Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 605

Unease in Brazil as Recession Bites

Brazil’s economic slowdown is turning out to be as bad as many feared it would be, the Financial Times reports:

Brazil’s economy officially slipped into recession in the second quarter as high inflation, plummeting consumer confidence and a roiling corruption scandal led gross domestic product to contract 1.9 per cent from the previous quarter.

The figure was even worse than economists had expected and was compounded by a big downward revision of first quarter data from a 0.2 per cent reduction in GDP to a 0.7 per cent decline.

Compared with the second quarter of last year, the economy has shrunk 2.6 per cent, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics said on Friday. After two consecutive quarters of negative growth, officials said the economy was formally in recession.

China’s slowdown drags heavily on Brazil, a country whose basic strategy for ten years has been to ride the Chinese tiger.

Meanwhile, the recession hits when the government is paralyzed. President Dilma Rouseff is at 8 percent in the polls, threats of impeachment are swirling, and the biggest corruption scandal in Brazilian history has dozens of politicians, including two ex-presidents, leaders of two of the three most important parties, and top congressional leaders, worried that they are going to jail.

The president’s authority in Congress has collapsed, and Congress doesn’t seem to be able to do anything: it can’t cut spending, it can’t raise taxes, and it can’t think of anything else to do. The public is furious and fearful; the economic blows are coming thick and fast as unemployment rises and consumer spending falls. Yesterday came news that (between the recession and the rapid depreciation of Brazil’s currency) international air traffic has fallen so far, so fast that luxury stores in the country’s main airport are shutting down.What scares the older generation most is the apparent return of inflation. For decades in the 20th century, Brazil was regularly ravaged by some of the highest inflation rates in the world. New currencies were introduced, then depreciated so fast that the central bank could hardly print new, higher denomination bills fast enough to keep up. There were times when stores stopped posting prices on goods in the windows; prices would change so fast that it wasn’t worth it. At one time in the late 20th century, Brazil had three currencies circulating at the same time: 100,000 of the oldest one equaled 1 of the middle one; 10,000 of the middle one equalled one of the newest one. It got so bad that an association of the descendants of famous Brazilians demanded that the government stop putting their ancestors’ faces on currency bills, since it was more of an insult than an honor to be featured on such worthless money.That all changed under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who introduced the current currency, the real, more than 20 years ago. Ominously, the inflation rate reached almost ten percent in July of 2015—that’s the highest rate tin 12 years. Brazilians who remember the old days worry that the old troubles might come back—when hyperinflation strikes, bank accounts are wiped out, credit dries up, merchants won’t take credit cards, people who live on fixed incomes turn into paupers as a lifetime of saving and work can go down the tubes in a few weeks.This latest cold shower of bad economic news won’t improve the country’s mood. We are a long way from those halcyon days just a few years ago when emerging markets were ruling the earth, and the BRICS were reshaping the global order.The trouble comes at a bad time regionally. Brazil isn’t the only country in South America that bet the farm on continued exponential Chinese growth. Falling prices for commodities ranging from oil to copper to soybeans to beef are knocking one South American country after another into trouble. Many countries have already suffered under misguided populist regimes—Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela are all looking fragile.The United States had the luxury of not worrying very much about South America in the last 15 years. Thanks to the China boom, the region was growing even as American policy shifted towards benign neglect. The next president may have to rethink that approach: from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, Latin America could be on the brink of real trouble.

The Hotel Patriot

The Hotel Years

by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael HofmannNew Directions, 2015, 192 pp., $14.95

“Why do you people always go wandering around in the world?” So asks a Russian peasant of Mendel Singer in Joseph Roth’s novel from 1930, Job. “You people” are of course Jews, but in Roth’s fiction it isn’t only his Jewish characters who are condemned to wander the earth. All of his creations are to some extent itinerants buffeted by history, tossed about by fate, frequently and inextricably in transit and in limbo. All are moving. There are the soldiers in the Austrian army who, when not performing endless military maneuvers on Viennese parade grounds, are consigned to far-flung outposts of the empire to skulk, semi-stateless, in frontier garrisons and taverns. There are the Russian spies, revolutionaries, and deserters who have slipped over the Russian border—“less the boundary of the all-powerful empire of the Czar than the bounds of our despotism” according to the secret agent Golubchik in Confession of a Murderer (1936)—and are on missions in Europe or on the run to the Americas. And then there are the Jews, like Mendel Singer, who flee pogroms and destitution for better lives elsewhere, anywhere. Some of Roth’s characters even wander into other Roth novels—Singer pops up again in Weights and Measures (1937)—making welcome returns like that other Roth trope, the ever-recurring strains of Strauss’s Radetzky March.

