Fighting Words number 3: a newsletter about the things that got me steamed this week. Plus (new feature!) a short cultural/historical literacy quiz at the end. |
Item one: The world—well, most of it, anyway—condemns Putin In my Monday column (that’s my schedule—column on Monday, newsletter on Friday), I lamented the fact that up to that point, only 87 countries had voted for or said they would vote for a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Russia. Russia, as a permanent member of the council, had vetoed the resolution, causing the U.N. panjandrums to switch the venue to the General Assembly, where more countries would have to go on the record. That vote took place Wednesday. The results were more heartening: This time, 141 countries voted to deplore the invasion. Just five voted against: Russia, of course, along with Belarus, North Korea, Syria, and Eritrea. Serbia, to its credit, voted to condemn. The 35 countries that voted to abstain made for an interesting list, including India, China, Pakistan, South Africa, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam. Some are nominally far right, some nominally far left, but what they mostly all have in common is that they’re not exactly bastions of freedom. Go to Freedom House’s web page listing countries’ freedom scores, and plug in some names, remembering that a score of 72 makes a country free: China (9), Cuba (12), Pakistan (37), Iran (14), Vietnam (19), and so on. Only South Africa (79), Bolivia (66), and India (66) have decent scores. Meanwhile, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to condemn the invasion, 637–13 (yes, there are in fact more than 700 members!). So nearly everyone from far right to far left cast the right vote, but most of the 13 who voted “no” were from the far left—Greek Communists, Portuguese Communists, two members of the German Die Linke, and so on. The general grounds for opposition, as described in this article, revolved around the idea that arming Ukraine would only make things worse. I get it, I guess, but I don’t think most Ukrainians think that. Meanwhile, the GOP Putin Caucus soldiers on. The House of Representatives took a vote Wednesday to condemn the invasion, and three Republicans voted “no”: Paul Gosar of Arizona, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Matt Rosendale of Montana. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene managed to vote “yes” on this one. You know about Gosar—he’s the one who has spoken twice now at the annual event organized by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Massie came up with some excuse about sanctions harming “the innocent people of Russia.” Rosendale seems to be obsessed about the U.S. southern border. Not long ago, he introduced a bill blocking aid to Ukraine until the border is secure—i.e., never, by his standards. |
|
|
|
{{#if }} Every day, our journalists are exposing the right’s assaults on our democracy—and pushing the Democrats to go bold to preserve the republic. Here’s a special offer from The New Republic so you won’t miss their scoops and sharp analysis. |
{{/if}} |
|
|
|
Item two: Putin and nukes There’s lots of speculation about whether Putin would resort to nukes. None of us has any idea. Putin will do what Putin needs to do to (a) swallow Ukraine, which he considers not a country, and (b) maintain power. If he decides going nuclear will help with those ends, he’ll do it. If he decides it won’t, he won’t. I’ll just point this out. When we think of going nuclear, we think, as Randy Newman once put it, “Boom goes London / boom Paree.” We think of a major city being leveled with hundreds of thousands of deaths. But this is not your father’s nuclear arsenal. Consider: Little Boy (dropped on Hiroshima) had a blast power of 15 kilotons, and Fat Man (Nagasaki) 25 kilotons. But these days, the United States has a weapon that is just 8 kilotons, Slate’s Fred Kaplan reported. Russia, according to this article, may have even smaller ones. If Putin thinks he’d kill “only” about, oh, 15,000 people, and much faster than the time it would take to kill that number conventionally and bring Kyiv to its knees, well … |
Item three: Who Is Cleta Mitchell? The House January 6 committee subpoenaed Cleta Mitchell this week. Who’s that? She’s a central and longtime right-wing conspiracy fixture. Some years ago, she was advising a lot of the conservative nonprofit groups that accused the Obama-era IRS of showing political bias against them. It was all very flimsy and trumped-up, as so much of that right-wing noise is, but it served a useful purpose: It gave GOP lawmakers a club to wield against the hated IRS. These days, she’s most famous for having been on that phone call where Donald Trump was pestering Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him 11,780 votes. After the uproar over that, she resigned from her law firm, Foley & Lardner. Then, last August, since that resignation in disgrace only proved her credentials to Trumpworld, she was nominated by conservative members of a civil rights commission to be an advisory board member of the federal Election Assistance Commission. The EAC was created in 2002, in the wake of the disputed 2000 election, at a time before it became holy writ in the GOP that the only problem with U.S. elections was that too many Democrats voted in them. It’s just an advisory board; she probably can’t do much damage. But keep an eye on her. I was at a dinner with her once. She said something that, well, wasn’t openly racist or anything like that. But it was stupid and repulsive. I’ll save the exact quote for my memoirs, but I remember that when she said it, a big light bulb went off over my head: “Wow, so these people actually think like this.” |
