hold drug companies, which seems not unreasonable, given that a corrupt politician who lies his way into office is capable of killing and destroying the lives of many more Americans, through incompetence alone, than any FDA-approved drug.

To the interslopers who would ah-ah-ah this idea with a lot of self-serving hand-waving about grey areas and slippery slopes, we say: c’mon man!  Of course there are grey areas–there are grey areas in every particular of the law, which must either be resolved into black and white or avoided. But when a candidate promises he/she will do one thing in a campaign and then, in their subsequent term in office, does the exact opposite, what is the grey area?  That circumstances changed?  That’s the kind of question juries decide–in a breathtakingly wide variety of other cases. That he/she/they (maybe) didn’t mean to? In the legal definition of false advertising, the focus of “intent” is on whether the false statement was intended to promote the sale of a product–in this case the candidate–not on the intent to tell the truth or not, provided the statement was made “knowingly or recklessly” with the intent to sell.  Many companies have been convicted of false advertising in which it was never proven that their claims were outright lies, only that the company hadn’t proven them to be accurate, which is exactly what we’re talking about here: a claim, a promise, that turned out not to be true.

The motto of our country is e pluribus unum, not caveat emptor, and we hold companies tightly enough to standards of truthfulness and full disclosure that hair dryer manufacturers feel compelled to warn customers not to use them “while sleeping” and purveyors of vanishing fabric markers warn not to use their product “on checks and other legal documents.” Others warn that sleeping pills “may cause drowsiness,” that maps on cocktail napkins are “not intended for navigation,” that bobcat urine powder is “not for human consumption,” and that children shouldn’t be placed in washing machines.  Why should politicians, whom we can’t sue for the damages they do, even if we didn’t vote for them, be held to a lower standard, no standard in fact?  We’re not proposing denying them their First Amendment rights–they can say whatever they want–but if they make a promise, it had better one they can and will keep, or they shouldn’t make it at all.  The Ukrainians were–and are–right about that.

Be that as it may, politicians like Trump and Putin must have found the Ukrainians’ reasoning incomprehensible.  After all, the only rule Trump and many other politicians of both parties have felt they needed to live by was first coined by the incorrigible Edwin Edwards: “Never get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” As long as you can hurdle the aforementioned lowest bar this side of Hurlingham Park, you’re free to lie away.  During the 2016 campaign, for example, Trump repeatedly told a lie that arguably had at least the absolute, if not the relative, magnitude of financial implications for the people of our country that Yanukovych’s fib had for the Ukrainians, claiming at rally after rally that his tax plan would be a “middle class tax cut” in which “none of the benefits will go to people like me,” that in fact, “the wealthy will pay more,” (claims he continued to make in office).  Which was a critical element of the promise, given that as many as 80 percent of Americans, including many Trump supporters, believed that the wealthy should be paying more in taxes.  Once in office, of course, he proposed and passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut in which, by any measure, a large proportion–certainly well over half–of the benefits in fact flowed to the wealthy, either directly or via corporate tax cuts primarily benefiting the largest corporations, their executives, and shareholders.  And this was clearly no accident: the night he signed it, Trump flew down to Florida, walked into Mar-A-Lago, and gleefully bragged to his tony customers that “you all just got a lot richer.”

Here we have to fast forward (швидко вперед) briefly in time to make an observation on this that we couldn’t then.  The redoubtable Anne Applebaum describes the Ukrainian national character as “against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the urbanites,” as “anti-elitist before anyone used the expression;” in short, a lot like Trump’s base supporters, who see themselves as the rightful heirs of our founders, believe and proudly want others to believe that what Applebaum details describes the nature of their character.  Yet when Trump broke this fundamental promise to them–and it was hardly the only promise he didn’t keep–they rationalized, they meekly accepted the scraps given, they responded like…well…Russians.

Yanukovych broke one promise–admittedly on top of becoming increasingly authoritarian, which only heightens the contrasting responses, because Trump was and is a flaming authoritarian, right down to his décor. Yanukovych broke one promise, and Ukrainians took to the streets like it was 1776. Something great happened in 1776–that’s something Americans of every political persuasion agree on.  But the cost of years and years of allowing prevarication after prevarication, treating whoppers like nothingburgers, sportifying politics–as a cost-cutting, profiting-seeking measure–into an “all’s fair” game, in which the kind of “discipline” and deception we admire in football, but used to call fascism in politics, is celebrated by the elites of every stripe at swank principles-optional (if you can afford them) affairs, the cost has been the spirit of ’76…’32… ’41… ’44 (Omaha…Omaha)… ’60… ’68, and more.

Watching and supporting Ukraine may be one of the best ways to get it back.  Cueing harp reverie, cycling back to 2014:

Once again, with the faith of democrats, Ukrainians came to Independence Square, aka the Maidan.  Having learned their lesson from the last uprising, this time the Russians stationed snipers all over Kyiv, who, in turn, shot and killed many Ukrainian protesters (while the West looked on).  Nevertheless, they persisted, Yanukovych was driven from power, and when the Ukrainians descended on their government, they found a level of corruption so obscene and, well, tacky, even they could not have imagined it (but we could, easily). 

Being, as all dictators are, a very sore loser, Putin responded to this turn of events by openly violating the one actual signed agreement extant in his cloud of grievances, and a bright-line accord at that–if you, kraine, hand over your nuclear weapons, I’ll guarantee your border–invading Crimea with an ugly Clintonesque pirouette: that the original agreement was “signed with a different government” (was Putin ever a child? If so, did he not learn, as all children do from one another, that the human body virtually completely replaces itself every seven years? Does this mean that, in exchange for Crimea, Ukraine gets its nukes back?).  Then went on into eastern Ukraine, with an ominous rationale drawn from the darkest days of the last century, the protection of ethnic [insert invader’s nationality here] living there.  In response to which, having not defended our own democracy, once again we did nothing.  Oh wait, no that’s not right–we did send blankets.

