The Sicilio-Ukrainian Gambit

The Great Gate of Kiev is a striking piece of music by Mussorgsky, and must be differentiated from the rapidly emerging narrative of Kiev-Gate, which is not so great.  Yes, I reluctantly return from the sun-drenched plains of philology to the murk of the political arena.  This essay is all jealousy and sour grapes.  It involves Ukraine, and specifically my missing out on the gravy train of scuzzy Ukrainian money that has been enriching so many of my fellow citizens.  Ukraine, or as we used to say in the very old days “the Ukraine,” now an independent country, is that large part of the dissolved Soviet Union that was once called the “breadbasket” of the old Russian heartland, the place where Stalin and Krushchev, in refounding the agrarian economy on sound socialist principles, bumped off all the “millionaires and billionaires” of the day (i.e., the kulaks, some of whom owned as many as two pigs) and starved several million people to death.  I am no Soviet expert, but I did have to look into all of this while writing about the Ukrainian defector, Viktor Kravchenko, one of the important authors I dealt with in The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

Kiev-Gate is a rapidly developing story, but here are the principal players so far.  I’ll begin—solely for purposes of dramatic contrast--with my only strong card,  Marie Yovanovitch (Princeton class of 1980), former Ambassador of the United States to Ukraine, an honorable professional who got canned for being honorable and professional.

Next comes Paul Manafort (former chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, current prison inmate), perhaps best characterized as greedy, meretricious, and felonious.  Then we have former Vice-President (and current presidential candidate) Joseph Biden, whose curiously jovial incompetence is in this instance somewhat marred not by any criminality, as suggested by Trump, but by a suspicion of disingenuousness deployed in favor of his son Hunter Biden, Washington lawyer and sometime expert consultant in that branch of the olive oil business known as natural gas.   Then you have the principals: Donald Trump, who has behaved like a Mafia thug; Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolf Giuliani, once mayor of New York, whose public statements have been incoherent to the point of borderline insanity; and Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, who may by now regret moving from theatrical comedy to that form practiced by politicians.  

As I assess things, the current Ukrainian flap involves outrageous behavior by Donald Trump, sleazy behavior by Hunter Biden, and dumb behavior by Joe Biden; it recalls earlier criminal behavior by Paul Manafort, formerly Trump’s campaign manager and now an inmate in prison, where, perhaps on holidays, he may be allowed to wear his Ukrainian-financed $15,000 ostrich leather sports jacket.   However, the current episode as it is being revealed is so obviously damaging to Donald Trump that folks don’t seem to notice that it is not really very good for Joe Biden either.  I don’t know whether there are any actual olive trees in Ukraine, but the olive oil business is clearly thriving there.  Lest my reference be obscure, I refer to memorable testimony before a congressional investigating committee made by Frankie Pentangeli in Part 2 of The Godfather.  The aspect of the olive oil business most relevant to our emerging story seems to involve natural gas monopolies, pipelines, exclusive franchises, and the potential legal liabilities of the oligarchs who have appropriated them.   These are matters that require a lot of expert advisors, or “consultants”—and not just any old consultant either.  Some journalists have hinted that on the face of things, Hunter Biden lacked the expertise needed to advise oligarchs about gas pipelines and such, but that is all nonsense.  This man had been, probably for more years than he could remember, the son of a prominent American career politician, and one who had at length arrived at a mere heartbeat’s distance from the Presidency itself.  And that is the kind of expertise likely to be useful in the olive oil business.  Any random engineering  graduate of Georgia Tech or the Bauman Moscow State Technical University can bring you up to date on pipe specifications.  This needs something special.  This needs Hunter Biden.

 Now, look, I’m a civil libertarian.  Live and let live.  It is not technically illegal to be named “Hunter Biden”.  In fact, “Hunter Biden” would be a great name for a character in a Fitzgerald novel, Amory Blaine’s roommate perhaps. But if your father’s political persona is that of Joe Sixpack from Scranton, PA, the name may raise just the slightest degree of cognitive dissonance.  On the other hand, “Hunter” may be preferable to “Fredo”, another literary allusion likely brought to mind by the circumstances.

In my part of the socio-cultural landscape, where political opinion generally runs all the way from A to A’, I have for the past four years struggled to maintain a broader view.  All attempts to enforce fair-mindedness, however, have been overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of our President’s behaviour.  Common or garden variety Washington sleeze, while often odiferous, cannot compete with constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors.  As this post is being published Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal “impeachment enquiry”.  That’s a serious step, and certainly one she has been reluctant to take before now.  The promise of the White House, for what it’s worth, is to release a full transcript of the telephone conversation between Presidents Trump and Zelensky that has been at the center of the speculative outrage.  Have your whistle ready at hand.

As in Shakespeare’s history plays, the most poignant villains are the hangers-on and henchmen.  Giuliani is not a man without accomplishments.  He was an effective comforter-in-chief to his traumatized city in 2001, since which time his speech has consisted primarily of tripartite sentences featuring a noun or two, a verb with luck, and the indispensable phrase “Nine-Eleven”.  In this he is now being imitated by Joe Biden, except that Biden says “Barack Obama,” or, when really closing in for the kill, simply “Barack”!  But whereas Biden merely sounds foolish, Giuliani is truly demented, his speech both violent and incoherent, not to mention mendacious of course.  One supposes that his assigned task was to transmit to Zelenksy an offer he could not refuse, but it is possible that he failed to transmit one he could even understand.