But Roth’s travelers never embark on one-way journeys. They ebb and they flow. Friedrich Kargan in The Silent Prophet (1929) changes his direction as often as he changes his philosophical outlook. Roth’s surviving soldiers must make long, arduous treks westward from Siberian prison camps. His Russians and his Jews grow disenchanted in exile (the hero of Tarabas (1934) comes to loathe New York, “a city of stone”; Mendel Singer, plagued by one misfortune after another, finds America “a death-dealing fatherland”) and risk treacherous trips back to where they started from. Invariably, his prodigals turn into lost souls who flounder once “home.” “Where can I go now…?” muses the protagonist at the end of The Emperor’s Tomb (1938). In the same vein, Franz Tunda realizes in Flight Without End (1927) that without a job, ambition, hope—without movement—he is “superfluous.” Perhaps most tragic of all, the increasingly apathetic Carl Joseph Trotta in Roth’s greatest book, The Radetzky March (1932), in time resembles “a man who has lost not only his homeland but also his homesickness for his homeland.”Roth himself was always on the move—if never rudderless then certainly rootless. His nomadic life informed his masterful writing, too long available only in the original German. The German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki said that Roth “always made it easy for his readers and often made it hard for his interpreters.” Thanks to the efforts of redoubtable translator and poet Michael Hofmann, Roth’s oeuvre has steadily migrated into the English language. The publication in 1999 of Rebellion completed the set for fiction, but more and more of Roth’s non-fiction is seeing the light of day in translation. The latest is The Hotel Years, a collection of journalistic pieces written on the hoof and on assignment. It is top-heavy with work from the 1920s, when travel for Roth was exotic, thrilling, freeing—and his choice. Only a handful of articles are included from the more desperate 1930s, when travel was flight, work a necessity, and existence hand-to-mouth.Hofmann has trawled through Roth’s three volumes of non-fiction, each a thousand pages dense, and cherry-picked “something topical, something lasting, something burning, something whimsical.” Most items are choice cuts from Roth’s travels for the Frankfurter Zeitung through France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Albania, and the USSR. Appearing in English for the first time, all are marvels in miniature: lightly sketched but boldly colored people and places, moments in time, fleeting joys and sudden upheavals, upswings and downturns. All are studded with Roth’s trademark metaphors, aphorisms, mots justes. So often the ransacking of a literary vault uncaches only scraps—patchy juvenilia, excruciating verse, rejected novels or, worse, The Original of Laura. Hofmann could very well have unearthed such dross. Instead, he has struck gold.The opening section finds Roth reporting from “multi-faceted, tribal Germany”—a place he emphatically calls “the least understood nation in Europe.” In the first piece he homes in on a war veteran who cycles the streets selling newspapers with a dog sitting atop his hunched, shattered back. It sparks a memory in him of “when men were trained like dogs and were barked at as “Schweinehunde” and so forth, by others who were themselves bloodhounds.” Elsewhere, a woman is knocked down on the Kurfürstendamm, and in the mêlée a man walks off with her umbrella. At Bremerhaven, the Pittsburgh (which resembles the Neptune at the same port in Job) containing Eastern Jews and peasants, is about to set sail for America, departing “the continent of pogroms, of the police, the black market.” A tour of the run-down industrial Ruhrgebiet shows each city as a failed Coketown smothered by thick palls of factory smoke. Two of Roth’s postcards entice and then repel: Hamburg in 1924 is cheap, its banks reliable, but it is crippled by crime and unemployment; while on the Baltic island of Rügen in the same year—15 years before Isherwood took us there—we get sun, sea, jazz, cocktail bars “and even some swastika flags.”In another section we follow Roth further afield. A trip to Sarajevo (“Innocent, accursed city”) 13 years on from its catalytic event, prompts much before-and-after comparing and contrasting—until Roth changes key in an impassioned, finger-pointing finale: “All the heroes’ graves, all the mass graves, all the battlefields, all the poison gas, all the cripples, the war widows, the unknown soldiers: they all came from here.” On a journey through his native region and “half-banished land” of Galicia, he views forgotten villages and unhealed battlefields while subverting stereotypes and evincing “the sad allure of the place scorned.” In