That’s as far as we got with the original “Part II.”  Before we could complete it, the 2018 election happened, and the forces for democracy won a historic victory. It turned out that, in an unprecedented moment of candor, the Trump administration was telling the truth when it insisted that the Russians were completely AWOL for the event, and when you think about it, who better to know? Why they were inactive, and more generally, why the POS (Party of Suppression) apparently sat on its laurels as well, has been the subject of credible speculation elsewhere.

But before we could be never so happy to be wrong, we experienced a profound moment of precognition that, in hindsight, should have made everyone else a precogger, too, when the same “small European country” we wrote about, the nation most Americans, if they knew it at all, knew as “the Ukraine” (located on their mind’s map next to “the Africa”), whose example we had urged on the community in 2018, suddenly “blew up”¹ in mid-2019 and found itself where it is now, again–and probably was the whole time, had we been paying attention–standing defiantly on or lying astride “democracy’s front line,” the border between democracy and autocracy worldwide.

You would think Donald Trump and the then-newly elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have gotten along famously, given the similarities in their backgrounds: Trump “won” the presidency by playing a businessman on TV; Zelenskyy won by actually playing a president on the small screen and getting 73%+ of the vote. But the difference in their pre-presidential TV roles has proven surprisingly predictive. Or maybe it’s just that Zelenskyy was a successful businessman, self-made.  Instead of the expected bonhomie, 44.46, in ways not seen in the Oval since…well, ever… brazenly and–it must be said–perfectly asserted the powers and prerogatives of an autocrat in his first post-election call with Zelenskyy (having eschewed the normal felicitations the morning after), especially in his openness about it, readily releasing a “transcript” of the call, apparently unaware of how damning it was or, more likely, seeing it as another, particularly powerful message to be sent–mobster-style, of course–in furtherance of cementing learned helplessness in the public mind: yeah, I did it, and I say it was fine, so what are you going to do about it? 

And the answer was, once again, not much, not by the standards we’re finally understanding democracy needs and deserves, the standards Ukraine set in 2004 and continues to set to this day.  Sure, we impeached him, “knowing” full well that what would follow would be nothing more than an inverse of the show trials practiced by dictators around the world since Stalin debuted the art form for Autocrats, Inc. in the 1930’s.  We knew this because, unwittingly, we made it so.

If we were Ukrainians, when the GOP refused to convict Trump, despite the plethora of evidence, testimony, and “common sense” we could all see and hear–no, forget the Ukrainians (for a moment, if you can), if we were Americans, and no, not the Greatest Generation of World War II, but the much-maligned Americans of the 1970s, the Boomers widely mocked for “evolving” from the causes of the ’60s into the “Me Generation,” we would have at least done what they did: hit the streets en masse and stayed there, calling, writing, demonstrating all over the country, and generally doing to the bunker-hiding, eagle-fearing Occupant what our ‘rents did to Trump’s role model, the pioneering would-be strongman Richard Nixon, driving him first to drink–or snort, in Trump’s case–even more heavily, and then out of office.  Ask Woodward and Bernstein, ask the still-living who were involved in the House & Senate hearings: it was we the people who did in Nixon, not the Washington Post. 

What’s that? What are the apologists saying? That the Republicans in office “back in the day” were more principled, more open, even more cuddly then? More willing to speak truth to Nixon?  Really? Telling us that, less than half a decade after the 1960s, four years after the Hard Hat Riot, in the midst of literally hundreds of bombings conducted by the left-wing Weather Underground, we were so much less polarized, it was so much easier for those Americans to do what needed to be done?  After all, these days Americans don’t agree about anything anymore, right? Except these things, these things, and these things, for example.  That there was no Fox News then? And if there had been, Nixon wouldn’t have had to resign no matter what we did, as political experts (and Fox News employees) ranging from Geraldo Rivera to Sean Hannity have averred? Are we talking about the Fox News that brags about having between 1-2 million viewers/prime time hour out of 330 million+ Americans–that Fox News?  The Fox News that’s getting crushed online, where everyone under 70 gets their news? Nearly 3:1 by CNN, 4:1 by CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC, by more than 12:1 if you throw in the Post, the Times, NPR, and PBS (all data retrieved via SimilarWeb Pro)? Granted, Fox is far from the only hard right information source, but as the right in general–and Fox in particular–will tell you, the nine Spokes of Evil whose bounty we just tallied are far, far, far, far from the only “lamestream” left-wing enemies of the people.

The bottom line: for all–especially the punditry–who love to turn everything in politics into sport, here’s an analogy that might help explain why all these (and all other) “it was a different time then” excuses don’t even get bait out of the bucket, and never will.  The institution of baseball has gone through many eras in its 150+ years of existence, with wildly varying metrics from pass to time.  As a result, it’s cliché to say “you can’t compare eras.”  Except in some ways, you have to, otherwise you can’t, for example, decide who’s worthy of inclusion in the sin qua non of Halls of Fame.  The toolkit generally accepted as evidence-based, objective, and generally up to a pinch between your cheek and gum is to look at each player in the context of his era, generating numbers via increasingly advanced metrics that can be compared to similar calculations from other points in history.

And this can be done because, while the game’s ball has regularly done its Lazarus impression, the mound raised and lowered, fences moved in and out, and more… pitchers still pitch, batters still bat and steal, fielders field–the game is fundamentally the same as it was in 1876, when the MLB–Catch It!–launched.   And the same as been true of our system of government.  Even as the world, unlike baseball fields, increasingly becomes one our founders would not recognize, we still have the same branches with the same responsibilities, whose occupants, much to our increasing consternation, are determined in the same way, and in theory at least, are still subject to the same checks and balances as we had in place in 1788. When it comes to governance, in many ways we’ve gone from the youngest nation to one of the oldest.

