WhirledView

Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich - a Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

Not long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan various versions of the following joke circulated in Moscow:

An American and a Soviet were comparing notes about their respective modes of travel. The Soviet asked the American how he got the work. The American answered: I drive my green car to the office. Then the Soviet asked the American how he got to the theater. The American answered: I drive my yellow car to the theater. Finally, the Soviet asked the American his mode of travel when he went abroad. The American responded: I drive my red car when I go abroad.

The American then asked the Soviet the same three questions: the Soviet responded, I take the metro to get to the office. I take the metro when I go to the theater. And I drive my tank when I go abroad.

By March, the not-so-well-kept secret of the Soviet invasion hastily embarked upon to prop up a flailing, incompetent and vicious Communist dictator in Kabul had begun to show results - just not the ones the Kremlin had planned.

Instead, Soviet soldiers were being sent home in coffins sometimes arriving at the dead of night and buried secretly in graves with no indication that the soldier had been killed in war - simply that he had died fulfilling his international duty.

The first evidence we at the US Embassy in Moscow had of the effects of the invasion was a report from Kiev by an American couple who had come across a number of strangely marked fresh graves of young men in a local cemetery when they had been searching for Baba Yaar but had been sent in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, I remember Russians living in Moscow of every economic class desperately trying to find places in institutes or universities for their sons so they would receive student deferments and thereby avoid or at least delay being sent to the killing fields.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghan War, a collection of heart-wrenching stories from the survivors of that war and of families whose children or spouses died fighting in it. The term “Zinky boys” refers to the zinc coffins the deceased’ bodies were transported in before they were loaded into planes and often unceremoniously delivered to their loved ones at home for burial.

Alexievich, an investigative journalist from Belarus, collected these stories through copious interviews. She first published the collection in 1991 in Russian. It was translated into English by Julia and Robin Whitby in 1992. The book was controversial in Russia from the beginning - meeting with a decidedly mixed response. Alexievich concludes it with some of the negative comments she received.

Alexievich only won the Nobel Prize for literature this past fall, a prize awarded a writer - not just for one book but for demonstrating a consistent record of exemplary writing over many years.

On January 17, I heard Shostakovich’s “Fifth Symphony” performed by the Santa Fe Symphony under the baton of guest conductor Brian McAdams. The performance was excellent;  the piece - by its nature - disturbing.   It is a powerful, troubled and mostly discordant piece in the key of D minor. Shostakovich wrote the symphony in 1937 just as his country was enduring Stalin’s purges and Hitler was on the march in Europe.

As the symphony nears its conclusion, the timpanist emits - not the familiar drum roll - but a desperately loud and throbbing solo of one solitary note after another pounding into the listener like the sound of a death-knell or a chorus of jack-boots smashing down in unison on hard cobblestone pavement.  Perhaps a harbinger for the years to come.  This is the same emotional pounding I experienced reading Zinky Boys – one tragic story after another proceeding in rapid-fire succession until the book finally ends in exhausted relief.

It was clear from these stories that the Soviet Army had been far from prepared to fight a guerrilla war abroad and certainly not one in the high and rugged mountains to its south. Alexievich’s interviewees describe from day one the lack of adequate clothing, food, medicine, ammunition and equipment, the inability to communicate with the local population and the rampant corruption and drug use that enveloped the Soviet military bases there. These weaknesses were there from the invasion’s beginning well before the US started to equip the mujahedeen. They were never overcome.

Instead of preparing adequately for a war of choice fought in the name of international Communism, the Kremlin had invested in heavy tanks designed for warfare against NATO forces in Eastern and Central Europe just as NATO was acquiring new technologies and better weapons to make those tanks obsolete.

The lack of Soviet preparedness to fight the war in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the Finnish Winter War of 1939 when Stalin’s troops invaded its neighbor for no good reason during the coldest and snowiest part of winter in clothing ill-equipped for the harsh climate and easily visible to Finnish forces - themselves clothed in camouflage white. The Soviet troops fought under weak leadership. Its ranks had been politicized and decimated by the purges just a year or two before whereas the outnumbered Finns - fighting alone - had superior military leadership.