the newly formed Soviet Union he sails on a Volga steamer and surveys the towns ravaged by the Civil War (“the saddest I have ever seen”), pities the rag-tag jumble of passengers in fourth class in the belly of the ship (not least the homeless children, the “so-called “bezprizorniy” who live off wretchedness and fresh air”) and is lulled by the mournful tunes of the barge haulers or “Burlaki” in whose hearts “destiny and song are woven together.” In 1927, after taking in Astrakhan and Azerbaijan, Roth heads to Albania. Despite the pomp and ceremony of marching soldiers, a big-scoop presidential meeting, and the exotic menace of “color-postcard vendetta-artists with revolvers for bellies, and rifles for umbrellas,” he finds the country “beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring.”Later pieces written in exile see Roth either manfully ignoring mounting political tension, eroded liberties, and inevitable flashpoints (as in a long essay on Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer) or confronting the crisis head-on. In “The Third Reich, a Dependency of Hell on Earth” (1934), Roth’s vitriol laces each line, in particular its killer opener: “After seventeen months, we are now used to the fact that in Germany more blood is spilled than the newspapers use printers’ ink to report on it.” A cold shadow falls across Roth’s study of his literary idol, Heine, written in the same year. For Roth, Heine was not only a poet but a prophet who “foresaw the course Germany would take. Read him, and save yourself the daily reports of events in Germany. Every new German calamity bears him out.” Heine’s stark warning from 1821, today engraved on Berlin’s Bebelplatz—“where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people”—went unheeded in 1933. But then, as Heine’s works were among those consigned to the flames, snuffed-out words only carry so much influence.For a book entitled The Hotel Years, it would be fair to assume that hotels preponderate. In fact, they don’t. The section “Hotels” runs only to forty pages, with remaining sections containing scattershot references or isolated tales of one-nighters and lobby-loiterings. However, quality trumps quantity. It is in Roth’s hotel accounts that we get the full brunt of his powers of observation and illustration, his alchemical skill of transmuting pedestrian fact and commonplace occurrence into something newsworthy, even provocative. In “Millionaire for an Hour” (1921), Roth relates how every now and then he enjoys spending time in a top Berlin hotel—not as a paying guest but as a poor visitor, one in need of feeling “flush and expansive.” As he sits in the foyer in his one earthly pair of trousers, he weighs up the words and deeds, clothes and accoutrements of his “brother millionaires”: lawyers, politicians, spivs, carpet traders, and Russian counts. An old man smokes a “freshly guillotined cigar.” Deals are made: “cocaine, sugar, political systems, revolutions and women are on offer.” As soon as Roth exits, the fairy tale ends. There is no moral, no explanation for his masquerade. We take it for what it is: a plush tableau vivant, a stolen glimpse into another world, a glorious suspension of reality.Later in “Hotel Kopriva” (1923) in the town of P., Roth takes us on a tour of less glitzy lodgings. The hotel caters to “single, rivalrous, anxious travelers” who are forced to shack up together and endure each other’s snoring. A far worse disturbance, though, is the constant blare of the dining-room gramophone which “scratches out marches, waltzes and two-steps with the inert implacability of a machine”—surely as frustrating as the hotel noise Brandeis must endure in Right and Left: “The sound of love and gramophones leaked out of all the rooms.” In “The All-Powerful Police” (1928), a snapshot of Fascist Italy, Roth is irked at discovering that the porter of his Roman hotel is a police spy, while in Tirana we sense his approval of the hotel owner shrugging off his savagery and using his holster as a receptacle for small change.It is during Roth’s long stay in 1929 at an unnamed hotel in an unspecified city (which may or may not be Marseilles) that we see him at his most watchful and gushing. He notices the young couples, both “lawful” and “unlawful,” in the breakfast room—breakfast being “an asseveration of their love”—and the fat ladies who take civilized afternoon tea while their daughters are seduced by gigolos. We get thumbnail sketches of hotel staff, from patron to chambermaid, which, though brief, still brim with warts-and-all detail. It is in these hotel pieces that we also see Roth at his most revealing. He delights in stressing the worldly mix that passes through the hotel’s doors and thrives under its roof. The telephonist, we are told