Different eras produce different policies, but the way policy is made hasn’t changed all that much in our 230+ years of existence.  And when it does, our system seems to have its own little Gaia to maintain at least some semblance of equilibrium.  For example, the entry of vast sums of dark money has been viewed by punditry and hacktocracy alike as a game-changer.  Maybe, but so is the dirt-cheap Internet–every election cycle now seems to spin out a whole fresh basket of firsts, which is why the darksters have been so determined to get rid of Net neutrality.  Whose fault is it the vast majority of Democrats, unlike Donald Trump, have never figured out how to use the new medium for anything but raising money to pay for third-rate television ads nobody watches?  The bottom line: things get done, or they don’t, and it’s up to us, not some amber of time we’re stuck in, whether they do or not.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t events that actually can insert a B.C./A.D.-magnitude fault line between eras, in both sports and politics.  One game-changing event type that’s been consistently positive, a primary wellspring, in fact, of our greatness, has been this: expansions in who can play, who can vote.  Old tape don’t lie–not as much as new tape anyway–baseball is a much better game than it was in the 1970s, let alone when whatever technology, or lack thereof, made Babe Ruth look like he was in a videogame when he ran the bases.  Meanwhile, even the Masters of the Universe right-wingers have always revered not only recognize, but proselytize–with the backing of voluminous evidence-based research–how diversity in all things is what really raises all boats (as Nature has known for billions of years).

On the opposite end of the heaven-hell aspiration spectrum is the hard stop and go attached to politics’ nuclear option, the razing of democracy in favor of autocracy, whether overtly or by using parasitic stealth to achieve a neutron-bombesque hollowing out of the people’s will.  While nuclear winter in the non-metaphorical sense might at least stop global warming–in a “destroy the village to save it” kind of way–it’s hard to see how the deep chill following the rise to power of an autocrat benefits anyone in the end but the autocrat, as everyone who has ever tried to help Trump has learned and, it seems, Putin’s inner circle is learning as you read.

In fact, we’ve just witnessed a larger than life proof of what ought to be a truism where forms of government are concerned, via a biennial marker that’s become fashionable to deride, though it’s one autocrats themselves have recognized the importance of since at least 1936: the Olympics (yes, another sports-based example for the punditry).  For both the Winter and recent Summer Games, we’ve created something we call the Real Medal Count, which, in recognition of the ideological nature and propaganda value of the competition, particularly among authoritarian regimes, differs from the official count primarily by counting all the medals won (as you’d think something called a “medal count” would do), e.g. if a country wins the gold in men’s ice hockey, 23 players win gold medals, so 23 golds are added to their country’s tally, not just 1 as in the “official” count.²

In theory, giving team medals greater weight should benefit autocratic countries, who claim to be the ones who can really pull together the people and ‘compel’ them to “get things done,” unlike those squabbling small d democrats (or those with capital D, in the case of the democracy v. autocracy competition in full-swing–whether Dems fully realize it or not–in our own country).

We then divide(d) the world into two teams, democracies vs. autocracies, using The Economist’s Democracy Index to pick sides. With a few marginal exceptions, we put all countries rated as “democracies” or “flawed democracies” on the D squad, and all those rated as “hybrid regimes” or “authoritarian” on what they think is the A team.³ Below you can see the stunning results when the world is divided up in this way.

In short, in all seasons, all year-round, democracies bury the authoritarians.  We democrats probably would have won even without all the team medals, but contrary to what authoritarians would have the world believe, team sports greatly widened the gap, especially in the Summer Games, for reasons obvious to anyone who’s ever taken a Poli Sci course⁴ (one of the many advantages conferred by that degree⁵)–or watched the Russian army in special military action.  Because China, in particular, has been touting the virtues of their centralized, authoritarian capitalism, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (apparently, the Chinese don’t really have a word for chutzpah in their vocabulary⁶), we also set up US vs. China Real Medal Counts, in which, thanks to team competitions, the results diverge even more from the official tabulations.

Overall, in a propaganda war between democracy and autocracy for the hearts and minds of the world (including, apparently, many in our own country), in a war of words, information, and every other means that’s never been at a higher boil for higher stakes (and yes, some of us were alive in the depths of the so-called Cold War), these Real Counts provide strong, easy-to-understand demonstrations, across a wide range of disciplines, if not a microcosm of society, that democracies are far superior to autocracies, and in ways that can’t be attributed to population at all.  In fact, quite the opposite, suggesting the inevitability of China’s triumph, via their own version of the Law of Large Numbers, will remain a Great Pumpkin for its supporters until they abandon authoritarianism and centralized control. Specifically, beyond the general results above, in our all-weather, all-seasons 1 v 1 match-up with China, the US won 72% of the duo’s gold, silver, and bronze–with only 19% of the two nations’ combined populations.⁷).  And it doesn’t take much to imagine what we could do, both in sport and broader competition, with an about-face to our roots.

Of course, someone will invariably point out that democracies have much greater financial resources and superior infrastructure.  To the extent this is true, the correct response is: And your point is?

The most recent of the Games we analyzed in this way ended just two weeks ago, but today, March 6th, 2022, in a geopolitical environment as cold and unforgiving as space–in which our planet has never seemed so small and fragile–every second is precipitating out, hard, sharp-edged, and clear, burying Beijing 2022 in such a blizzard of time it’s already barely visible and seems impossibly far away.  We are lost and snow-blind, putting one foot in front of the other, calling, as a people, on muscle memory and instincts, for many of us long forgotten, to guide us. At intervals, we see a flag flickering ahead, not beckoning exactly, more like taillights you follow in a fog. Strangely it’s not our own, reminding us we are far from what we used to call home, but each time we catch a glimpse of it, it causes our heart to race and our blood to warm, in ways we thought were behind or beyond us.  It’s the flag of that small/not-so-small eastern European country again.

