Vladimir Putin’s Inner-scape is Completely Beside the Point

Originally published on Feb. 15, 2018 in The Cornell Daily Sun's Guest Room in response to GOROKH | Putin’s Fears and Grievances.

I read with mixed feelings Artur Gorokh’s February 13th column Putin’s Fears and Grievances. In it, he asks us to consider Putin not as an evil antagonist ever-bent on chaos, but as more of an antihero — a once-keen idealist turned callous by frustration and circumstance. Gorokh is correct insofar as Putin’s early rhetoric was much easier on the international ear. It is also true that villainizations of Putin by western outlets range from the hypocritical to the absurdly comical. All that aside, it is perhaps most useful of all to look at a few actual events early in Putin’s political career to assess where he falls on what is referred to in superhero circles as “the evil villain spectrum.”

In 2004, on what would be called back-to-school day here in the States, the entire Beslan School No. 1 in North Ossetia was taken hostage by a group of Chechen fighters. After the dust settled from the Russian tanks having blasted the terrorists out of the building, the collateral damages were discovered, as if awaiting burial, already in their best back-to-school clothes. In all, 334 hostage casualties were reported, 186 of them children. Throughout the crisis, the Russian state persistently lied and obstructed the press, and Putin’s aftermath-photo op was not announced until after he’d come and gone. International outrage notwithstanding, this kind of heavy-handed nihilistic response was already par for the course for the Putin presidency.

Photo from Sputnik International

Two years before, Vladimir Putin had taken to the television following a similar incident in Moscow itself to defend the unrestrained response to the takeover of a theatre by Chechen independence fighters. In this case, Russian government agents had pumped a highly toxic gas through the theatre’s air conditioning system after a 3-day standoff. The state-siphoned gas ended up poisoning everybody in the building and killing 130 of the hostages. According to the account of journalist Oliver Bullough who was on the scene, government agents entered the front doors, found the Chechen’s among the fallen bodies, and shot them in the head on the spot.

It was thanks to this early-Putin lack of inhibition that the former KGB agent won the hearts and minds of a terrified Moscow. Moscow had been subjected to years of bombing attacks from Chechen separatists. A decade of violence and tragedy had brought out cruelest aspects of human nature on all sides: the decimation of Chechnya’s capital Grozny by Russian bombs, the conscription of desperate women as suicide-bombers by the terrorists, the endless list of innocent victims, and the debut of Mr. Putin strongman himself. Rereading the accounts, I still struggle to make sense of it, and then I hear Marlon Brando’s heavy and slow voice somewhere in the background, iterating Conrad’s “The horror!.. The horror!”

It was details like these that gave me pause when reading Gorokh’s column this Tuesday morning in The Sun. Here he portrays Vladimir Putin as a sympathetic actor—an idealist turned evil by fear and frustration, “having started with understandable values and noble goals.” For Gorokh, Putin is a tragic figure, a victim of his own good intentions, the classic villain trope we have come to expect, like Vader, like Voldemort (Magneto from X-Men is Gorokh’s choice). It’s just like in the movies: they start out alright before falling victim to circumstance and inner demons.

While I find Gorokh’s characterisation of Putin naive and, well, cartoonish, his column left me conflicted. He rightly points out that much of Putin’s political maneuvers make sense in light of things like NATO’s expansionist ambitions, resentment and international humiliations in double dealings with the US, and a reluctance on the part of Russians to feel like they have become patsies of the West.

But while Gorokh rightly finds fault with the “simplististic narrative” of the Russia and Putin we hear about, he likewise falls into his own caricatures by bringing up of the inner lives of political headliners, and even comparing Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. Why should we care if President Putin started out with noble intentions? Why are we trying to evaluate his tender hopes and gauge the fragility of his feelings? It is not only Putin’s inner life I don’t give a damn about, but also not Trump’s, not Obama’s, not Aung San Suu Kyi’s, and not Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of Dragons. Why, you ask?