is an Italian. The waiter is from Upper Austria. The porter is a Frenchman from Provence. The receptionist is from Normandy. The head waiter is Bavarian. The chambermaid is Swiss. The valet is Dutch. The manager is Levantine; and for years I’ve suspected the cook of being Czech. The guests come from all over the world. Continents and seas, islands, peninsulas and ships, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists are all represented in this hotel. The cashier adds, subtracts, counts and cheats in many languages, and changes every currency. Freed from the constriction of patriotism, from the blinkers of national feeling, slightly on holiday from the rigidity of love of land, people seem to come together here and at least appear to be what they should always be: children of the world.

For Roth, the hotel is more than a pit-stop: it is a surrogate empire, a melting pot of disparate nations held in peaceful union. “The hotel I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe”—so begins “Arrival in the Hotel” (1929).

Fortunately, this self-proclaimed “hotel citizen” and “hotel patriot” will always have a secure place in his new adopted fatherland. “No one asks me how long I plan on staying, an hour or a year, my fatherland is happy either way.” Roth would soon give up what semi-permanent home and security he had made for himself and embark on an increasingly uncertain journey, one which would encompass the last ten years of his life and see him at various stages enacting the role of both hardy wayfarer and restless wanderer. Home slid from view; in its place came a string of transient sanctuaries. “Other men may return to hearth and home, and wife and child,” he continues in “Arrival in the Hotel”; “I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid.”Joseph Brodsky said that there is a poem on every page of Roth’s. Girls in white dresses wander the streets “like so many church bells, all smelling of jasmine, sex and starch.” An undertaker wears bicycle clips which make his “sinister” black trousers bunch at the ankles, “looking like umbrellas in fair weather.” In “Journey Through Galicia” (1924), Roth seems to imply that his observational knack is a reflexive act, the result of ungovernable curiosity:

I would like to avoid the kind of reportage that looks out of a railway window and jots down fleeting impressions with a rush of satisfaction. But I can’t. My eyes move from the speaking features of my fellow travelers to the melancholy flat world without limits, the mild sorrow of the fields into which the battlegrounds have grown, to subsequent details.

That moving eye is at work on trains and steamers, cafés and hotels, but also while exploring on foot. And of course when Roth isn’t eyeing the present, both in his journalism and his novels, he is casting searching and wistful backward glances towards the sanctity of home and homeland, dreaming of a Heimat purged of nationalistic fervor within a Mitteleuropa imbued with tolerance and fraternity.

But while Roth is a master at freeze-framing a moment and replaying a memory, he offers little in The Hotel Years in the way of tentative peeks into the future—political projections, economic forecasts, the likely fates of individuals. In contrast, his novels are aswirl with dark prophesies and his busy correspondence is dotted with optimistic predictions—the former turning out to be depressingly true, the latter sadly too good to be true. “I’m convinced nothing will befall the cheeky chutzpah-Jews,” he wrote to Stefan Zweig in August 1932, and was equally sanguine in July 1935: “Hitler won’t last more than another year and a half, and then slowly but surely, we shall have a new German Empire.” Similarly in The Hotel Years, in the few instances where Roth tries to look ahead, he drastically underestimates the consequences. In Berlin in 1923 he watches two high school kids chanting “Filthy Yids!” on the street and not one passerby censuring them. “That’s how law-abiding people are in Berlin,” Roth writes. “And that discipline is heading for a tragicomic ending.” Would that it were only tragicomic. Most of the time, especially in the later pieces, we must make do with grim foreboding. In the bleak penultimate article, penned mere months before Roth’s death, a poor man struggling to stay afloat must report to the police. “He has a document with his name on it and where he comes from and where he lives. But what it doesn’t say is how long he can stay there, and where he’s allowed to go.”The glamour of Roth’s bohemian life started to lose its allure when he ran out of money and options. Fellow exiled writer, Irmgard Keun, who lived and traveled with Roth between 1936 and 1938, described how when she first met him in Ostend she recognized someone “who was simply about to die of sadness.” That sadness could only have intensified with the Anschluss in 1938 and the painful realization that the Habsburg monarchy would never be restored. Was Roth, one wonders, as sad as old Zipper in Zipper and His Father (1928) whom he wrote about a decade earlier: “as sad as a room which has been emptied, as sad as a sundial in shadow, as sad as a stripped railway coach standing on a rusty line?” A deeper, palpable melancholy seeps into the work of Roth’s late period, far thicker and more debilitating than the earlier romantic variant, that rueful yearning for past ideals. “The day is so long because there is no melancholy to fill it,” he tells us in “Leaving the Hotel”—by which logic we can surely conclude that his last, dead-end days in Paris, all of them drink-sodden, must have felt very short indeed.At one point in Roth’s second novel, Hotel Savoy (1924), the hero, Gabriel Dan, is in the bar being plied with schnaps by his cousin, Alexander, who makes him an offer. If Gabriel turns over his room to him, Alexander will pay his fare to Vienna, Berlin or Paris. Gabriel should be overjoyed: finally he can leave this monstrous hotel, simultaneously “palace and prison,” a place where girls strip downstairs in the bar and bankrupt guests die upstairs—and move on through “the gates of Europe.” But instead he feels the offer has come too late. “Alexander ordered one schnaps after another, but the more I drank the more melancholy I became, and the thought of traveling further and the thought of freedom vanished into thin air.” This description of a fictional character’s predicament in 1924 uncannily mirrors Roth’s plight in 1939. It is tempting to believe that were it not for his alcoholism he might have checked out of his Parisian hotel and joined the likes of Mann, Brecht, and Remarque in America. It’s an incongruous image—Roth, as prolific as ever, a nostalgic but also forward-looking vagabond churning out Exilliteratur in Santa Monica—but an undeniably alluring counterfactual. Instead, Roth’s hotel years came to an abrupt end in the Old World. Thankfully, his account of them, and of the turbulent cross-currents of his age, live on in exquisite collections such as this one.

