On the menu today: Joe Biden tells you where to find the best basketball in Delaware along with another serving of cringe-inducing stereotypes, while historians grapple with the legacy of the late Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — one that is more complicated than the common heroic narrative would suggest. Also, one reader offers a particularly satisfying assessment of Gathering Five Storms.
‘You Could Always Tell Where the Best Basketball in the State Is’
President Biden, speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., yesterday:
My deceased son, Beau, he was the Attorney General of the State of Delaware. And what he used to do is go down, in the east side, the — called the “Bucket” — highest crime rate in the country. It’s a place where I used to — I was the only white guy that worked as a lifeguard down in that area, on the east side.
And you know where the — you could always tell where the best basketball in the state is or the best basketball in the city is: It’s where everybody shows up.
The east side of Wilmington is indeed a primarily African-American neighborhood; earlier this year, Wilmington mayor Mike Purzycki described the East Side as “neglected for decades and decades” by city, county, and state leaders. Whether or not this neighborhood in Wilmington ever had the “highest crime rate in the country,” the area has been described as “Murder Town USA” in the not-too-distant past of 2014. And yes, this is the neighborhood with the swimming pool where Biden used to be a lifeguard (now renamed after the president) as well as Corn Pop’s old neighborhood.
“You could always tell where the best basketball in the state is or the best basketball in the city is” is a yet another classic, cringe-inducing use of stereotypes by Biden. It’s not the most consequential thing that Biden did yesterday, but it fits in with his long history of using racial and ethnic stereotypes that make him look like an ass: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking”; “[Obama is the] first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; “gonna put y’all back in chains; “these Shylocks”; “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”; “Unlike the African-American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community”; “Are you a junkie?”; “You ain’t black”; and so on.
(Biden’s frequent use of racial stereotypes might be a little less irritating if he weren’t always telling us how he stood up to racism in his life, and about how racist all of his critics and opponents are.)
There are a lot of reasons we shouldn’t embrace cancel culture. One big reason is that it often elevates an off-the-cuff comment into a litmus test of a person’s character and decency; we would all hate to be judged by the dumbest or worst thing we’ve ever said or done. Another reason is that once a disputed comment becomes a major controversy, it becomes a binary choice where the person must be fired or canceled or not. There’s very little middle ground, such as, “You shouldn’t be fired from your job, but that was a dumb or offensive thing to say, and you shouldn’t have said it. You should apologize and try to do better in the future.”
But another big reason is that the amount of offense that is taken is often directly inverse to how important you are to the Democratic Party at that moment.
If a little-known Republican state legislator had characterized a heavily African-American neighborhood as “where the best basketball in the state is,” you probably would have heard it denounced as yet another example of the callous racial animosity coursing through the veins of the modern Republican Party. But Biden said it, and many people have gotten used to him using “poor” and “black” as synonyms.
(Right now, there’s probably somebody out there contending that “where the best basketball in the state is” is a compliment. African Americans can speak for themselves, but people generally prefer to be seen as multifaceted and complicated human beings, not reduced to one simple hoary stereotype. It’s a bit like describing America’s Latino communities “as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.”
How Should We Remember Gorbachev?
By the standards of Soviet leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev was a great man. But that’s not saying much, because the leaders of the Soviet Union were literally a murderer’s row — a cavalcade of monsters, brutes, thugs, and mummified corpses. “Looks good compared to Josef Stalin” may very well be the lowest bar to clear ever.
The coming days will bring a lot of irksome, deliberate misremembering of Gorbachev in the Western press.
Gorbachev did not want to see the Soviet Union come to an end. “The greatest unintended outcome of all was the disintegration of the Soviet Union,” wrote Archie Brown, an emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University and the author of Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, in 2010. “Gorbachev, by 1988, had consciously set about dismantling the Soviet system. At no point did he wish to see the disappearance of the Soviet state.”
The Soviet system was slowly but surely failing; what made Gorbachev revolutionary was that, compared to his geriatric, half-dead predecessors, he wasn’t willing to pretend everything was running smoothly. As Gorbachev explained in a 2001 interview, “During the final years under Brezhnev, we were planning to create a commission headed by the secretary of the Central Committee, [Ivan V.] Kapitonov to solve the problem of women’s pantyhose. Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government. And so our people were already worked up, and that is why the dissident movement occurred.”