Whether the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 caused the downfall of the Soviet Union just a decade later is still disputed but in the end its effects on Soviet society were traumatic and the ill-fated decision made by an aging and poorly educated Politburo was certainly a contributing factor.

Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, New York & London: WW Norton and Company, 1992.

The Military Is Only Part of the Story

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For the most part, the Republicans (including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan) listened to the President’s State of the Union speech with stony faces. Many frowned throughout. During his quite eloquent remarks there were a number of points at which a smattering of Republican applause would hardly have violated anyone’s deeply held principles. The vaguer references to cooperation and bipartisanship come to mind. Instead the Republicans treated the President as they have ever since he took office, not as the legitimate choice of the American people, but as a non-person best ignored when not targeted for insult.

This offensive behavior is totally consistent with the primary Republican goal of the past eight years, not to serve the best interests of the U.S., but to ensure a failed Obama presidency. In fact, the more this administration has accomplished in spite of incessant stonewalling—the Affordable Care Act, the nuclear pact with Iran, a respectable economic recovery, etc.—the greater the reactive implacability. Not even when Obama’s envoys put together an exchange to get a number of Americans released from custody in Iran did the Republicans allow the least hint of appreciation. Just carp, carp, carp. If ever there was an example of grace under pressure, it has been Barack Obama during his two terms of office.

Why has the President been a target of egregious disrespect? We all know it isn’t just ideology. The Republicans’ vow of total non-cooperation has been a symbolic lynching, a unified front designed to nullify this presidency. Meanwhile, even if racism is far from dead in this country, Barack Obama’s ascendency has also shown that many Americans have ceased to judge a person by the color of his skin. That’s something to feel good about.

Speaking of respect and the lack of it, as the President entered and left the chamber there seemed to me to be a striking disproportion of Black legislators seeking to shake his hand or have their programs signed. Make of that what you will.

But let’s get back to the State of the Union speech. One passage alone had Republicans and Democrats alike rising in shared hand-clapping adulation. That passage paid homage to the military. Due appreciation is no doubt warranted, but this lock step genuflection (so to speak) has happened too often during Presidential addresses, as if the armed forces are more important to the safety and well-being of the American people than all other branches and agencies of government put together. They are not. Moreover, in that direction lies the loss of democracy. Look around the world and draw the logical conclusion re excessive deference to the military.

So, let’s pause to mention some other public servants to whom we owe deep gratitude for keeping us safe and prosperous. Among the least respected of these, I can’t help thinking, are the diplomats. Renouncing anything like a normal American life for themselves and their families and working often in uncomfortable or dangerous situations, diplomats contrive day in, day out to advance American interests. They also negotiate treaties on everything from the price of rice to eliminating weapons of mass destruction. Such negotiations take infinite skill and mature judgement and those working on the pact with Iran, for example, have accomplished wonders for U.S. security.  And for Israel's, although Bibi Netanyahu couldn’t hold his conservative coalition together if he dared to acknowledge this.

Diplomats are dedicated to protecting American interests without going to war, which is probably why they seldom appear as heroic, central characters in popular culture formats. Blockbusters are built around battle scenes not conference tables. As for quiet diplomacy, it saves lives. It also saves billions and billions of dollars, although these economies are systematically undervalued even by deficit-consciousness Republicans. In the foyer at the State Department there is a plaque listing the many American diplomats who have given their lives for their country, but no one seems to care, which suggests that the only reason the Republicans carry on about Ambassador Chris Stevens is that they can use his death in Bengazi to beat up on Hillary Clinton.

The militarists among us also forget that an army is only as good as the economy that backs it, which implies a need to be grateful to the millions of American civilians—teachers, farmers, scientists and factory assemblers as well as bankers and tech barons, most of whom will never wear a uniform. The Soviet Union didn’t fall apart because Moscow lacked a large, competent military. It collapsed because its economy was in shambles.