Cops and the Cult of Accountability

Megan McArdle is skeptical of some elements of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement’s newly-released plan for regulating the police. She points out that it is extremely difficult for external regulators to effectively manage and control the behavior of professionals—like doctors, lawyers, and police—without creating unintended consequences that ultimately harm the public interest. A snippet of McArdle’s piece in Bloomberg View:

Because police officers spend a lot of time operating unsupervised, and do not have measurable outputs other than the time they put in, they will have a lot of ways to rebel against perceived unfairness.

This is why professionals require a certain esprit de corps, a professional ethic, to do their job effectively and fairly. That ethic is supposed to keep them doing the right thing even when no one is looking, and it cannot be imposed from outside, because professional jobs are about judgment with imperfect information, and the only people who have ever tried to exercise such judgment are the professionals themselves.  At best you can substitute crude metrics that often backfire — see, for example, David Simon’s savage critique of what happened to Baltimore policing under Martin O’Malley. Or what happened when New York State started scoring cardiologists on how well their patients did: the cardiologists stopped taking risky patients who might mess up their numbers.

For a deeper dive into the history of professional “accountability” in America, check out Jerry Z. Muller’s essay in the latest issue of The American Interest. Muller shows that public policy—and management practices in the private sector—has been driven by a distrust of professionals for a long time, and by the conviction that professionals can be adequately measured. Efforts to measure closely monitor professionals, like some of the initiatives in the ‘Black Lives Matter’ policy outline, have been fashionable on the right and the left alike for a good part of the 20th century, and have grown more popular than ever in the 21st:

Today, “accountability” and its kissing cousins “metrics” and “performance indicators” seem to be, if not on every lip, then on every piece of legislation, and certainly on every policy memo in the Western world. In business, government, non-profit organizations, and education, “accountability” has become a ubiquitous meme—a pattern that repeats itself endlessly, albeit with thousands of localized variations.

The characteristic feature of the culture of accountability is the aspiration to replace judgment with standardized measurement. Judgment is understood as personal, subjective, and self-interested; metrics are supposed to provide information that is hard and objective. The strategy behind the numbers is to improve institutional efficiency by offering rewards to those whose metrics are highest or whose benchmarks have been reached, and by punishing those who fall behind relative to them. Policies based on these assumptions have been on the march for decades, hugely enabled in recent years by dramatic technological advances, and as the ever-rising slope of the Ngram graphs indicate, their assumed truth goes marching on.

The attractions of accountability metrics are apparent. Yet like every culture, the culture of accountability has carved out its own unquestioned sacred space and, as with all arguments from presumed authority, possesses its characteristic blind spots.

Muller goes on to cite specific instances when such metrics for professionals have created perverse incentives, with ruinous effects—in education (No Child Left Behind led schools to teach to the test, without improving overall student performance), in medicine (“surgical report cars” led some surgeons to turn away sicker patients), and in policing (police reliance on arrest statistics as a marker of competence has led police to pursue low-level teenage drug dealers rather than the drug lords at the top of the pyramid). Muller’s argument is not that there is no place for accountability metrics—but rather, that they should be deployed with caution, and in addition to—not instead of—old-fashioned experience and judgment.