Because politicians should be judged by what they do—not whatever they end up saying in front of TV cameras. Even if every last bit of it isn’t superficial, it might as well be. We will only ever be able to judge such show-people by what they end up doing. What they say is just part of the calculus that somehow put them where they are. A math PhD might put it this way: the better a politician can approximate the best-of-all-possible-combination-of-words, the better they will maximize their preferred outcomes, whatever those outcomes are.

Let us reject, along with Gorokh, the simplistic narratives and press releases—but let us also defy the personality narratives that give these politicians much of their dark powers in the first place. It’s hardly a stretch to say that both Russians and Americans are prone to delineate their own identities in terms of the personalities of their leaders. This is always a mistake. Heads of state have more in common with each other than they do with their subjects. Remember the last scene in Animal Farm? It is all about who you are sharing the table cloth with! Likewise, peoples have more in common with each other than with their figureheads. Our bread should be broken thusly. Let’s identify first as citizens of the world, and leave political-puppet pop-psychology and personality analysis to Hollywood Access and TMZ.

Classmates of 43 disappeared students of 2014 Iguala kidnappings, still protesting

In September of 2014, forty-three university students disappeared after being arrested attempting to protest education policies and the poor conditions of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College, in what became known as the Iguala kidnappings. The missing students are believed to have been then handed over to and murdered by criminal gangs. The remains of only two students have since been confirmed through DNA testing. 

This afternoon, my friend Artur and I came upon the classmates of these missing students outside the Ministry of Justice in Mexico City, still demanding justice and protesting corruption three and a half years later. This man approached us to help us understand what was happening. He was kind enough to let us record his take on this situation and also share a bit about himself. Kindly forgive the cellphone shakiness and poor framing,

Life in Modern Day Khevsureti

A short video we made about the challenges of life in Khevsureti, taken from footage shot this past summer.

Confessions of a Climate Change Denier

A version of this article originally appeared in The Cornell Daily Sun

By Artur Gorokh & Ryan Sherman

It was in southern Utah in 2003 that Aron Ralston amputated his own arm to escape the boulder that had crushed him against the wall of a slot canyon. The only implement on hand was a small multi-tool, and in vain he poked, jabbed, and sawed at his arm, and hacked at the canyon wall and dug at the boulder. Five days later, delirious and severely dehydrated, he realized it had been his preoccupation with the useless tool all along that prevented him from seeing what had to be done.

Last week, Prof. Jon Schuldt of the Department of Communication, spoke at a Cornell Amnesty International discussion about the perception of climate change in the American population. Effective communication, he explained to us, is key in raising awareness and bridging partisanship. “Doomsday” rhetoric does not help, he said, but only serves to limit action and discourage engagement. If he is right, this column will be of no help at all.

You have no doubt been informed that the coming decades will see a world of increasing crop failure, flooding, wildfires, infrastructure failures, droughts and exacerbated inequality. This much we’ve all heard before. Much less talked of is a colossal humanitarian crisis of displaced peoples, the so-called climate refugees. Dire though all this may be, few of us have trouble falling asleep with worry for our fellow humans, or terrified of horrific calamities to come. Climate change is slow, it happens quietly in the interim and, by God, does it make for boring television. This non-urgency itself is a deathly feature. It allows us to distract ourselves with less unpleasant solutions and fall into the same mental trap into which Aron Ralston found himself.

Let me illustrate. After Prof. Jon Schuldt talk, a student stood up and to berate non-present Republicans for their sins and ignorance. The line between the right and wrong was demarcated by the aisle between them. Building solar panels, the student said, will replace coal, create jobs and stimulate the economy. Everyone wins. How incomprehensible anyone would refuse to do something so straightforwardly good!

This Teletubby worldview of win-win-win solutions was also the crux of President Obama’s environmental policy and is a denialism of its own kind. As the former administration’s website boasts, our solar output grew 30-fold and thousands of jobs were created along the way. Impressive, to be sure, but let’s fiddle with phrasing a bit put it this way: $160 billion was spent on subsidies, and as a result solar energy now makes up for a mere 0.6 percent of total supply. This infusion of cash rendered other clean sources of energy less competitive, and even forced several nuclear power plants to shut down.

