As Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez boarded the vessel, his beefy bodyguards tried to follow him up the gangplank. They were stopped by their equally beefy Russian counterparts. The Venezuelans, who presumably spoke no Russian, tried to push their way through. The Russians, who presumably spoke no Spanish, fought back.Why are they thuggish (a word she deployed twice)? From the description, it doesn't seem like either side did anything that the Secret Service wouldn't do. Is being the bodyguard of a president with authoritarian leanings a thuggish occupation in and of itself? By that logic, would a Secret Service agent go from being heroic (or at least admirable) under Kennedy to shady a few years later under Nixon, and then back to admirable for Ford and Reagan?
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And yet -- the lingering image of those thuggish bodyguards, shouting at one another in mutual incomprehension, remains weirdly appropriate.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Nitpicking
Anne Applebaum slips this passage into a column about Russia's forgettable imperial designs:
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2 comments:
Applebaum "slips" into unbridled hawkishness on a very regular basis. She managed to build up significant reserves of credibility by virtue of writing a book on the Soviet Gulag - something everyone can agree was A Bad Thing. This seems to have distracted people from her rather un-nuanced, McCain-iac view (smart-but-hawkish McCain, not Schuenemann-neocon McCain) on many foreign policy issues to the point that even the reliably liberal NYRB started publishing her. She's no moron but it's no surprise to see her casually "slip" into such a posture.
Yeah I think that's absolutely right. I've been reading her regularly for maybe four years or so, and I read Gulag shortly after I started reading her column, and it took a long time for her hawkishness to surface, at least to me. If I had a week to kill and no way to kill it, I'd be interested in rereading a lot of those columns to look for earlier hawkish signs.
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