Vidvaga

Think of the greatest teachers you ever had, the most inspiring, the most illuminating, and so often ageless.  Ukraine, young in democracy but old in time, has, in the space-time of a single collegiate quarter, explicated an entire curriculum’s worth of liberté, égalité, fraternité (i.e. French for “1776”) that we used to model and spread, like gospel-infused compost, on cultures and consciousnesses long thought civically barren.

We’d liken the Ukraine-U.S. dynamic to a cinematic classic wherein a precocious youngster, world-weary wise, reminds an aging legend who he/she/they once were, thereby restoring them to their former glory, but we’ve seen the daily rushes for more than two months now, and no movie so obscene has ever been made, nor should it be.  What has happened to Ukraine, to Ukrainians, makes something of a mockery of the words spoken by America’s Mayor on 9/11–the ones caught in our throats that day–even more so than Rudy Giuliani has since made of himself.  More than any of us can bear? Ukraine reached that threshold weeks ago. Except they’ve borne it.

More than borne it; thrown it back in the face of the world’s most cynical people and leader, often in ways that echo our own formative years, when we had to overcome an unbeatable foe claiming to be our blood elder–led by mad autocratic paterfamilias, a nation that was our mirror-image nemesis (now our “special relationship”) that committed more than a few unspeakable atrocities in a futile effort to terrorize and break us. Remember?  John Paul Jones, Nathan Hale, the Boston Tea Party, the crossing of the Delaware, the Green Mountain Boys? The more you know about Ukraine, its people, its history and ours, the more these figures and others can seen in Kyiv, in Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol, like apparitions in the night vision smuggled across borders in our name, in manifestations more extreme in every way than 1776-81, perhaps because that’s what’s required to reach us as we age and numb as people, a nation, a species.  It’s akin to watching a Field of Dreams sequel in which we get to see what our great, great, great grandparents were like when they were young.

Let’s review the bonds a little–between who we were and who they are–made visible in the last seventy-nine days and counting. Remember how stunned we were when Zelenskyy refused our offer of safe evacuation, because isn’t that what anyone would have wanted?  A JPJ moment if ever there was one. And the Klitschkos, we wondered, what are they playing at? Plotting a post-war run for president perhaps, political sportscasters speculated. Compelled by the example of the comparatively hobbit-like occupant of the office to follow suit? Surely there was a private jet idling for them somewhere in Kyiv the armchair strategists just haven’t located on Google Maps yet. Or some deep-fake pixelprints in the videos shot–as they dispensed consolation, comfort, and courage–proving they were never in the capital at all (popular search: Are the Klitschkos really fighting in Ukraine?).

The great Anne Applebaum’s last pre-invasion dispatch was titled “There Are No Chamberlains In This Story. But There Are No Churchills, Either. And Ukraine Will Fight Alone.” To her credit, she shares our definition of doubling-down, and “Ukraine Must Win” would make a good default title for everything she writes now. On the other side of the looking glass, Slate‘s Lili Loofbourow well-captured the world wariness so many of us have been reduced to over the decades when she said, of the “Zelensky legend,” that it’s been “skillfully produced,” “calibrated to appeal to a specific brand of international solidarity—of sides in a global struggle,” “shaped and inspired in part by the ‘cinematic’ quality of the media coming out of Ukraine” by a man with “great dramatic instincts” who is “doing brave things and…very ably disseminating media of himself doing [them],” all of which she observed admiringly, as if writing a film, TV or horse race political review. For Loofbourow and other members of the jaded class, “this can’t really be happening–it can’t be real” clearly still means something very different than it did to the people of Bucha a few weeks ago.⁸

But happily, albeit grimly and often profanely, rolling tides of newborn Ukrainian kazkas of ancient lineage keep stubbornly springing up, like ghostly, out of season/fashion fields of pasque flowers and pysankas, to overwhelm–even draw sustenance–from the more familiar muck of realpolitik. When boxing great Vasiliy Lomachenko found himself in Greece on 24-Feb, it was reported that he fled there, because isn’t that what our celebrities, our wealthy would have done? Of course, it turned out that, like many Ukrainians, he never believed Putin would invade, and he hurried back to put on the uniform and take up arms.  And of course, he was not alone.  In the deluge of stories about the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the country–i.e. the Up Close And Personals we could all relate to–there was another, journalistically irresistible (but corporately mufflable⁹) man bites dog story literally heading in the opposite direction, the tens of thousands of Ukrainians coming home from all over the world to fight (a magnitude which has swollen to hundreds of thousands in the last month), followed, in short order, by tens of thousands of foreign fighters joining the fray as well, including a plethora of American veterans who couldn’t “just stand by,” who found themselves “hungry for what they see as a righteous fight to defend freedom against an autocratic aggressor,” i.e.” the reason they joined the military” in a conflict that, unlike others they’ve been part of, “has a clear good and bad side,” providing fulsome opportunities to “make amends for failed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  Click here if you’re interested in joining them.