And may I now suggest a little appreciation for the most despised categories of all—the politicians and the civil servants. Often, as today, our elected representatives disappoint us, but the Arab spring has shown us what happens when a country lacks a sufficient cadre of people with well-honed political and administrative skills. It’s fairly easy to bring down a government, a lot harder to put decent one together and run it. Iraq is a case in point.  Furthermore, like the idealistic people in America’s Occupy Movement, those wonderful demonstrators in the streets of Cairo were totally unprepared to contest elections and organize power when Mubarak fell. Result: another general, a Mubarak clone. Bye bye dreams of democracy! Elsewhere, as in post-Gaddafi Libya, militias contest for territory and power. In yet other chaotic countries I.S.I.S. is trying to create a caliphate.

There are indeed self-serving and incompetent politicians in this world, the U.S. not excepted, but societies need political and administrative specialists as much as they need professional engineers and physicians, which is why the current state of presidential politics in the U.S. baffles me. People who wouldn’t let an amateur touch their electronics-heavy new cars imagine that any old outsider can run the government. For that matter, should some outsider win the presidency, who will sustain him and carry out his policies? Those hated civil servants. Those despised diplomats.

Believe it or not, I am not running down the military. What I am saying is that military men (and women) are specialists, highly trained for one important purpose: to wage war when all else has failed, to be prepared to do so should that happen and to do so only when in possession of orders from the civilian leaders whom U.S. citizens have elected. Naturally, they must be accorded warm public appreciation when the job is well done. Those who have died must be buried with full honors. Those who are wounded or otherwise harmed must receive first rate rehabilitation administered in a timely, ungrudging fashion. While in uniform, service men and women should be protected from loan sharks, and when they need help in transitioning back into civilian society they should not be shunted into for-profit diploma mills that prepare them for nothing at tax payers’ expense. Perhaps a truly thankful bipartisan Congress could do something about ending such entrepreneurial exploitation.

 

Sri Lanka and the Scars of War: A Review Article

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Today’s Sri Lanka is the ancient land of Serendip, which gave rise to the modern English word serendipity. Sri Lanka is still a stunningly beautiful island surrounded by white sand beaches that rise up through tropical forests into blue mountains famous for their delicate tea. (When I moved to Moscow from Colombo, I think the true source of my popularity was the tea I brought with me.)

But who thinks of Sri Lanka in those idyllic terms anymore? The battle ravaged landscape in the Tamil north as well as the ethnically-mixed East is still disfigured by the debris of war, and the emotional wounds are far from healing, as Samanth Subramanian reports in his new book This Divided Island: Life, Death and the Sri Lankan War. His account is based almost entirely on interviews with those who survived. The fact that Subramanian is a Delhi-based journalist whose family name reveals his roots in India’s state of Tamilnadu both helped and hindered his research. He speaks Tamil fluently, yet everywhere he was instantly recognized as hailing from the big meddler next door, which is to say, India. But I don’t think his heritage unduly biases his book

The seeds of war in Sri Lanka were sown by British officials who used census categories to divide and rule their colony of Ceylon. The more immediate cause was the post-colonial Sinhala Only Act of 1959, which purposely omitted recognition of Tamil as a second official language. As a result, young Tamils found it hard to pass university exams and obtain government jobs. By 1976 Velupillai Prabakaran had founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a militia that innovated some now standard terrorist tactics. Assassination via suicide bomb, for example. In 1983 a Tiger ambush of an army convoy triggered anti-Tamil riots extensive enough to transform into a civil war. That war ended in 2009, with a protracted siege that culminated in a battle that may be classified as a war crime. Did the Tamils use civilians as shields for their last stand? Did the Army disregard the tens of thousands of trapped civilians in the way of their bombardment? (Or both, as I believe?) Subramanian visited Sri Lanka in 2011, when nothing like genuine reconstruction was well under way, a process he found to be badly contaminated by an officially-sanctioned “erasure” of all evidence of the Tamils’ millenia-long occupation of the island. (This Divided Island provides a very useful, far more detailed time line.)

When I arrived in Sri Lanka to serve as Information Officer at the U.S.I.S. post in Colombo in the mid 1980s, the alienation of Tamils from Sinhalese was already well advanced. Anti-Tamil riots had been so violent that Tamils, included the secretary to our Public Information Officer, had been herded into concentration camps for their own protection. Back home, back in the office, she was still in a state of shock. How could this be happening? My own secretary, who belonged to the Sinhalese majority, was just as distressed. She’d gone to school with Tamil girls. They’d become friends for life, they'd thought, but gradually, among the Sinhalese, it had become suspect for anyone to have Tamil friends. The two communities, once interwoven, were being wrenched apart.

