Ope Pardon, No. 6: War Stories

My habit, or the habit I am trying to form, is to write these on Wednesdays and/or Thursdays, and then on Saturday and/or Sunday, edit and polish and make whatever I initially wrote 10-15% more coherent. As you may recall, Russia invaded Ukraine this past Thursday and the rough draft I wrote that day, some of which I've kept, amounted to a longwinded explanation for why I wasn't writing a "proper" (i.e., entertainment- or personal life-related) newsletter this week. This is mostly still that, just with three more days' worth of reflection.

You see, I had a lot of topics I wanted to write about this week — the Academy Awards' increasingly unhinged self-sabotage, texting habits, sadness, John Mulaney — but I couldn't get my mind to focus on any of those things, in part because I am in the last days of unemployment and I am still at liberty to scroll Twitter far, far too much but also because war is objectively a more attention-consuming subject than West Side Story. So, I have seen what feels like all the tweets about Russia's invasion of Ukraine: All the bad takes, so many different types of bad takes, but also the seemingly smart takes — which, who knows, could be revealed to be bad takes if another, smarter-seeming take convinces me so — and of course all the tweets about how you don't need to have a take right now. It's okay to be silent, a 100 different people not being silent told me. (And here I am: Not taking their advice anyways.) To be clear, I do not do all this scrolling uncritically. I know I am in my bubble, but it is a bubble I have carefully curated and still, I check accounts I don't recognize and prioritize articles from publishers who employ fact-checkers and mostly avoid resharing anything myself at all.

(I think part of the reason I don't worry about misinformation is that I am not a visual learner nor am I on TikTok, where the worst of the misrepresentative content seems to be. And because we live in a brain-meltingly bad world, the video and clips are not fake as much as they are simply from different wars we should ALSO be mad about and ALSO not respond to with further military intervention. But I digress.)

The onslaught of takes, unsurprisingly, got exponentially worse when the Americans woke up Thursday morning and proceeded to make the war, as is our wont, about us. I'm not trying to undervalue the significance of the U.S. deciding to go to war or not, but America isn't always the main character in every global story and the gymnastics required to find the angle to make it so can be...exhausting. To the extent what's happening in Ukraine is about America, the tweets I saw seemed to want to litigate to what degree the U.S. was or was not responsible for knocking down the one or many dominoes that led to Putin's invasion. How much was the U.S. to blame, as if there can only be one self-important imperialist global power at fault.

I will be honest: Who is to blame or how we got here — beyond the immediate and obvious: Putin — is of less interest to me than how we move forward and end it. Would I be surprised to discover Putin's interest in Ukraine could be traced back to some fuck-shit U.S. foreign policy? No, not all. A lot of global conflict tends to involve that. But I feel I would need to do a lot of research to develop an educated opinion on the causes of this conflict, which wouldn't change the fact it's happening or necessarily change my opinion of what needs to be done.

(Plus, on the list of live crises, I feel my recreational research time is better spent understanding the election in the country I reside in, preparing for the election in the country I vote in, and continuing to minimize the damage I do to the vulnerable in the pandemic we are still living in.)

For what it's worth, from what I've seen, I've landed on what feels to me to be the simple position that Western and U.S., in particular, escalation of and intervention in the war in Ukraine will only hurt more people and the response of the U.N. and EU should be to strangle the shit out of Putin and his cronies with personal sanctions and asset seizure. I find the argument convincing that going after their assets is a far more effective strategy than escalating war or sanctioning citizens whose lives and livelihoods Putin has never shown any semblance of care for in the past. I'm fine with the decision of allies, including the U.S., to send military equipment in the meantime, largely because it was a direct request from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It's nice that the gang finally got around to cutting off Russia's SWIFT banking access and sanctioning Putin personally, but it would have been nice if they had wasted less time lighting up buildings in blue and yellow.

There is also something undeniably invigorating about the fuck-around-and-find-out spirit of not only Zelenskyy's response but that of many Ukrainians who chose to meet the moment by taking up arms, digging in their heels and defending their homes. That "we're all here" video goes very hard. (The music was added by the user who did the subtitles.) Positive national pride is a novelty to see coming from a country where national pride has not been used for good... possibly ever in our entire existence.

This is, if the analysts I've read are to be believed, perhaps the greatest of Putin's miscalculations: He was too vain to realize it wasn't 1992 and Ukraine has a real sense of national identity and pride, along with no desire to return to the USSR. He underestimated Zelenskyy, too, who either now dies a martyr or continues to lead as a hero — in either case, someone the people can rally around. What Zelenskyy has done in four days is an impressive feat of leadership, or social media or propaganda or however you want to see it, because I can't necessarily confirm the Ukrainian people are as hype about Zelenskyy as Twitter is, though he was democratically elected and hasn't fled and appears to be fighting himself and one assumes that counts for something for the people still there.

(Hell, it's also rich that he's basically embodying the leadership fever dream of every Trump supporter — a strongman-type giving out assault rifles and calling for armed resistance in the name of nationalism — but they have to come up with increasingly absurd criticisms because they are obliged to be on the other side. That said, I am also mildly concerned because I fear that if the story of Zelensky's background as an actor/comedian gets picked up in the U.S., we might actually elect Chris Pratt in 2024.)

But this fervor is also unsettling because no story, but especially no war story, is ever that simple. While Zelenskyy is inspiring his nation to fight and the world to retweet, his army is also allegedly conscripting all men 18 to 60 at the border who are trying to escape the war. (One American freelance journalist tweeted about men being forcibly dragged from their cars or families, but I haven't seen it reported elsewhere.) It's unsettling because even for the Ukrainians who voluntarily joined the fight, "voluntarily" is very relative. Surely, this would not have been their choice of weekend activity had you asked on Monday. Every declaration that we've never seen a people resist like this or that this is an attack on "civilized" people is erasure at best and racism in truth. Every feel-good story about European countries throwing open their doors to welcome Ukrainian refugees, no questions asked, comes with the knowledge that that is not the policy for refugees from other countries and other wars. The stories of African refugees at the border being forced to wait longer to cross or routinely sent to the back of the line are hardly ones of humanitarian solidarity. There is optimism to be found in the collective response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to be sure, but these are largely the same politicians, institutions and pundits they were last week.

I loved war stories when I was young, or rather, I loved stories about the experience of war — I never much gave a shit about strategy. Vietnam was my favorite, if one can call a war a favorite, but coming of age when I did, I grew fascinated with America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. The absolute wreckage they caused on everyone's psyche, though I am embarrassed to admit that what I was reading at the time was mostly the stories of American soldiers, which also weren't exactly pro-war. For a period, I thought I wanted to be a war journalist. Now, war stories mostly make me sad. Even the so-called good ones. Because, for me, it's too hard to take a singular story of perseverance out of the context of the broader tragedy. Which I know can be said about just about any story of the human experience, but for me, it's especially pronounced with war stories.

There are, it seems to me, no good war stories because there are no good wars — there is only death and destruction we've deemed acceptable in the effort to end something worse. I am not a pacifist and I believe in the use of justified violence, and I know that what I consider justified probably differs from what you do, and that is, of course, the crux of any question of war. I am also moved by the resilience of the Ukrainian people, impressed with Zelenskyy's leadership and cautiously content with EU/UN response. But I find it hard to celebrate the stories even still. Better than the alternative, to be sure, but still so knotted up in the web of geopolitical cruelties.

I don't imagine any of this to be profound or unique, of course, but, in any case, it felt more worthwhile to share than a rant about people who take five days to text back.