Ultimately, while policymakers can make use of metrics to hold professionals accountable, our best hope is to try to cultivate high-quality professional classes, composed of diligent people who self-monitor and perform complicated tasks out of professional pride (even as, of course, the authorities monitor the professionals for any serious abuses). As the debate about police accountability intensifies, McArdle and Mullers’ essays make good companion pieces. Read them both.

The Sources of Hookup Culture

Most explanations for the rise of hookup culture focus on, well, culture—the steady ascent of social liberalism since the 1960s, especially among the upper classes, and the decline of traditional norms surrounding courtship and dating.

Mixed in with this cultural story, however, is a more straightforward demographic one. According to the writer Jon Birger, one reason a certain slice of today’s young people—well-off college graduates in urban centers—is having so much casual sex is that there is shortage of men among their ranks. The female-heavy gender ratio among the yuppie elite makes it easier for men to find sexual partners, and thus less likely to take the time and effort to court them. Birger wrote in Thursday’s Washington Post:

In 2012, 34 percent more women than men graduated from American colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education expects this gap to reach 47 percent by 2023. The imbalance has spilled over into the post-college dating pool. According to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are now 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 vs. only 4.1 million such men. In other words, the dating pool for straight, millennial, college graduates now has four women for every three men. No wonder some men are in no rush to settle down and more women are giving up on what used to be called “playing hard to get.”

These demographics represent the true dating apocalypse, as stacks of social science show how dating and mating behavior is influenced by prevailing sex ratios. When there are plenty of marriageable men, dating culture emphasizes courtship and romance, and men generally must earn more in order to attract a wife. But when gender ratios skew toward women, as they do today among college grads, the whole dating culture becomes more sexualized.

Of course, men remain overrepresented at the highest echelons of American society—the U.S. Congress, the Fortune 500 executive suites, the mastheads of major newspapers. But as Hanna Rosin argued in her blockbuster “End of Men” article (and book), young men are, on the whole, falling behind compared to their female peers—earning fewer college degrees, fewer graduate degrees, and, in a growing number of cities, earning less money. There are a variety of reasons for this—some of them cultural, others economic (Rosin speculates that “a postindustrial society is simply better suited to women”)—but regardless of the cause, the increasingly skewed gender ratio is clearly one reason why, as Birger says, “Manhattan’s hetero, college-grad, under-30 dating pool” is essentially “a sexual playground for men.”

In other words, the fortunes of both genders in the sexual and economic realms are tied together. The transition to a post-industrial economy has generally been kinder to women than men from an economic perspective. However, this female-friendly economic landscape also seems to have contributed—in some spaces—to the rise of a no-strings-attached sexual culture that is, on the whole, more suited to male than to female preferences.Of course, demography is not destiny: gender relations are shaped by culture as well, and millennials could come up with new norms to regulate the modern sexual landscape if they decide that the status quo is in need of a correction (and based on Vanity Fair’s recent dispatch from the world of Tinder, it seems that a correction wouldn’t hurt). We’re not sure what these new norms would look like, exactly, but a good place to start would be to take on the whole system of elite cultural segregation that leads modern college graduates to only date within their social class.

Russia’s Beer Nativism

Nationalist activists are showing their love for Mother Russia by destroying foreign beer as a way to promote domestic food products in the wake of the self-harming food import ban that the Kremlin introduced as a counter to Western sanctions over the crisis in Ukraine. The London Times reports:

A group of ultra-conservative Cossacks, spearheaded by a rock star, have marched into a supermarket and ripped apart cans of “unpatriotic” booze.

In an apparent response to western sanctions, Stas Baretsky, 43, a former vocalist with the Moscow-based band Leningrad, joined the Orthodox Union of Cossacks in their campaign of destruction in St Petersburg.As a crowd of onlookers gathered, he ripped apart a can of Danish lager with his teeth, spraying foam everywhere. “Don’t we have our own beer?” he asked. “Have all our beer factories been closed down?” […]Mr Baretsky joined the Cossacks in their search for American and European Union produce to destroy. He said that he had been named “minister of culture” for the Cossack group. “We are in a state of Cold War with the European Union,” Andrei Polyakov, the Cossack leader, said. “Europe causes us trouble, and we have to feed it by buying its goods?”

Earlier in August, Moscow tightened the terms of the ban by ordering any that any contraband comestibles be destroyed. That’s been followed by the public crushing and burning of a many picnics’-worth of such foreign products as Dutch flowers, Spanish Ham, and French cheese. Strangely enough, beer isn’t even on the list of prohibited products.

