While I defended Tucker Carlson after his interview with Vladamir Putin, some of the other “Russia” coverage didn’t sit well. The trip to the supermarket reeked of propagandist posturing. It stank of Western elites and their love affair with Stalin’s Russia. Putin is a bad man. Look, groceries!
I think the interview was necessary, perhaps groundbreaking, and a great get for any journalist, especially for the ones who whined like babies because it wasn’t them. Many have interviewed strong men with violent reputations to the jealous applause of their peers, never working so hard to push them off a cliff afterward as they did Tucker Carlson.
He’s got the bigger audience, so that (no doubt) wrankles as well. An audience that lays claim to a sense of awareness about truth and media that others allegedly lack (but then don’t they all). And did they buy the supermarket schtick, or were they savvy enough to get it? Putin was never going to let Carlson report on post-Soviet-era living, poverty, police-state militarism, or any reality outside the one that would paint the best picture. This is Russia. Those vignettes were probably part of the deal. You will supplement the interview with reports from places the Russian government selected. You do this then we let you go home.
I’m sure many were savvy enough to see through it, including Tucker, though we never heard him say that (unless I missed it).
It is also safe to assume many were not savvy enough. To be fair, we’ve all tripped over or fallen for something. Wow, that is exactly what I wanted to hear: the affirmation, confirmation bias, and even edification—the desire to see reality align with one’s feelings or at least suspicions. Who doesn’t want that? It makes you smile a little at a time when cheer seems to be in short supply.
The corollary to that might be this hurts my political enemy, so it is my friend, the enemy being a person, project, party, idea, nation, or which way the toilet paper should scroll off the roll. Anyone who disagrees is trapped in an echo chamber.
Just be careful when talking about other people’s echo chambers that the sound you make is not coming from your own. There’s no avoiding this, by the way, but you can assure yourself if you are willing to admit it. On the opposite side, you don’t want to live your life trusting nothing and no one. That’s a tough row to hoe. It can make you bitter and resentful. Angry. It is best to be a happy warrior with a honed sense of skepticism about everything, including what you think you believe.
Did you buy the Russian Supermarket thing? Did you want to? Did you think there were hundreds of these sprawled across what passes for the once-oppressed Soviet landscape? Does it matter? You know there’s no democracy there. No Republic. Putin won the way Saddam Hussein did, and Ukraine is a lot like that now (or again), and regardless of the landscape, post-peace may stay that way.
Russia at least has fake elections; Ukraine doesn’t have any.
Is that a win for Putin or NATO? Was any of it? That depends on who you believe about the what, why, when, where, and how. The Ukrainian people didn’t win, though they might walk away, those that can still walk, with less territory but security concessions (and fewer secret CIA bases and Biolabs).
And maybe some Democracy, not that democracy is all that and a bag of chips. It’s a part of something better, but mob rule describes Russia and more than a few other places where freedom doesn’t exist as we understand it.
In the US, many of the same people whose meddling is responsible for the mess in Ukraine would like to get rid of Democracy here. They talk about it so much that you know they hate it. Democracy used to be about one person, one vote. These days, Democracy is about counting however many votes it takes to protect uniparty institutions and elevating them above the people so that when these same institutions have destroyed faith in Democracy, the people will look to them for some semblance of security and give up freedoms in the bargain. That’s a popular narrative in my echo chamber.
The urge to discard rights (usually someone else’s) in the interest of the appearance of stability is strong. Russia works that way. They have not shuffled off the totalitarian coil. So, Tucker’s sojourn looks like San Francisco before and after Xi came to town. A shithole spit-shined for a moment in time. Proof that the state can pretend to get things done for appearances but has no interest in it other than as a hobby. Tidying up for guests. It’s an illusion we can make into reality if we want to believe it badly enough.
Or is it a truth we refuse to believe? That’s the fun part—working out the difference while saddled with the likelihood that our stereotypes or echo chambers are filtering all of it to the detriment of further inquiry. And is that prejudice or discrimination? No, they are not the same thing.
Authors Note: When I started this, I had a different idea about where it was meant to go. It landed somewhere else, and not necessarily well, but I stopped trying to fix it. My apologies if I’ve left you wondering what my point was. There is some value in what’s here, just not the one I thought I was looking for, which, in the end, might be a better thing.