The reality is that, if we are to replace coal and do it fast (say, by 2050), sunshine alone won’t do the job. It won’t even come close. An invasive energy plan, full of government overreach and deals struck with devils should be forthcoming. We might have to get over our nuclear phobia and invest into a new generation of reactors. Natural gas is not renewable nor all that clean, and fracking is controversial, but it makes for a cheap and abundant resource that could be decisive in temporarily replacing coal. Carbon tax very well may hurt the economy, but it also is a powerful incentive for corporations to reduce their emissions. (Stagnating economies also are much more environmentally friendly, by the way.) These strategies would require us to compromise our values, be they wealth, safety or even freedom, to help manage an impending crisis. But any truly effective action is likely to entail such compromise.

Distracting ourselves with impotent solutions might just prove to be more dangerous in the long run than the outright detachment from reality on the right. What these well-meaning talking points engender are a sense of fighting the good fight by creating an illusion of actionable items. This is evident in the emerging tribal culture based in sustainable garden living, anti-plastic-bag bags and targeted dietary changes. While meritorious on some level to be sure, these are activities that don’t meet climate change in reality, and the good feelings they bring are examples a temporary placebo effect.

Aron Ralston spent days in his own denial before accepting what he had to do to achieve liberation from the boulder that had crushed his arm. Even when faced with the spectre of death, perhaps the truth was just too unpleasant. But severely dehydrated and delirious, he finally abandoned the useless tool and then leveraged his own weight to snap the arm in two, freeing bone from boulder, and allowing himself to escape the canyon (almost) in one piece. But before he was able to do what had to be done, he had to recognize the situation for what it was, and take action that met the problem in reality. Climate does not care from which side of the aisle our political rhetoric derives. It isn’t interested in soothing communication strategies. It doesn't take notice of the scattering of hybrid cars or solar panels. Until our conversations describe facts, and our solutions target reality, we are all climate change deniers.

Is it Possible to Escape Cornell’s 2.5k Student Health Plan?

If you are living on loans, every time you buy a coffee, a fricassee, or tip the pizza guy, you take out a small loan to do so. That transaction leaves you a few more notches in the red. It is debt you will one day get notices about, defer to the future, and eventually pay back with significant interest.

So it is with Cornell’s student health insurance plan. Ask a car rental agency if you need that extra insurance, and you’ll find they aren't all that motivated to help you figure it out and minimize your costs. Fair enough. Yet, if they intentionally obscure relevant details to sell you something you don’t need, I would submit that is quite a different ethical category. Is that what's happening here?

The rub’s as follows: you may have already discovered you are about to be automatically signed up and charged 2.5k a semester for student health insurance. Several emails have no doubt appeared in your inbox informing you of this action and directing you to information on how this service might be waved. Following the blue bread trail takes us to the disheartening language of the Cornell Health Policy: “...requests to waive may be granted with demonstration of alternative insurance that meet [this intimidating list of complicated requirements.]”

Take that with the fact many of us have not arrived, are not yet residents, and so are not yet eligible for alternatives, are incredibly busy, are inclined to give the policies the benefit of the doubt, and you’ll end up with a group of potential customers with very predictable behaviors.

Not only that, but a sizable disincentive is also tacked right after, a $150 fee for anyone who chooses to waive their insurance after the Aug. 16 deadline. Effectively a built in sunk cost factor --- every time a student pauses, wonders, is it worth it?, there’s a $150 floating there, threatening to vanish like a Bernie Sanders afterworld.

We therefore may never discover that for many, many a Cornellian, a much more affordable option is very definitely available. For example, if you are a US citizen, paying your expenses with loans, chances are almost certain you qualify for a state-subsidized health insurance plan. A short phone call or online survey is enough to find out (nystateofhealth.ny.gov). That can turn out to be over 2k/semester that you don’t have to borrow, don’t have to be followed around by, don’t have to pay interest on long into the the unforeseeable future.

