Steve Bailey's Blog : Putin, Put Me On Your List

I am jealous. The Russian government bans Virginia's Attorney General Jason Miyares and 500 people from entering Russia because they have been critical of Vlad the Bad and his war on Ukraine. So why am I not on this list? Ever since that delusional dictator decided to invade Ukraine, I have written letters to newspapers (look right), published journal articles (Putin: A Dilettante in the Art of War), and ranted on social media, condemning the man and his atrocities. I even recommended a preemptive strike against Russia before the invasion, giving some of my Facebook friends apoplexy. All this, and I am not on his list!

Just think about what that would do to my freelance writing career. With every submission requiring a "brief bio," I could say, "I published in this and that, AND I am banned from Russia." The only thing better than that would be to be banned in China, which the Chinese Communist Party should do since my novel condemns the Chinese government for their genocidal treatment of the Uyghurs.

Putin the Punk banned Stephen Colbert. Barrack Obama also made the list along with some Senators. Many little people like me think Russia's head thug is a total douch bag. We should all be banned. People like me root for the Russian dissidents who carry out the time-honored Russian anarchist tradition of blowing their fellow Russians to pieces when they are too loyal to an autocratic government, as was the fate of the nationalist podcaster Vladlen Tatarsky.

Many of us celebrate the news of partisans conducting intelligence gathering for the Ukrainian army and committing sabotage and assassination on Russian soil. They remind us of the romantic stories of the European Resistance to the Nazis in World War II. Somewhere out there is Ukraine's Victor Laszlo.

Now, there is enough in this rant alone to get me banned from Russia for life. So come on, you pathetic Peter, the Great wannabe, make my day; exclude me from your country! It would be an honor.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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Putin, Put Me On Your List

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