Month: March 2022

On “Servant of the People”

By 1+1 – https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/942397/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60575960

I’ve started watching the Ukrainian sitcom Servant of the People, available on Netflix, and it’s a funny, surreal, and horrifying experience.

The premise of the show is this: a high-school student surreptitiously records a video of his history teacher, Vasily Goloborodko, as he rants to a colleague about the corrupt Ukrainian election system, its mediocre candidates, and the subservient populace that lets it continue. The video goes viral. The teacher’s students, without letting him know, start a GoFundMe page to pay for his candidacy. At the same time, the power brokers, who customarily collude behind the scenes to fix the election, decide on a whim to actually let the election play out, rather than wasting money on sham campaigns. As a result, the thirty-something schoolteacher literally wakes up one morning to find out that he’s been elected president of his country.

It’s pretty funny. Much of the humor (of the first two episodes at least) derives from all the privileges the new president and his family are suddenly confronted with—the kind of privileges they claimed to detest before. For example, when Goloborodko is taken (by presidential motorcade) to a branch bank to make the monthly payment on the loan he took out to pay for a microwave oven, the teller cheerfully informs him that his debt has been suddenly wiped clean…he just happened to be the winner of a promotional contest! Goloborodko’s father starts getting phone calls from long-lost friends, and proudly promises cabinet positions for all of them. The rundown public tenement where Goloborodko, his parents and his niece all share a cramped apartment suddenly gets a new paint job and landscaping. Etcetera. It’s evident that the arc of the story will be largely occupied with how Goloborodko comes to grips with all the interests trying to pressure him, and whether he can retain his integrity.

It’s a surreal experience, because the actor who plays the schoolteacher is one Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian who is now in fact the president of the Ukraine. Because President Zelensky’s face has become so familiar, it’s a struggle to watch the show—which originally aired from 2015 to 2019—without feeling as if you are actually watching the president of the Ukraine, who for some reason decided to act in a TV show as a schoolteacher who becomes president.

But there is a vaguely sickening aspect to the experience of watching this show. Why?

The show functions partly as a social and political satire, mocking the corrupt, self-serving and hypocritical aspects of Ukrainian society. But it is not a dark comedy. Its tone is fundamentally cheerful and optimistic. In the opening credits, Goloborodko bicycles to work in the presidential palace in the golden morning sunlight of Kyiv, along clean, spacious boulevards and past green, blossoming parks. The future of the country, as represented by the good-natured students in his history class, looks bright. The country’s real power brokers, represented by three meaty, elderly men in suits, who always seem to be sharing cocktails or a lavish meal, their faces obscured, are still in control, but you have the feeling that Goloborodko will eventually be more than a match for them.

The problem is of course that since February of this year, reality has turned out so much worse for the people and country of the Ukraine than anyone could have imagined during the production of this show. You can’t help but wonder who, among the actors of the show, are still in the country. Are they all still alive? Are the gleaming towers and baroque palaces that Goloborodko bicycles past still intact, or are they in flames? The real Ukraine may have gotten its uncorrupted, everyman president, but that did nothing to stop Russian bombs and artillery shells from turning the country into a deadly nightmare. This TV show about corruption and hypocrisy now seems…terribly innocent. It’s like watching an old home video someone made of an impossibly cute kindergarten play, knowing in retrospect that the happy children in it will later be sexually abused. It feels a little wrong to take pleasure in watching Servant of the People, knowing what is happening now to that servant and those people. But I’m going to keep watching it. And rooting for its actors and their countrymen.

We try to find something positive to say, and think, and feel, here in the Garden. In this case, here it is: this show is more evidence that the Ukraine is a country worth saving—a country in which a comedy about its own corrupt government thrived for three seasons and 51 episodes, and ended up by arguably making its own fantasy a reality. It’s hard to imagine such a project lasting beyond the pilot episode in today’s Mother Russia.

Texas’ AG: Follow My Cruel, Stupid Orders, Unless It Makes Me Look Cruel And Stupid

As we have written before, the Great and Sovereign State of Texas, a place we love and call our home, is a scary, stupid state. It is especially so around this time of year, when primary elections take place.

You see, no Democrat has won any statewide office in Texas since 1994. In such a safely Republican state, the general election is irrelevant. What matters is which Republican candidate wins the primary, and our cynical state leaders have decided that the way to win a primary here is to be more reactionary, more macho, and in many ways more cruel towards vulnerable people than their opponent. And my fellow Texans have rewarded this strategy with electoral victories.

What this means in practice is that our unimaginative leaders search for ever more ways to make more guns available to more people to carry in more places with fewer restrictions than ever before; find new ways to make life more difficult for women who want to get an abortion, by twisting and torturing the meaning of the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings to the breaking point; conduct witch-hunts on books held in school libraries; send an otherwise law-abiding ex-convict to a lengthy prison stay for the crime of casting her vote; threaten to revoke tenure for public university professors who want to discuss the possibility that one’s quality of life in these United States is affected by the color of their skin; make the act of voting more difficult and complicated for any demographic perceived to vote Democratic; use my tax dollars to file lawsuit after lawsuit against the federal government…and the list goes on.

Another recent example of cruel political cynicism was foisted upon us by our state’s top cop, Attorney General Dan Patrick, who wants to convict parents who support their child’s sexual identification of child abuse.

Last year, the state legislature tried and failed to pass a law defining medical care such as hormone therapy for minors as child abuse.*

But who needs a law? Patrick simply issued an official opinion that such medical care constitutes child abuse. That was all our governor, Greg Abbott, needed to hear. He directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of children receiving such care for child abuse.

And wouldn’t you know it…there is at least one good public servant who actually works for the department—a child-abuse investigator—who has provided “gender-affirming care” for her daughter. She made the mistake of asking her boss about Abbott’s ruling and how it might affect her and her family.

According the Austin-American Statesman, “Within hours of making the inquiry[…]the employee was placed on leave, and a child-abuse investigator came to her home the next day to determine if her daughter had been abused[…].”

The woman filed suit, and judge issued a temporary restraining order against the state, stopping its child-abuse investigation of her. True to form, Patrick appealed that ruling.

In his appeal, Patrick–the man of a thousand lawsuits against the U.S. government–complained that the woman was “self-reporting” child abuse in order to “gin up” a test case.

In other words (Patrick is saying), the woman was only complying with his legal opinion, potentially losing her job, her daughter, and going to jail as a child-abuser, just in order to expose Patrick’s ruling as stupid and cruel. Some “gin up!”

None of which suggested to Patrick that he actually revise his legal opinion, or drop the investigation against her, but rather that it be allowed to proceed…without her pesky lawsuit.

So to all you lawbreakers in Texas: go and ahead and turn yourselves in…unless it makes our Attorney General look stupid and cruel. We can’t have that!

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 *For the basic facts behind this case I rely on the article in the March 10 2022 Austin-American Statesman, “Court sides with trans teen’s family”