All that said, it turns out international students are not allowed the the option of seeking or securing another health insurance, even if they can demonstrate they have a health insurance that meets all of the Office of Student Health Benefits’ conditions. For the arbitrary reason of not being a US citizen, an entirely different standard is applied with large financial implications that could very well end up being prohibitive. As you may know, international scholarships often don’t cover health insurance, and 2.5k is greater than a year’s salary in more countries than it isn't (143/176!).

But this is not a J’accuse!. I’m not railing against an imaginary Big Cornell. Institutions naturally make decisions that facilitates their mandates. And don’t we all went to attend a well-run university? Cornell is itself a complicated institution made up of many entities, the student body included, each with its own raison d'être and occasionally conflicting interests.

As for me, I submit the most equitable solution would involve creating reasonable deadlines that do not preempt and disincentivize other options. Student Health Services should also be compelled to inform students that alternatives exist. What might do the trick is something like, “Students are advised to explore all their health insurance options in the state of New York at nysateofhealth.ny.gov and make the decision that is best for them.” In fact, all those waiver emails could be a good spot for the message.

Cornell Health Services are not swindling us. My graduate assistantship covers my SHP now, and it is great. At worst, Cornell Health Services are taking advantage of an unlevel playing field to charge us for something that might not be our best option. The good news is you may still be able to find a subsidized plan (nystateofhealth.ny.gov). If it all works out and you qualify, you will then waive your SHP, cough up the $150 cancellation fee, receive a bursar refund, reflect on the nature of institutions for a few moments, and then go on about your goddamn business.

Old Man Stops Riding Bicycle

He had been peddling with resigned determination when I saw him, as if he'd always peddled, and always would be peddling. I saw him out on the road several times a week, and then I didn't.

What was that sappy novella I read for a highschool class? I remember it for the beautiful image at the end, an old man dancing away his own mortality. But in that book, the author, mitch alborn?, alboom?, wastes the opportunity and misses the whole point. He turns the reader's head away from mortally and ends on transitory triumph without addressing our own human conflicts. In Tuesday's with Morrie, the character of Death stays home. We are given happy music and uplifting stories meshing into a sort of Sunday school lesson of sentimental existentialism. An old man, was it with cancer?, dancing. Dancing! And what does Mitch do? Waste it on a sentiment! He draws us from heartbreaking truth and leaves us with a silly picture of an person flailing in irrelevancy. That's not very helpful.

This old man here on the bicycle in the arctic reminded me of that book and that old man, but only for a moment as he rod toward the silly, oblivious dancer, and then peddled through dissolving apparition and on through the remote streets of an arctic town.

I found here that the arctic summer is a place of remembering. We go there, and so are taken out of lives of forgetting. We or gently set down into a mild, endless day, where it’s impossible to avoid remembering. And with the slowness of the imperceptible movement toward the end of life, the arctic's endless night slowly shrouds the endless day. Because of this, the arctic is also place of forgetting, as one has to get right down to the business of forgetting again. 

My simple forgettings are pedestrian. Alaska itself speaks to the original grand american forgetting event, the original early American pettifogging! Here the imposition of the imperial minority of whites has not become an historical abstraction, as it is for most of us Southerners. Here it is still a measurable penetration.

"Now we know in part," reads the beautiful passage before sputtering into false wishes. What does one know in the arctic? It is where the Southern world — now swarming with the work and days of hands — once formed, from where came glaciers and new animals, and it is alien and strange and but hauntingly familiar, like a womb. The arctic is where you learn that we will only ever know in part.

Obama in the Arctic: Climate Change Superstar?

*A version of this appeared here in Alaska Dispatch News (but some links and sentences didn't make the cut).

Obama in Kotzebue: Climate Change Superstar?
by Ryan Sherman

It’s no use judging a politician by what they say. That’s how they all get there after all --- they are very good at saying things. We can only judge them by what they do.

President Obama landed yesterday in the sizable native village of Kotzebue, my current place of work and residence, on the last stop on his Alaska climate change circuit. He took the stage that evening in the K-12 school’s gymnasium, and he had a lot to say.