At the end of the 1400’s in Florence, the social pendulum swung wildly and frequently between moralizing conservatism and orgiastic, opulent hedonism. It was there that Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola and his followers rose up at the end of a particularly decadent period and ransacked the city’s homes for sinful objects like games for gambling on, fancy clothing, expensive non-religious artwork, and, most famously, mirrors. They burned the loot in the town square—the so-called bonfire of the vanities.Just like in Florence (and hopefully not like that other great historical incident of burning cultural objects), the Russian protests are a jarring demonstration of how much and how quickly cultural moods can change. The relationship between Russia and the West has deteriorated further and faster than almost anyone had imagined it might. It’s been less than two years since the invasion of Crimea. Remember the reset?

Ukraine’s Recruiting Problem

As violence in the east of Ukraine flares, Kiev is struggling worse than ever to meet its recruiting goals, as Defense News reports:

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense managed to recruit only about half of the 25,000 conscripts it was hoping for, according to Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Peter Mehed. The government is implementing its sixth military draft this year.

“Depending on how the situation develops, there could be a seventh, an eighth or ninth wave of mobilization. We’ve got 50 percent of the people we need,” Mehed told local broadcaster Ukraine Today.

In the western regions, far from the conflict, draft dodging and bribery to get out of the draft are widespread. Kiev had to almost immediately up the age range for recruiting from 50 to 60 once the conflict started, and it has struggled to find willing, able-bodied soldiers throughout the war. And with some 50,000 Russian troops massing on the border right now according to President Poroshenko, as well as the rebel forces and presumably their Russian peers and overseers inside sovereign Ukrainian territory, now is not a good time to be coming up at all short on manpower, much less by more than half of the target.

Poland Ready to Throw Wrench In Climate Talks

The Polish opposition party that’s looking likely to win parliamentary elections this October is coming out with rhetoric that will worry delegates around the world preparing for this year’s climate summit in Paris. The Law and Justice party is leading in the polls ahead of voting on October 25, and it’s coming out with some strong words for the quest to sign a binding international treaty addressing climate change. Reuters reports:

Poland has long argued for special dispensation under EU emissions rules because it generates its electricity mainly from highly polluting coal. This will not change if PiS wins elections in October, a member of the party told Reuters.

“Any binding stance that would be accepted at the conference in Paris will be harmful to Poland, so a failure of the summit is in Poland’s interest,” parliamentarian Piotr Naimski said.

This isn’t just a problem for climate talks at the international level, either. Polish politicians hoping to thwart a binding Global Climate Treaty in December will try to use such a failure to wiggle out of EU emissions targets:

“If there is no agreement at the global level, there will be no reason for the current EU regulations on CO2 emission reductions to be maintained. This should mean that they will renegotiable,” Naimski said.

Poland relies heavily on coal, which makes it an outlier in most EU talks about the latest green effort. It’s no surprise, then, that it looks to play the role of spoiler when these discussions are elevated to an international level. You can be sure that they aren’t the only country keen on keeping their cheaper, dirtier power plants running. India has repeatedly asserted its need to grow its economy unrestrained by emissions reduction targets.

When the issue of a binding GCT has been raised, we’ve often pointed to the near impossibility of such a treaty being ratified by the U.S. Senate as reason enough for that particular goal being unachievable. Poland reminds us that there are many other nations unwilling to sign on to such an agreement. Without any binding clauses or enforcement mechanisms, whatever is agreed upon in Paris will become little more than the eco-version of the Kellogg-Briand pact.Negotiators in France will hope to tamp down on global emissions, but the way things are shaping up it looks like all they’ll end up producing is a lot of hot air.

Vladimir Putin, Grave Robber

As part of a propaganda campaign to portray himself as the heir of a continuous, unbroken tradition of strong Russian leadership, Vladmir Putin has begun repatriating the remains of imperial heroes exiled by the Soviets. It’s a sort of funereal form of reconciliation—and at least one target’s family is having no part of it. RFERL reports:

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s great-great-granddaughter says that not only are Moscow suggestions that his gravesite is neglected in the United States “categorically false,” but she also stresses that the Russian-American icon of classical music fled the Soviet Union because “the Russia he once knew and loved no longer existed.”

The comments by Susan Sophia Volkonskaya-Wanamaker to RFE/RL’s Russian Service further challenge a narrative, which Russian officials have long appeared eager to push, that portray Rachmaninoff’s legacy as somehow misappropriated by his adopted home, the United States.