I’d thought when I was assigned to Colombo that I’d be able to study Buddhism with some deeply respected dharma teachers. As it happened, I couldn’t. For one thing, I didn’t see how I could do my job if I gave the appearance of partiality. Worse, I was shocked by the fact that monks, in a frenzy of Sinhalese nationalism, had contorted ancient texts in order to take up arms. As Subramanian puts it: “It was an odd twist of the Buddhist principle of renunciation—not a renunciation of violence for the larger good of the soul, but a renunciation of non-violence for the larger good of the Buddhist nation.” In some of the most interesting sections of This Divided Island Subramanian shows how a foundational Buddhist text known as the Mahavamsa provided justification for an all but genocidal war against Sri Lanka’s Tamils, whose presence historically and in our time was construed to threaten the very survival of Buddhism. Does this contradict the contention that Tamils had no ancient presence on the island? You’d think so, but fanatics often have a hard time with logic.

After I left Sri Lanka, the situation got worse and worse. Where, earlier, Tamils had clamored for equal access to educational and economic opportunities, the Tigers demanded that the entire Tamil population support an increasingly bloody campaign for a separate Tamil state in the North and East. Civil War was the inevitable result, and once again the Tigers were in the terrorist vanguard. They governed the territories under their control with all the finesse of today’s I.S.I.S. “Far from being consummately beloved by their people,” Subramanian writes, “the Tigers started to inspire...fear and revulsion.” As one of his interviewees put it: “The heart weakens without democracy, and there was no democracy within the Tigers. They antagonized their brothers by killing them.” And all the while they were singing “the siren song of the tyrant,” which is: “what we’re doing is for the greater good.” Thus, according to Subramanian, many Tamils learned “a useful life lesson: anybody who asked you to trust them despite ‘minor’ infractions was not to be trusted at all.”

Arriving in Colombo two years after the end of the war, Samanth Subramanian set about making friends, establishing trust and interviewing people. His method in This Divided Island is to allow us to see the Civil War and its aftermath through the eyes and memories of people who had, in so many different ways, been caught up in the savagery. “Underneath it all [the horror of war] there were Sri Lankans trying to live regular lives: earning a living, sending their children to school, writing novels, playing cricket, making lunch....A regular day came to involve keeping your children from being conscripted by the Tigers or being wary about buses that might have bombs planted within them....I went to Sri Lanka to discover what became of life before, during and after the [three] decades of war, and to find out what the conflict had done to the country’s soul.” He succeeds brilliantly at this task.

Subramanian also wanted to “see if any embers remained to ignite the blaze all over again.” What he found , unfortunately, was a vengeful mood among Singhalese and resentment still simmering among Tamils. Although the vainglorious war President Mahinda Rajapaksa has since failed to win reelection and his successor is, reputedly, a more moderate member of the same party, the process of rapprochement between the Singhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil minority (to say nothing of the also victimized Christians and Muslims) remains far from complete. When the wounds of the savage American Civil War are not fully healed, how could anyone expect the mood of the island to be cheery and forgiving?

Iris Scamming: The American Visa Process

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

They’re everywhere among us, doing essential work, sending their kids to school, dreaming of something better, but statistics on undocumented immigrants are pretty fuzzy, which shouldn’t be surprising. Anyone who has entered the U.S. without papers is obviously not going to be jumping up and down and shouting, “Here I am. Come and count me! Come and get me!”

For the most part, in fact, the only undocumented entrants who are likely to come to notice are the small percentage who are stupid enough to run afoul of the law (or of their neighbors) once they’re safely far from the border. As a result, vote-seeking Republican xenophobes can turn the few into a norm and seek electoral support based on fear-mongering.