|
|
|
Answers to last week’s questions: African geography quiz: It can be a challenge to memorize the exact location of the small countries on West Africa’s coast. Name these four countries in correct order from west to east: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal. Answer: Senegal, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana. You can take these online geography quizzes, where the countries aren’t labeled and you get to label them. I take the Africa one every so often to stay (semi) sharp. Transportation quiz: What is the fastest train in the world? No, it’s not in China! This is kind of an obsession of mine—high-speed rail, that is. One of these days, we’re going to have a big cover story on how high-speed rail could transform America economically. Answer: According to this website, it’s Japan, with a maglev train that runs up to 374 mph. China is right behind, though. Still—wow! Could you imagine if the Acela could do that? Washington to New York in an hour and change? (It’s only about 200 miles, but obviously a train can’t go 374 mph the whole time.) You could live in one city and work in the other. Pop culture quiz: Why did I headline the first item last week “Good Gawd, Y’all”? Answer: Because it was about war, and that was the catchphrase of Edwin Starr’s incredible song “War,” released in 1969 during the Vietnam War. This week’s quiz My old friend R. wrote last week to say he was glad to see the Friday quiz had returned. He was referring to a weekly Friday quiz I used to give to readers when I was at The Guardian, on a range of topics that I felt an educated person ought to know a thing or two about—different aspects of history, philosophy, culture, literature, and so on. My friend has spurred me to revive the quiz, though on a smaller scale, because I’m a little busier these days. So here’s a seven-question quizzlet on a topic of general intellectual interest. In deference to my friend, a photography critic, I’ll make it about photography, and since I wouldn’t say I know a great deal about photography, this will be pretty easy. | 1. | This artist and photographer of the early twentieth century was famous for both his photographs and what he called “photograms,” which were camera-less negative shadow images of collections of everyday objects.
A. Man Ray
B. Henri Cartier-Bresson
C. Aristide Briand
| | 2. | Which of these people was not one of the famous Life magazine photographers of its golden age?
A. Carl Mydans
B. Margaret Bourke-White
C. Pete Souza
D. Alfred Eisentstaedt
| | 3. | Joe Rosenthal was the name of the photog who took the famous Iwo Jima photo. For whom did he work?
A. The Associated Press
B. The Department of Defense
C. The Baltimore Sun
| | 4. | Martin Luther King Jr. said to photographer James “Spider” Martin: “Spider, we could have marched, we could have protested forever, but if it weren’t for guys like you it would have been for nothing. The whole world saw your pictures. That’s why the Voting Rights Act was passed.” What event did Martin photograph?
A. The March on Washington
B. Bull Connor turning his spray hoses and dogs on Black children
C. “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the Selma-to-Montgomery March
| | 5. | The artist Sally Mann’s photographs in the 1990s got her denounced by Pat Robertson—while The New Republic pronounced a book of these images to be “one of the great photograph books of our time.” What was her subject?
A. Older men and younger women in intimate poses
B. Older men and younger men in intimate poses
C. Her own children in various poses in the nude
| | 6. | Annie Liebowitz, who over three decades had photographed various rock and rollers and rebels and Hollywood celebrities, shocked many of her fans in the early 2000s by photographing:
A. Saddam Hussein
B. The leading officials of the Bush administration
C. Jeffrey Epstein
| | 7. | The photography staff of Reuters won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for their photos of:
A. Donald Trump rallies
B. Hong Kong protesters
C. Exhausted E.R. nurses and doctors |
Answers next week. |
If you like what you read, sign up for this weekly newsletter free below. See you next week. —Michael Tomasky, editor |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