And by them, we don’t only mean the combat soldiers. There are the tens of thousands of civilians, including, crucially, many women¹⁰ joining territorial defense units all over the country, others lying down or standing in front of Russian tanks, even pushing them back with their hands or standing on them, elderly women and men coming out of their homes to scold and berate Russian soldiers on the street, the young marine who sacrificed his life to blow up a key bridge the Red Army was planning to use to advance on Kyiv.  There’s the costume designer using her skills to source uniforms, shoes, helmets, gloves, body armor, knee pads and other military equipment, the network of restaurateurs, cooks, bakers and many others cooking meals, the dozens of volunteers shredding old shirts, sheets and other cloth into long strips to be braided into camouflage, the workshop churning out anti-tank devices, the procurement officer for a gas producer finding Kevlar and bulletproof vests from all over the world and importing them, and others creating these vests from scratch, the artists turning bullet holes into flowers in Bucha and other towns and villages savaged by the occupiers.  There are long lines at blood banks reported across the country, and one financial establishment alone reports $80 million in donations by its customers to the military, in a country where the average citizen makes less than $500/month.  It’s a nation of MacGyvers in real life and real time, American-style pragmatism on a mix of steroids created in the ancient world and not invented yet. Everybody, it seems, is doing something all the time to help the war effort, applying whatever skills they have in any way they can.  Even the animals.

Flashing like a mirror in our eyes, there’s the Kyiv psychologist who reassures her patients and readers that the “anger and hate” they are feeling is “normal and important to validate” but also important to channel into useful and productive activity, such as “making incendiary bombs out of empty bottles.”  There are the citizens rising up in Maidan-like protests in Russian-occupied southern Ukrainian cities like Kherson and Melitopol, the weeks and weeks defenders of completely destroyed Mariupol managed to hold out, despite predictions of their imminent demise for more than a month (an eternity in modern warfare), continuing to inflict heavy casualties (and even periodically even getting resupplied, despite Putin’s brag straight out of Stalag-13 about imposing a blockade so complete “a fly can’t get through”), buying their country enough time to roll in heavy weaponry to block the Russians’ advance from the east, while ensuring the only propaganda win emerging from their Alamo-to-the-nth-power defense of their decimated city will be Ukraine’s.  Already, in the days following Russia’s 15 minutes of triumph, Ukrainians have reported killing Russian officers occupying the port city and sabotaging their operations while Ukrainian troops encircle Kherson as the Russians did Mariupol and an active underground undermines the occupiers from within.

Channeling Patrick Henry for our times was the response of the Ukrainian defenders on Snake Island when ordered to surrender by the Moskva, the largest and most powerful ship in Russia’s Black Sea fleet: “Go f*** yourself, Russian warship,” (a moment memorialized on a commemorative stamp for philately-inclined supporters, not to mention as a popular epithet on hundreds of replacement road signs helping to sow confusion, like salt-water tea, in Russian columns) at which point the unconscionably brave defenders were obliterated, only to turn up still alive several days later. Which is more than can be said of the Moskva, now resting at the bottom of the sea, potentially with hundreds of sailors still on board, the largest warship of any nation to be sunk in more than forty years (leaving us to wonder about the security of our own carrier-led fleet, indeed our entire theory of warfare), thanks to two homemade Ukrainian missiles–and perhaps a steaming bowl of karma served up in memory of the Kursk—as they flew just over the surface of the water like a boat crossing the Delaware. Or maybe that analogy is better applied to the daring destruction of a Russian oil depot 20 miles inside Russia by two Ukrainian helicopters, which generated a Putin conniption because it’s against Great Power rules for the smaller country you’re trying to crush to inflict damage on your nation in response, followed by Zelenskyy’s deadpan “false flag” parody¹¹ of Putin’s typical overprotesteth denials when he has boardinghouse-reached past other nations’ sovereignty to punish his enemies.  Meanwhile, we’ll probably never know how many more recent acts of sabotage within Russia have Ukrainian vidbytky palʹtsiv on them.

There are the hundreds of burned out Russian tanks, some still with the charred remains of their occupants visible, that, in lieu of life-size Zelenskyy cutouts, have become popular roadside attractions and selfie magnets for Ukrainian families all over the country, especially after the nation–in a move that no doubt sent shockwaves through the worldwide tax collecting community–announced that the citizenry would not have to declare as income any Russian equipment they collected or seized.  Meanwhile, instead of dead presidents, the Russians have been collecting dead generals–a dozen so far, which is unheard of in modern warfare–and their supreme commander nearly became unlucky number 13 when he briefly popped across the border to survey the situation.  Overall, the Russians appear to have lost more troops in two months of this war than they lost in nine years in Afghanistan.  Maybe they should have been paying attention last fall when their erstwhile foes were repeatedly flying into Afghanistan to extract Afghans left behind after we packed up and left.

If there seems to be an undercurrent of humor in these actions and their retelling, it’s no accident (Ukraine is, after all, the first nation to elect a comedian–and a good one–as its president), and no surprise that we Americans–inventors of the sitcom, the stand-up, and so many other seminal contributions to comedy–are attuned to it, even in its darkest form. When the Brits tried ridiculing us during our revolution by calling us “Yankee Doodles,” we owned the insult, even turned it into a still-popular patriotic song. As Veronika Melkozerova, executive editor of The New Voice of Ukraine, observes:  “There are two types of people in the world. There are those who cry after falling, and those who pick themselves up and laugh. We Ukrainians are the second type.”  She continues:

“We laugh when Russian soldiers accidentally detonate their own mines. We laugh at Chechen fighters filming TikToks in our destroyed city of Mariupol, only to be killed by Ukrainian snipers. We laugh at Russian propaganda that claims we train birds to identify Russians and infect them with diseases we’ve created in our U.S.-sponsored biolabs (ed note: yet another case of IP theft?). “Ukrainian soldiers say the Russian invaders are brainless,” Sviat Zagaikevich, another comedian [has] said, “because a bullet goes in one ear, and comes out the other.”

One stand-up who finds himself in combat elucidates how laughter is helping to superpower the Ukrainians: “If you can write a good joke, it becomes your weapon… I can, and that makes me a double threat—because I also have a gun.” Or as another puts it: “If you are a good comedian in the U.S., you can have a late-night show. If you are a good comedian in Ukraine, you can destroy Russia.”