Rachmaninoff was exiled by the Soviet Union and lived the last two and a half decades of his life in the United States. His will clearly states that he wished to be buried in New York.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated trend. A recent article in the New York Review of Books by Masha Gessen illustrates the extent and significance of the reburial movement:

A recent propaganda film called “President,” a two-and-a-half-hour review of the victories Putin has won for Russia, included the exhumation and reburial, in 2005, of White Guard general Anton Denikin, (who died in Ann Arbor in 1947), nationalist philosopher Ivan Ilyin (who was exiled from Russia on Lenin’s orders in 1922, and died in Switzerland in 1954), and their wives. Putin himself laid flowers at their new Moscow graves for the cameras. For the propaganda movie, the country’s most successful film director, Nikita Mikhalkov, explained that the reburials were the “real end of the civil war” that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution.

Fortunately, Rachmaninoff’s family are still around to fight for his wishes. Hopefully the State Department will resist the Kremlin’s effort as strongly as they would for any other American citizen, which Rachmaninoff was. In the meantime, here’s a recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, played by his friend and fellow Russian exile Vladimir Horowitz. Happy weekend, everybody.

 

Putin Slips in the Polls

Vladimir Putin’s domestic approval ratings are dipping according to two recent Russian polls, after they had shot up in the wake of the annexation of Crimea. Numbers on what Russians think of their Tsar—ahem, President—still show him remaining quite popular in absolute terms, but the step down in the numbers appears to be real. Reuters :

Russians’ concern about rising prices has eroded President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings but these remain extremely high, the daily Vedomosti reported on Friday.

It cited a poll by the Public Opinion Foundation as showing that 72 percent of Russians would have voted for Putin in August, down from 76 percent in May.Another poll, by the Levada Center, showed that in August 83 percent of Russians approved of the President’s actions, down from an all-time high of 89 percent in May.

Russians increasingly have good reason to be upset, or at least less happy, with their leadership. Plummeting oil prices and Western sanctions have given the Russian economy a good shove towards recession, contracting output by 4.6 percent in the second quarter of 2015, and sending the ruble down to its lowest levels ever against the euro and dollar this week. Inflation in consumer goods prices—the vector by which average Russians will most acutely experience pain—remains stubbornly high, remaining at around 15.6 percent in July.

The question, as always with Russia, is just how much pain will the people bear? Russian history might suggest that the answer could be “a lot”; and Putin’s enduring popularity is no doubt due to the suffocatingly jingoistic propaganda that suffuses the country’s mass media 24-7. Nevertheless, when things go as bad as they seem to be going, unpredictable things can happen. The Kremlin, which is by all accounts obsessed with public opinion ratings, can’t be happy about this turn of events.

 

Desperate Venezuela Calls For Emergency OPEC Meeting

Venezuela’s economy was already in trouble last summer when oil prices were trading well over $100 per barrel, so you can only imagine how dire the straits the petrostate is now in with crude barely over $40. The WSJ reports:

According to [sources], Venezuela has been in touch with some members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, including Qatar’s oil minister and president of the OPEC conference, Mohammed al-Sada, to try again to find common ground to defend crude prices.

“Venezuela is genuinely concerned that if no action is taken prices are going to drop further,” an OPEC delegate said. “They also understand that OPEC alone cannot help much and there is a need for cooperation with producers outside OPEC, mainly Russia,” the delegate said.

Russia isn’t a member of OPEC, but it is without question a petrostate, which puts it in the same sinking boat as the rest of OPEC’s members. Caracas seems to think that bringing Moscow into the talks might help push OPEC away from its strategy of inaction, but Russia has no intention of cutting its own production. Meanwhile, OPEC’s biggest and most important member, Saudi Arabia, still isn’t likely to budge from this inactive position. Riyadh is the only one that can realistically throttle its output to a significant enough degree to push prices up, which makes its vote the only one that really matters at these meetings.

As the Economist explains, the Saudis may believe they can continue to endure the bearish market in the hopes of squeezing out non-OPEC producers (and Iran):

Though Saudi Arabia’s public spending has tripled in the past decade, needing $100 oil to balance the budget, it has foreign assets to sell and a debt ratio of just 1.6% of GDP. That gives it the leeway to avoid making a rushed decision.

Yes, prices are low, and yes, that’s pushing the world’s petrostates further into the red with each passing month as budget deficits begin to add up. But the biggest player in all of this is also the best prepared for it, which means the cries from OPEC’s smaller, more at-risk members seem likely to go unheeded.