Lovin' On Russia

AH, DISTINCTLY I REMEMBER, as E. A. Poe once said, when it was the left wingers of America who were afflicted with the love of Russia. That was in the old days, when Russia was still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the infamous USSR, the "evil empire", as the Gipper put it. Before the big break up of 1990, when President Yeltsin was for a few awkward moments held virtually at gunpoint in his own office by insurrectionists. Before the fifteen satellite proto-countries fled the communist coop, and became Georgia, BelaRus, and all the rest, countries in their own right. What the American left idolized was of course nothing other than mandated economic and social equality, an ideal which, lofty though it may have been, never really existed in reality. Arguably, it never can. But, whatever, that was then, as we say, and this is now. Now, it is the turn of the American right wing to admire all things Russian. It comes to mind that a couple of years ago, at the semi-annual gathering together of CPAC (conservative political action committee), the audience struck up the chant: "Rush- ah! Rush-ah!". We now know that all it takes to turn the American right around, to inspire admiration in what they once despised, is to convert from communism to oligarchial, top heavy, capitalism, concentrated heavily. But really it isn't the conversion to convoluted "capitalism" which throbs the hearts of our far right in the U.S.. In any event, to describe the current economic paradigm as "capitalism" is no more accurate than to use the same descriptor for the American economy. Capitalism, after all, at least in Adam Smithian theory, involves some competition in the free market place, something other than mere monopolies. What American conservatives like about Russia doesn't exist either;it is a fantasy. American conservatives have somehow gotten the crazy notion that Russia is a lilly white Christian country. American conservatives live in a country of multi-ethnic diversity and encroaching secularism. That, they do not like. A huge majority of immigrants entering their Christian dominion are poor people "of color". Like Donald Trup openly stated, it would be better if more people came to the Uited States from Norway, rather than, as he put it, "shit hole" countries. The irony is in the demographics. Fact: Russia is a far more ethnically diverse society than America, with a much larger Islamic population, people of all shades of skin color,many languages, many religions, religions other than the one true one. If the conservative Christian kingdom of God in the U.S. would do a few minutes of research, they would become aware of this. But that would be expecting too much, expecting the American political right to become fact based. And, so what? for a segment of society which indulges itself in fantasies generally, believing Russia to be something other than what it actually it is really not so extreme. These, after all, are the people who tell us that a pesidential election was stolen, that something they call a "deep state" quietly runs things from behind the scenes, and that there is only one true religion. What will they think of next?