Conversely, in regard to foreigners who’ve entered the U.S. via a notoriously rigorous U.S. visa system, the statistics must surely be pretty complete, a well-maintained compendium of relevant information. Seems logical in a well-organized government, doesn’t it?
So I assumed, anyway, until a few days ago. That’s when Homeland Security Department officials confessed to Congress that they “don’t know” how many foreign visitors overstay their visas every year.

I had to read that twice. It seemed impossible. It seemed absurd. Getting a U.S. visa often involves the submission of countless documents in preparation for a torturous inquisition conducted by an eagle-eyed, hard-hearted, deeply skeptical official, to say nothing of a long wait, oftentimes under unpleasant conditions. Why would our immigration apparatus put so much effort into screening people wishing to study, travel or work in the U.S., in each case issuing a visa with an explicit expiry date, then turn the lucky entrants loose, to comply or not, according to whim—or artfully concealed original intent? Re the latter, surely by now the whole universe of prospective immigrants must know that once you enter the U.S. on any type of visa the odds are good that you can stay forever, undetected.

Here’s one possible explanation for the sloppy statistics: officialdom has so much faith in the thoroughness of its laborious screening process that what recipients do after they enter hardly matters. Back home? Still here? Who cares? The birth rate being what it is, good people are always welcome. Very touching.

Another explanation has to do with money. Serious exit processing would cost money, and no non-military agency in the U.S. is adequately funded. So, the great disappearing visa-holder scandal may be a consequence of short-sighted cost-cutting by a U.S. government that’s afraid to tax its citizens to pay for essential services responsibly rendered by well-trained professionals. Evidence of this: amongst other blatherings those red-faced officials undergoing a Congressional grilling very strenuously passed the buck. Airlines, they whined, are reluctant to accept the cost of screening departing visitors with any degree of seriousness—as if the job of handling departures belongs with the private sector in the first place. In fact, I’ve always been astonished that airline personnel are the only ones to examine (well, glance at) the travel documents of passengers departing the U.S. on international flights.

Above all, the excuse for losing track of non-immigrant visa holders leaned heavily on the great promise (and the current lack) of a screening system backed up by a storehouse of biometric data. Think cheat-proof—at least, for now—iris scans.

Iris scans. That’s the goal, and it will transform immigration statistics, according to hopeful immigration officials. Everyone will be accounted for.

Maybe so, but requiring iris-scans might not be so hot for tourism. Imagine how privacy-minded European tourists will react when they learn they’ll have to provide unique biodata info in order to visit New York or gaze into the depths of the Grand Canyon. The Taj Mahal or the Forbidden City anyone? For that matter, why should anyone of us trust the insidiously over-reaching U.S. government with such vital personal data? Not in this post Snowden age, anyway. Think of the many purposes to which unprincipled U.S. security officials might, in secrecy, put a collection of iris-scans? I, for one, am not in the least tempted to enable an iris-scan in order to to circumvent the time-consuming, TSA inspection line at the airport—and I stash my passport in a RFID-defeating envelope when I travel.

But wait. Maybe the paranoia is misplaced. Maybe we’re looking at another example of technological overreach, the romantic quest for an application-loaded, state-of-the-art, absolutely “perfect” system of the sort routinely proposed by private sector contractors enjoying cost plus deals fostered by Congressional enablers beholden to said contractors? The more complex the system the bigger the profit.

So let’s step back a bit. Was there really no way to keep track of visa holders before the iris-scanning became the solution du jour? Was it technologically impossible—or just not sexy enough, like maintenance? There’s never enough money, it seems, to maintain roads or bridges or schools in this country. Why? Because maintenance, like housekeeping, is boring. More accurately, it isn’t very lucrative when it comes to attracting big donors for the re-election campaign.

But a solution loaded with bells and whistles and requiring years to develop and install—wow! Get the bidding under way! Never mind that overly complex systems do indeed take forever to develop, are very tricky to operate and have a crash-score well above boring workhorse solutions.

In fact, such a practical, bare bones system could probably (technologically speaking) have been put into place many many years ago. Picture it: Every visa has a number and an expiration date, and each visa (with vital associated data) is entered into a master log when issued. Thereafter, the visa number is noted when its possessor enters the U.S. And when he or she leaves. If the expiry date occurs with no record of extension or departure, a search is initiated. To make this system work, some additional office workers would be required and departures would have to be handled as seriously as entries, but the investment would surely be worthwhile. What we’ve got now is clearly a charade. Hypocrisy does not a healthy government make.