And then there’s the music. We all knew at least one Ukrainian song before the war–this one–beautiful in all languages.  If you know anything by Sergei Prokofiev–Peter and the Wolf, the Troika from the Lieutenant Kijé Suite, the Dance of the Knights from his Romeo & Juliet, the score for Eisenstein’s masterpiece Alexander Nevsky, best-known for its battle on the ice scene–then you know Ukraine has been at the pinnacle of classical composition for some time.  For decades, Russia and its apologists have tried to erase Prokofiev’s Ukrainian origins, just as they’re now trying to erase Ukraine, but he was born in Sontsivka in Donetsk, one of the two “independent republics” Putin declared on the eve of invasion 2.0. Did Prokofiev speak Russian? So what–most of the people of Kharkiv and Mariupol do, too, just as most Canadians speak English, eh? Did he develop his craft in St. Petersburg?  So what–from 1998 to 2005, Volodymyr Zelenskyy spent the greater part of his burgeoning comedy career in Moscow, and in 2014 spoke out against plans by Ukraine’s Minister of Culture to ban Russian artists from the country after the annexation of Crimea and initial invasion of the Donbass.

Prokofiev was iconoclastic, unorthodox, and rebellious, and composed outside Russia for most of his life as a result; in 1948, after his return, he was denounced by Stalin’s regime for producing “anti-democratic formalism.” As biracial tennis great Yannick Noah once said: “when I win, I’m a Frenchman; when I lose, a Cameroonian.” S.S. Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin; his funeral was attended by approximately thirty people while hundreds of thousands mourned the late dictator, and his death was reported by the leading Russian musical journal of the time in a brief note on page 116–of an issue whose first 115 pages were devoted to Joseph Vissarionovich dze Jughashvili hagiography. The Donetsk airport, music academy, and the all-Ukrainian piano competition are all named in honor of Ukraine’s native son. Two of his greatest works, the Alexander Nevsky score and his operatic adaptation of War & Peace, are about plucky underdogs repelling invasions of their homeland.  We think we know where he would stand.

Like Prokofiev, Ukraine’s astonishingly rich and creative modern music scene, described by Pitchfork as “a crucial node in Europe’s electronic underground,” was born out of the spirit of revolution, specifically the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, aka Euromaidan.  Rolling Stone writes that the country’s post-Maidan “thriving” “flourishing” “music community”:

…has fostered a growing and diverse pop scene that has brought homegrown flavor to hip-hop, dance-pop, techno, punk, and hardcore. There’s something for nearly every listener in Ukraine. Fo Sho, three sisters based in Kyiv and Kharkiv, blend hip-hop with influences from their Ethiopian heritage. Onuka offers up haunting electro-pop. Postman’s delicate acoustic indie-pop reveals his love of Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, and David Crosby. The Ukraine scene also includes the electric throb of Vagonovozhatye, the multi-textured synth-pop of Kurgan & Agregat, the hard-charging hip-hop of Alyona Alyona, the riot-grrrl assault of Death Pill — just a few of the hundreds of noteworthy Ukrainian artists bounding into nearly every genre.  [ed. note: our personal favorite is DakhaBrakha, aka the Ukrainian B-52s, or vice versa]

Sounds a lot like a musical culture we’re a lot more familiar with, right?  Namely our own. Ukrainian blogger Tony Solojov is biased but right when he declares (with ample proofs) that “Ukrainian music should be your next obsession.”  To us, its most distinctive and entrancing element, where radical innovation and experimentation meet deeply rooted tradition–as happens in so much of Ukrainian culture–are the instruments (including their voices), many of which we expect you’ve never seen or heard before, let alone the combinations in which they’re used.  A small example: the “flute,” a telenka, in Kalush Orchestra’s Stefania, Ukraine’s entry into this year’s Eurovision song contest, and heavily favored to win it (ed. note: since publication, they, in fact, won in a landslide, thanks to the people’s vote).  The piece, a “folk rap” mashup about the lead singer’s mother, natch, was written well before hostilities commenced, but it’s hard for anyone listening to it today to think of it as anything but a patriotic love song to the motherland, which seems both only fitting and inevitable. Enjoy.

Overall, above all, and most importantly for our own country, the Ukrainians embody an motivating principle known militarily since at least the time of Napoleon, one that most of us, based on our recent relatively desultory defense of our own way of life, apparently believe only applies to the movies, and corny ones at that: the power of moral righteousness, even against what seem overwhelming odds. The legendary French tactician & general, working with one of the largest Ns/sample sizes in history, went so far as to quantify this power, rating “the moral” as more valuable than the size or equipment of one’s army by a factor of 3:1, and this seems conservative, given Ukraine’s performance to date.  Put another way that sportscaster-pundits can better understand, victory goes to the team/country that “wants it more.”

Put yet another way, in more everyday terms, one evening I wrote something pretty despairing to a friend–who is normally infamously pessimistic–about the war.  His response was as surprising as it was simple: “But it doesn’t have to be that way.” As some of you know, one of our favorite projects is the Glossarium, where, in recognition of the power words carry in the town square, we are working together to create new language for politics–both positive and negative–and in these times, we’ve struggled to balance the two.  When I read what mon ami¹² had to say, I realized there isn’t really a word in our language to describe the quality of possessing depthless optimism despite having knowledge of every reason to despair–and there should be.  I also felt it was a quality too special for the usual clever portmanteau approach; in fact, I doubted it could or should be a word that’s English¹² in origin at all.

In light of the events of the past two months, I knew it had to be Ukrainian–I mean, when’s the last time 90%+ of Americans believed we were going to win a war? After being invaded by an army many times as large as ours with much more sophisticated weaponry and having half of our cities pounded into rubble?  Not to mention rebuilding those cities as fast as our enemies destroy them? When I began looking in earnest, I soon found a word that’s being used quite a lot from L’viv to Kharkiv to Odessa these days, a word that really sounds the part: vidvaga.  In Ukrainian, it means, roughly “audacity.”

