Spalding Grayzone

When I want to make a political point, I find it’s easier to disagree with someone than to agree. There’s no point to agree with the masses. There’s no point to consensus. I mean, I want to show people that it’s okay to jaywalk through oncoming traffic or, in my case, ardently defend Vladimir Putin.

You see, there’s this thing that happens to most people who are anti-war. They forget that you don’t have to be truly anti-war, so much as anti-western. And while I have never enjoyed the dramatic stylings of The Duke or Lee Van Cleef, I'm not talking about those westerns now am I?

When people describe the end of the Soviet Union, with bread lines and decaying everything, workers on street corners sucking down vodka from ballooning plastic bags, I wish I could have been there to experience it myself. Breathing in that polluted air with gusto. Finding my own personal Pravda in the cobblestones of Moscow.

It’s easy to laud the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I don’t see many people willingly demolishing a wall in their homes. People in glass houses? That would a nice start. Do we throw bouquets at contractors when they perform gut rehabs on homes that don’t need it? Well, we shouldn’t.

Sure, anyone can criticize the invasion of a sovereign country, especially when it’s done by the USA, but it takes a real principled person to criticize the sovereign country. But I’m not in the despot defense to win popularity contests, unless they are ones taken in the Kremlin by bureaucrats wearing ushankas indoors because the heat is once again on the fritz. 

What’s so bad about being called an apologist? If anything, I’m an empath, it just happens that I have the most empathy for authoritarians who may or may not enjoy riding horses shirtless. I’m always telling anyone who will listen that Ukraine isn’t really a country. They respond, nothing is really a country since borders are artificial; have I forgotten about the Pangaea supercontinent? 

Look, I'm not a geologist, and time is artificial, international boundaries are artificial, and my entire career is the product of artifice. That and being the son of a disgraced Washington insider. Nepotism works in mysterious predictable ways. 

Now I need a glass of water.