Would this simple system guarantee that no person of ill intent would ever manage to enter the country legally? No. Neither will iris scans, unless every person in the world is scanned and every police record is fed into the system and everyone managing the system is pure-as-the-driven-snow honest. You get the picture. A police state—and police states tend to be run by sadists, not saints.

Iris scan or iris scam, not the kind of country I want to live in.

 

National Minorities in Putin’s Russia: Diversity and Assimilation by Federica Prino - A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991,  the Russian Federation was left with much of its territory but far fewer of its ethnic minorities.  Within Russia, most minority regions became republics along the lines of those lost.  At the time, the country's population was predominantly Russian (then about 85% Russian to 15% minorities.  Now it is closer to 80% to 20%).  But the country's greater homogeneity did not end Russia's ethnic troubles.  The Russian government thereafter fought two wars with the independently driven Chechens living in the North Caucasus in order to retain this restive region under Russian control.

Although the Russian military has prevailed for the time being - there have been recent reports that to do so the Kremlin bought off Kadyrov, the Chechen chieftain or warlord of their choice who has been subsequently ruling the Chechen Republic.  Nevertheless the Kremlin's decision to let Chechen fighters leave Russia to join ISIS (becoming among its most battle-hardened and fearless troops) may well result in another shooting war once these Islamized and angry fighters return home from the Middle East.

As was the case with the former Soviet Republics, many of Russia's minority republics are located on the country's periphery - but not all.  Federica Prino's book, National Minorities in Putin's Russia:  Diversity and Assimilation soon to be published by Rutledge, is a study of the relationships between the Kremlin and three of those republics since Putin began his second term as President.

Print chose to focus on two republics located in Russia's interior and one with a lengthy border with Finland in good part because the data for them was more accessible than it would have been for the far more troublesome and dangerous North Caucasus.  She ably describes the push-pull phenomena that exist between the center and the three republics, the imprecise relationships that exist, the ways in which the center has been able to co-opt local leaders as well as the importance and continuing influence of the historical legacy remaining from the Soviet Union's handling of its far more diverse, far larger and ultimately far more troubled and troublesome periphery.

Her primary conclusion should not be surprising - namely that as Vladimir Putin has centralized power in Moscow, the minority republics have been negatively affected - forced to cede autonomy to the traditionally Russian dominated powerful Kremlin at the country's epicenter whose leaders are intent upon restoring as much of the former empire as possible.  Center-periphery relations have long created tensions between the republics and Moscow.   The Soviet Union was largely torn apart by the tensions that erupted between the central leadership and nationalist movements in the European and Caucasian republics intent upon reestablishing or establishing their own independent governments.

Tatarstan, Moldovia and Karelia

The three republics Prino focused on in her study were Tatarstan, Moldavia and Karelia.  Tatarstan, the largest of Russia's minority republics, is Muslim majority whereas smaller Moldavia and geographically distinct Karelia are, or were, traditionally Finno-Ugric majority regions.  Tatarstan and Moldavia are located in Russia's interior whereas Karelia is adjacent to Finland.  This crucial difference between the two interior republics and Karelia - which met all but a single criterion for independence in 1991 - should have been explored with far greater attention by Prino.

Print's research and conclusions assiduously follow the social science academic research model:  careful delineation of boundaries, use of statistical data and a substantial number of written interviews.  That's all well and good, but it gave her almost no room to explore beyond the study's self-determined borders thus outside factors did not factor in.  The problem is that the parameters of the study examined the differences with respect to the domestic treatment of minorities and whether certain criteria were met with respect to international norms but gave little consideration to the powerful draw of a more successful contiguous neighbor.

I am far less familiar with Tatarstan or Moldavia than I am with the Karelian Republic which was an integral and important part of Finland until the end of World War II when the Finnish government was forced to surrender the eastern part of Karelia to the Soviets in order to retain Finland's independence as a country.  Over 225,000 Finns - including Karelians - immediately fled to Finland along with the retreating Finnish troops as a part of the Soviet-Finnish peace accord.