Vidvaga. It’s a quality we used to have a near-monopoly on in the world, a key ingredient in our growth into the world’s largest economy, the world’s greatest military power, the leader of the free world, the beacon of democracy, the “one indispensable nation,” and more. As we all spectated the happenings overseas, it was only a matter of time before a leading pollster decided to ask the obvious question: what would we Americans do if we were invaded by Russia or some other country? The responses were sobering, not just overall, but how they sorted out politically:

 

To be fair, some of this is baked in demographically. The Democratic Party is more female than male, and old roles die hard (70% of men would stay and fight vs. 40% of women, many of whom would presumably take children out of the country). But other demographically-driven components of these results are more alarming for the future of America as we know it:

• Only 38% of Black Americans, a heavily Democratic constituency, would take up arms against the invaders; 59% would leave.  While this is more than understandable, based on 400+ years of historical experience, Black Americans have long been the conscience of the country, the most persistent in driving us to live up to our ideals and values, and the most willing to sacrifice and die in their name.
• Only 45% of another core Democratic group, young Americans (ages 18-34), would be willing to stand up and save the country. This, too, is understandable, given the mess we’ve left them to clean up, but whether in war or war by other means, we depend on the young for their energy, their spirit, their new ideas & generative creativity.  They are the future of any nation.

The overall proportion of Americans who say they would stand tall for the US, 55%, would rank 35th out of 60 nations surveyed in a similar poll by Gallup in 2015, tied with Sweden and Bosnia, just behind Mexico and the Palestinian Territories, and just ahead of Ecuador and Greece.  In 17 countries of that study’s sample size of 60, 70% or more said they’d be willing to put their lives on the line. To be fair, an actual invasion might well concentrate a few more minds–only 63% of Ukrainians in the Gallup survey said they’d fight, which was clearly an underestimate; by contrast, 75% of Georgians, who had already experienced Russia’s sting and felt it fester, said they were ready to rumble.  On the other hand, only 44% of Americans in the 2015 survey said they’d do so, which either means love of country has actually increased significantly (have you noticed?) or the Gallup survey actually low-balled a number of these countries, in which case our 55%, like our 66.6% turnout in the last election, is even worse than it looks.

In Part II of this series, unlike the corporate media, we’ll tell you what we think you/we should do to turn around this dismal state of affairs. If you’d like us to send it to you, please click here (your email address will not be used for any other purpose)

Part of our 21st Century Citizenship series.

 

Creative Politics is the world’s first online community-based political incubator, a work in perpetual progress, synthesizing the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing the Federalist Papers today.  We welcome, nay urge, your feedback in the comment/discussion section below, and will be using it (with credit) to make what you just read more and more real–thanks much for your time and insights; they will go unpunished!

¹ “Blew up,” that is, in those days in the language of the disengaged–hopefully after the past week, we’ll come up with a new way to describe a meteoric rise to superstardom of all types, and while we’re at it, perhaps come up with something other than “killer app” to describe hot new K-12 technology products. Back

² Other differences between the real and official counts include:

• • The Real Count ranks the countries or groups of countries in order of all medals won, not just golds.  Authoritarians want the focus to be on golds because their systems so stifle individual initiative they have a difficult time fielding competitive teams across the whole range of sports involved, so of course, being who they are, they want to rig the game by pouring massive resources, a la overbearing helicopter parents, into a subset of the sports (China’s been quite explicit about this strategy), dominate the golds across the board in those sports and, in a count ordered by golds only, claim victory over their democratic foes.  But if the Olympics are really about proving the superiority of one system over the other, it seems obvious that the democracies’ approach is a better test of real-world benefits of living under one or the other.  Furthermore, the difference between the first and third best athlete out of 8 billion people is typically fractions of a second or point, barely enough (as many have pointed out) to justify the difference between the medals for the individuals involved; as a measure of differences between whole countries, such differences become ridiculously infinitesimal.  Of course, one could argue the same is true of the difference between 3rd and 5th2a, which is why in the future we hope to develop a point system based on the order of finish of all competitors in every sport.  For now, we stand by the argument that while no one result tells us anything about differences between nations, the combined results of hundreds of competitions do, which is what justified medal counts as an ideological instrument to begin with.
  • If an athlete was raised in and learned the sport in one country, but now competes for another, we split any medals they win between the countries, since this is a geopolitical count and therefore both countries deserve credit. This rule resulted in three medals split between the US and China and one split between Canada and the US.
  • We believe that in obvious cases of cheating and foul play (excluding figure skating judging) that corrupt international sports bodies (i.e. all of them) fail to correct, those wrongs should be righted in the Real Medal Count. The IOC has the power to award medals to whomever they want, but medal counts are narratives created for the people, not the athletes, and as such, we believe the people should have the final say on how they are tabulated based on their collective sense of fairness.  In the case of the 2022 Winter Games, this resulted in one short track speed skating gold medal removed from the Chinese column for obvious foul play at the finish line to win that medal, and Russia’s gold medals in team figure skating awarded to the US instead.