He talked about hiking a glacier in Kenai fjords, performing a traditional Yup’ik dance at a school in Dillingham, and watching Inupiaq fisherman haul in their salmon catch. He talked of the presidents who’d visited Alaska before him. “But there’s one thing no American president has done before,” he told us with a grin, “and that’s travel above the Arctic Circle!” The gymnasium erupted in applause.

“I don’t need to tell people here in Alaska what is happening,” he said. “I met Alaskan natives whose way of life that they’ve practiced for centuries is in danger of slipping away.” He spoke to melting glaciers, native lifestyles, and coastal erosion. He laid out a powerfully compelling case for drastic action to fight climate change. “What’s happening here is America’s wake up call,” he said. “It should be the world’s wake up call.”

Stirred by his words, it was hard to believe this was the same man who only months before opened up the Arctic Chuckchi Sea to Shell drilling. This is the same Chuckchi sea drilling that the Department of Interior’s own assessment statements warned would have long lasting impacts on animals and Arctic communities. The same statement reported a 75 percent risk of at least one large oil spill when these leases are developed.

“We are the world’s number one producer of oil and gas,” the President said to us, “but we are transitioning away from energy that creates the carbon that warms the planet and is threatening our health and our environment.”  While we heard of his great administration’s steps toward clean energy, it was easy to forget that it was on his watch America became the world’s No.1 producer of oil and gas, passing Saudi Arabia two years ago.

The fight to slow down climate change will only truly begin when the huge amounts of profitable and exploitable carbon reserves are left in the ground.

Last night Obama reminded us that America’s carbon emissions had fallen by a 12 percent since he took office. “Last month I announced the first set of nationwide standards to end the limitless carbon emissions from our power plants,” he said. “And that’s the most important step we’ve ever taken on climate change!”

The emission reductions Obama takes credit for are largely attributed to our own great recession, and since 2013, emissions have risen dramatically. Coal-mining jobs are also up 15.3% since Obama took office, and between 2009 and 2012 our coal exports have more than doubled. The coal we aren’t burning, we’re simply selling to be burned elsewhere. Business is booming.  Our carbon is exported. Our footprint expands. The president grins and waves. So what's going on?

It’s hard to reconcile our president’s moving words to the Alaskan Arctic community with comments like those made back in 2012 to an oil community in Oklahoma:

“Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states… We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”

Last year Putin, who commands 40 icebreakers to America’s two, also declared a renewed interest in the Arctic. Soon after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper admitted concerns over militarization of the area. The United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Finland all possess territory with Arctic coastlines, and other nations, most notably China, would benefit hugely by a drastically shortened trade route.

The Bering Strait is poised to become one of the most economically strategic waterways in the world, with a projected 13 fold increase in daily traffic according to a 2009 Arctic Council report.

As if all this wasn’t ominous enough, earlier in the day, preempting the President’s speech, five Chinese warships moved into the Bering Sea after participating in a naval exercise with Russia.

At only one point last night were we given a glimpse of the development plans he has in mind. “To boost commerce in the Arctic and to maintain America’s status as an Arctic power,” the President said, slipping the info in between a salute to traditions and a nod to national parks, “We’ve called for the accelerated replacement of the Coast Guard’s heavy duty icebreaker and we are planning for construction of more icebreakers.”

Climate change is ever more a crowd-pleaser, and Arctic development cannot be achieved without enthusiastic Alaskan support. On the other hand, a querulous populace is the most serious potential obstacle to Arctic dominance. The Canadian government learned this the hard way when a small Inuit community halted a five-year license to search for oil and gas on the seafloor of Baffin Bay. 

Open trade routes. Russia. Ice breakers. Shell. Untapped energy. Development. Whatever the merits of Obama’s recent speeches, we should never be in doubt of one thing: we should not expect an Arctic savior, and he is no climate change superstar. A large-scale popular coming together, like America saw in World War II, could save us from the worst.

If it’s already too late, as some grimmer models predict, pulling together in a humanitarian spirit might be the only way to mitigate the human suffering that will occur throughout the world. Whatever else, it will require we embrace a new conception of life. What happens next is up to us.