That the remaining Karelian population in the Russian Federation is such a small percentage of the population and still declining should come as no surprise - or that few Karelians in Russia's Karelian Republic study Karelian -  if one considers the attraction of the republic's neighbor to the West.  Yet Prino all but fails to consider that the bright lights of Helsinki are most likely the primary reason for the declining population of ethnic Karelians in the Karelian Republic.

The Slapdash Cook Greets the New Year (Have a Happy!), Recycles the Christmas Beast—and Explains WhirledView

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Slapdash Cook makes plenty of mistakes in the kitchen, but there’s almost always a recovery route. And speaking of recovery, the Slapdash Cook hates waste. She should have been in Paris with the big boys on climate change last year. She’s a recycling pro.

When it comes to the worst of the world’s woes, she’s got a remedy for that, too. Stop fighting. Start cooking. What most people really want, after all, is a good meal shared with friends or family. The WhirledView/Slapdash motto?  Better to jaw-jaw in the conference room  than to slaughter the neighbors.  Best of all: bickering with the sibs over pumpkin pie.

And after the table’s cleared? Don’t toss the leftovers. Be stubborn. Be creative.

The challenge this week wasn’t a hulking turkey carcase. It was a great slab of medium rare roast beef—and no one left to share it with, this year’s Christmas quota of family having vanished. Fortunately, the Slapdash Cook has a vascular system lets her eat all the beef she wants, but enough is enough, even with prime rib.

Tossing the bloody lump into the trash along with the rest of the Christmas detritus was a tempting solution. Doling it out, chunk by chunk, to the magpies, like suet, was another. Either recourse, however, would be a declaration of defeat. Impossible!

Nor was the beef the only leftover challenge of the moment. The fridge held many candidates for trashing. There was the barely-broached quart of cream-top yogurt, a few dollops of which had worked wonders in a kofta curry. For her non-holiday lunch of yogurt and fruit, however, the Slapdash Cook prefers the fat-free version. So what to do? Yogurt takes forever to develop enough mold to justify guilt-free down-the-drain treatment.

Yogurt. Hmmmm.

At this point, the idea of goulash occurred to the Slapdash Cook (meaning me, of course). Riffling through my spattered and dog-eared old New York Times Cookbook, I found what I needed. Not goulash, but a close cousin. And joy of joys! The recipe called for another icebox orphan that screamed to be dealt with: a half bottle of tomato juice unneeded by the summer’s last batch of gazpacho. I’d even have a use for the half bag of petit pois that had been languishing in the freezer for eons.

So tote it up. Beef. Yogurt. Tomato juice. Peas. Salvage heaven.

Even if I simmered the stew for the prescribed 2 1/4 hours, there was a risk that re-purposed protein wouldn't produce the tenderest stew morsels, but my gamble worked.  No serious challenge to molars.  Even my failure to add horseradish didn’t hurt. I ground black pepper until my wrist hurt, then tossed in some green chili. This is New Mexico.

And what did I serve it with, this Slapdash dish that I hurried to the table after a very promising taste test? Why leftover mashed potatoes of course. Livened up with more green chili.

Now, what does the intrepid recycling of leftovers have to do with WhirledView?

Everything.

Making sense of world affairs is a tricky business, even with access to classified documents, anonymous top level informants and a big fat travel budget, all of which the co-authors of WhirledView definitely do not enjoy. So what do we have? Nothing fancy. Aside from a stash of relevant education and experience always on hand to draw from, it’s a matter of keeping eyes peeled, minds open and making the most of the angles that have been overlooked or the bits and pieces that have been put together in ways that don’t satisfy. Equivalents of culinary lapses and leftovers, so to speak.  However, take a little bit of this, add a little bit of that—and wow! pretty soon some delicious hypotheses emerge.

Time to serve it up, which is to say, post it, with a sprig of humor and absolutely no fear of losing a promotion for calling it exactly as we see it, this deep anxiety being an insufficiently appreciated hindrance to savvy policy analysis at all levels.

That’s it! Bon appetit! Happy New Year!