Why have we done and do we do all this at all? A reasonable question, deserving of at least two reasons:

• In hope that over time the real count will increasingly replace the official count, reflecting more accurately what Olympic results say ideologically, and insuring whatever propaganda benefits from this accrue to the countries and ideologies that deserve them. Based on past experience–ours and others–with changing hide-bound traditions, we believe this hope is well-placed. In the interim, if you’d like to replay the games, help build momentum for our movement, buck up small d democrats and the oppressed around the world while harassing their oppressors, contact us here and we’ll send you a full set of day-by-day Olympic results from Tokyo and Beijing, complete with editable color commentary, that you can redistribute play-by-play day-by-day or as a single binge. We’ll also make sure you get them in real time in Paris 2024 and beyond.
• Because one of the biggest mistakes we believe people (including ourselves) make over and over again is undervaluing the importance of what we think are “small things” or playing “small ball,” preferring to swing and miss at the fences over and over again, rather go the opposite way for single after single, knowing that each hit has more impact than people realize, and that collectively a lot of “small things,” like tiny ripples of hope, nearly always add up to big change, which is a lot better than striking out over and over. Back

^2a Though this is, we believe, much less often the case, and is a consequence not only of the gifts and training the athlete brings to the competition, but in many cases, how they react to what becomes inevitable defeat. It could be argued this tells us more about a country than who wins the medals (and as lifelong Bills fans and as Ukrainians [and Anglophone Cameroonians] in spirit, we would make such an argument), but in any case it’s a different measure.

³ Even before the invasion, we were frankly outraged that Ukraine, a country that’s arguably fought more for the ideal of democracy in the 21st century than any other, a country with a Jewish prime minister (a bit of Ukrainian–and American–history makes clear how stunning that is), a television comedian who beat 34 other candidates to win the office with 70% of the vote, is only rated in the Index as a “hybrid regime.”  So we traded Hungary and Poland to the autocrats for the blue & gold–though it looks like maybe Poland has had a recent scared straight moment and we’ll have to take her back.  Also, at one point in the Winter Games, the autocrats were doing so badly, we felt sorry for them, made a couple of judgment calls and traded India to them for Mexico. Based on Modi’s trajectory, it seemed like a move we were going to have to make sooner or later, and we’d like to think we know our amigos on our southern border better than a bunch of Brits (the Index was developed by The Economist) on the other side of the pond who’ve only used El Tri to goad us into backing their plays. 😉 Back

⁴  A few of the reasons why authoritarian regimes perform so poorly at what they would normally claim to be their greatest strength, team competitions, include

• Their imposition of an out-of-date (and never really in-date), top-down command and control management style primarily motivated by fear.
• Their stifling individual initiative in both society in general and on their teams, which has several deleterious consequences:
  • A lack of spontaneity, improvisation, and creativity when and where it’s needed in competition.
  • A substantial reduction in the likelihood that the teams will actually have the best, most skilled and passionate athletes in any sport on their teams
  • Substantial constriction of the breadth of sports for which they can field a credible team at all, which is why they always want the focus to be on the number of gold medals, not all medals won.

Back

⁵ This is a great example of the need for a new type of emoji for online content. This claim on behalf of political science degrees is intended to be deadpan humor, but some will think I mean it seriously and think I must be an idiot.  On the other hand, the entire rationale for deadpan humor is lost if, in order to protect oneself from this consequence, I append a winky 😉 at the end, which, in such cases, constitutes the emoji way of saying “get it? get it?” There should be a way to add an emoji that means nothing in and of itself, but when clicked on, for those who need to know (and to protect those of us who traffic in deadpan) tells the reader if the statement they just read is meant to be taken seriously or not.  As a side benefit, this could greatly reduce the number of online cancellations.  We’re working on a set of emojis needed for political discussions that we hope to make available for you to contribute to soon. Back

⁶ According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the Mandarin word for chutzpah means “unusual and shocking behavior, involving taking risks but not feeling guilty,” as opposed to “the Yiddish word for having ‘some nerve,'” or, since Chinese depends a lot on inflection, “the balls on that guy” spoken in a disapproving tone. In the case of Donald Trump, we probably need multiple versions so we don’t have to keep using it in every sentence, especially the “not feeling guilty” part. Back

⁷ Note: In fairness, we might have been focused on the wrong authoritarian nation.  Just as Russia has dragged us back into the 20th century geopolitically, they forced us to sit up and take notice Olympically, actually beating the US in the Real Medal Count for the Winter Games.  And while we thrashed them soundly in Tokyo for an overall win across the two events, 326-224, they still punched above their weight relative to us, winning 41% of the medals with only 30% of the collective population between us.  Of course, if Russia’s former doping czar, head of the Orwellian-named Anti-Doping Centre, is to be believed, we should probably take all of their medals away, at least in the Real Medal Count.  When you can’t win, cheat; the motto of autocrats everywhere. Back

⁸ If we seem to be singling out and skewering media figures with unseemly glee, it’s because, unlike virtually the entire media, the defense experts on both sides of the pond and, apparently, Vladimir Putin, the seven years we spent living in the Ukrainian Village in Chicago told us they were completely wrong about how this conflict was going to unfold. While they were projecting the number of days it would take for Kyiv to fall, we were telling anyone who would listen, e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, before the invasion, that the Ukrainians were going to “make Chechnya and Afghanistan look like picnics.” Back

⁹ Because the corporate media wouldn’t want we, the people, getting the idea that taking up arms against a repressive government without our government’s explicit blessing is a viable solution. It much better serves the needs of the establishment to share stories and videos of people as victims, helpless, in need of what established vetted, certified organizations (whom we’re welcome to contribute to rather than create our own) are willing to offer. Therefore we see hundreds of stories about refugees for every one about armed individuals and groups who’ve joined the fight. Back

¹⁰ You’d think the Russians, of all people, would understand the significance of this, given the critical role female snipers played in the decisive Battle of Stalingrad that Putin “remembers” so fondly. But you’d also think that a self-styled student of history like Vlad would recognize the ways in which Mariupol has already become a repeat of that German fiasco. Back

¹¹As big fans of Servant Of The People, we’ll acknowledge and share common ground with Lily L. that when Zelensky says something satirical, deadpan, or humorous, that yes, that’s probably just “performative.” Back

¹²The French regularly currently rank as among the most pessimistic people in the world. The Brits aren’t much more upbeat, and besides they have a popular children’s show called “It Will Never Work” Back