Opinions
Meanwhile charismatic Putin parades his manliness as he seeks to regain the Presidency next March hoping that his ruling United Russia Party would pick up extra seats in this week's elections to improve on the 64% in the current Duma (legislature) to permit constitutional changes they wish to push past opposition parties. If this sounds like our Harper it is!
But although Putin's party is expected to win these elections, it is likely that he will fall far short of his hopes and probably get 50% or less, despite some rather high-handed moves to obstruct opposition electioneering especially via electronic means. There are seven contenders (vs. eleven in 2007). The system is a pure PR one with 7% exclusion, although this time any party getting 5% will get a seat, and two for 6%. There are claims of Western interference at a time of rising anti-US feelings and one election watchdog funded from Western sources has been obstructed. The elections spanned nine time zones, involved over 96,000 polling stations in Russia and over 370 outside the country and nearly 110 million voters
Disaffection among ordinary folk, especially rural, has increased in the past years following Putin's two terms as President (2000-2008) which had brought some stability to the country after a decade of uncertainty and adventurism following the Soviet collapse. But the authoritarian rule has continued for too long and some kind of justifiable backlash is happening.
Although Russia and the old Soviet republics have improved the range of products available to its people they have not similarly improved the purchasing capacity of the people. The rich, many former bureaucrats and other high-ranked politicos, have become richer from ownership and control of the country's major industries, not all obtained above-board; Forbes Magazine lists 101 Russian billionaires for 2011 including several staunch oligarchs. It is unlikely that United Russia would change from its autocratic rule. An injection of new blood would be refreshing.
The fall of the USSR led to improved Russian relations with the other major Cold Warrior, the United States, but real warming has not really occurred (except perhaps to the globe!). Recently Obama did make an effort to improve relations but events in Afghanistan have dampened even this, to the point that the Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin, has threatened to shut down US supply lines to Afghanistan.
Back in America, pundits criticise Russians for failing to adopt a more people-oriented style of government, and continue to foster authoritarianism for which the Communists were blamed earlier. They advocate evolution from aristocratic oligarchy to true "democracy" for Russia, but fail to admit that this is exactly what America has become - a plutocratic oligarchy ruled by corporate heads, bankers and financiers who merely manipulate politicians, even the President, like so many puppets tied to strings.
The notion that America is a democracy is as laughable as British claims that its defunct Empire was democratic.
With Europe consolidated and North America in US hands, Putin would dearly like to see a reunion with his neighbours that could extend from Eastern Europe to the borders of China, Afghanistan, Iran, the Caspian Sea and Turkey, and increase power and prestige, recalling the exploits of Peter the Great and the 19th century Great Game between Russia and Britain.
Perhaps Putin's greatest challenge is to cleanse his own Aegean stables of the huge criminal compacts that seem to dominate the country's economy and its politics, some of which we have heard of here in the form of gangs engaged in various nefarious practices.
Putin's less than desired (50% of votes only) might well threaten, in future elections, the only symbol of democracy that exists anywhere: impartial voting. Remember the debacle in Florida 2000 with George Bush and the disastrous events that followed his election? So when Americans point fingers they have to be very careful they're not facing a mirror.
Hassle in getting Saturday
shopping done
I was a boy in kindergarten when I first understood we are mortals made from flesh and bone. We are all meant to die.
How I came to know this was the father of one of my classmates was gravely injured while working in the canefields. He had been caught in the machinery that dragged the canes onto the bed of an iron carriage. It had wrapped him firmly with an iron chain used to bind the sugar canes into loads for the locomotive. He had been broken into many pieces. He was taken to an apathetic sugar company doctor who could not put him back together again. He sent my friend's father away to die and turned to his next patient.
The man died the next morning in great pain. Wrapped in ineffective poultices, bandaged with strips of cloth, his head bathed in hope with a balm of coconut oil, he suffered all night. Relatives wept. They sat in vigil on borrowed, makeshift benches. Around them the smell of boiled coffee mingled with the metallic scent of blood draining into dented, enamel bowls.
Our village was a clutter of adobe huts, white and mud-daubed, the roofs blond with carat-palm leaves. The houses made an island awash in a sea of sugar canes. At times this sea surged, bringing with it monsters from the deep. Sometimes a mouth with a row of teeth would rise out of the tide of razor-sharp cane leaves and take one of us away.
In the hard life lived among the fields of sugarcanes that swept ahead of us in each direction, as unending as the ocean itself, another life had been lost, another son, a husband and a father had been caught in teeth that were too sharp and curved inwards for escape. We looked on helplessly as victim after victim was mangled before us and then pulled under.
We were in our kindergarten class the morning my friend's grandmother came to take him out of school. It was his sea-change.
We were singing the song that I still sing today. Whenever I hum it, the tune uncalled from my memory, it becomes a dirge. I recall his grandmother as a tall, dark woman in voluminous whites, floating into the classroom like a ghost.
We were singing, "John Brown's Baby." It went: "John Brown's baby had a cold upon its chest/And they rubbed it with camphorated oil." We sang the first line three times, the second once, the word "camphorated" as its constituent syllables, three long, drawn-out times. We finished off the song with a finalé by shouting out the second line.
It was vocal calisthenics, meant to wake us up from the sluggishness of the humidity. There was always humidity around us, like another sea trying to press down from above to drown us. It seeped into the classrooms through the sea-rust squares of the jail-house BRC wire mesh that ran between the top of the brick wall and the underside of the broiling, galvanised roof.
We noted the presence of a grandmother in the middle of the song. She had come from nowhere. She was my classmate's Grandma. Her face was puffed with sleeplessness from the bedside vigil. Hours before she had watched her son draw his final breath, seen the last of his life's vapour rise. Like a vessel she was now filled with sadness. And as a container that has been filled and sealed, her face was now permanently stamped with the lines of an immeasurable sorrow.
She spoke with the teacher. Her voice was hoarse, worn with lamentation. Eyes were puffed and red, the pupils swollen with a high blood pressure amplified by sorrow and sleeplessness.
"I come for the boy," she said simply, lifting an aged hand in the hush she had brought to call her grandson to her. A thinned-out, aged woman, she leaned forward in a totter with the effort of gesturing. It was as if she was drunk. The recovery of her balance was part reflex action - the balancing act of someone seasoned from having had too much sorrow to drink.
Her eyes locked on her grandson after alighting on our faces. She looked at him from a mire of timelessness. It was as if she was matching acquired images in her head of a child that only a mother can imprint in memory. She was comparing two faces. One was that of the many faces she had known of her deceased son. She had gazed at him the very first time after birth to the last moment when he had grimaced from the inward curved teeth of that final grip.
Now, in real time, she was imprinting her grandson's image. This she was placing among the faces she would gaze at long and lovingly when images flashed before her eyes during those final, fading moments.
She took his hand and walked out. My friend did a double step to keep up with his grandmother's determined stride. He was sent away to relatives after the funeral.
I have not seen him since.