Gorbachev remained a believer in the Communist system until it no longer mattered. As Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote in 2006, “[Gorbachev] wanted to reform communism, not replace it. But his reforms snowballed into a revolution driven from below rather than controlled from above. In trying to repair communism, he punched a hole in it. Like a hole in a dam, once pent-up pressure began to escape, it widened the opening and tore apart the system.” Long after he retired, Gorbachev himself admitted that he “went on too long in trying to reform the Communist party,” and that he should have quit the party during a key fight with other Communists in 1991.
Gorbachev deserves no more than partial credit for ending the Cold War. Yes, a lot of us on the right can be accused of being excessively nostalgic and starry-eyed about Ronald Reagan. But if Reagan hadn’t enacted the 1980s defense-spending buildup and rejected Gorbachev’s proposal to end the Strategic Defense Initiative at the Reykjavík Summit, the creaky, wheezing Soviet Union might have figured out a way to keep on running for another decade or two.
Under the Reagan revolution and with the rapid technological advances occurring in the U.S. in the 1980s, the whole world could see that the Soviet Union was declining — an overmilitarized, backwards, no-longer-quite-so-“super” power, decaying from within and falling further and further behind a thriving, advanced, dynamic, and innovative alternative. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, there were 50,000 personal computers in the Soviet Union; in the United States, there were 30 million. (The radioactive disaster at Chernobyl and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan didn’t help the U.S.S.R.’s chances for survival, either.)
Gorbachev wasn’t always a reliable ally for democratic reforms in Russia. William Taubman, the author of the best English-language biography of Gorbachev, is a fan of the man but clear-eyed about his bad decisions, including those he made after leaving office:
I struggle to understand the degree to which Gorbachev has supported Putin, and I would say this, first of all: Gorbachev understood that by the time Putin took over in 2000 after nearly 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union under his own rule, Gorbachev believed that at that point, Russia needed a certain amount of authoritarianism. In fact, he said that, but he accompanied that by saying that he believed that Putin was basically a democrat, and that in due course, sooner rather than later, Putin would return to some of the democratic features that he and Yeltsin had tried to foster. I think in that sense he misjudged Putin. Gorbachev opposed Putin’s reelection in 2012.
So he’s been very critical, Gorbachev has been very critical of Putin, but as late as April 2017, when asked by a German newspaper, “Do you still trust Putin?” he said, “Yes, I still do.” . . .
I imagine that Gorbachev feels that when it comes to dealing with the West, some of Putin’s toughness in response to the expansion of NATO may not be an entirely bad thing.
Russia experts in the U.S. tend to have a clear-eyed and nuanced view of Gorbachev, but very little of this view permeated the minds of the more casual observers of Russia. It is hard to overstate how much the U.S. media perceived and celebrated Gorbachev as a visionary statesman. In 1989, Time magazine declared that Gorbachev was “the Man of the Decade” and called him, “the force behind the most momentous events of the 80s and the man responsible for ending the Cold War.”
The brief appearance of a Mikhail Gorbachev lookalike in the opening scene of The Naked Gun offers a little bit of sharp geopolitical commentary in the middle of an otherwise silly (and hilarious) movie. At an imaginary meeting of the world’s most notorious dictators, thugs, and extremists in Beirut, the lookalike suggests that he’s running a long con on the West:
Gaddafi: Nonsense! The solution is not bold enough for Libya. I say, wipe out Washington and New York!
Gorbachev: What? And spoil three years of good public relations? I have the Americans believing I am a nice guy! In some of their polls, I am more popular than their president!
I suspect that the Zucker brothers — descendants of Russian Jewish immigrants — were not going to forget that even a nice and polite head of the Soviet Union was still a Soviet leader.
So, why is Gorbachev a great man by Soviet standards? Because for two generations, every Soviet leader who faced an uprising suppressed it with brutal violence. Gorbachev wasn’t going to do that; his country and his people had suffered enough. He knew when to give up the ship, or more specifically, when the ship wasn’t worth saving.
Well, that, and the Pizza Hut commercial.
ADDENDUM: A deeply satisfying review of Gathering Five Storms from “G.E.”:
This is definitely the best-constructed of the already-terrific Dangerous Clique books. The use of flashbacks and interleaving the various timelines worked well to flesh out the formation of the clique and added to the central mystery of this story.
Jim continues to come up with cool new locations for the story to take place (although nothing will probably beat Snake Island). The threats faced feel extremely real and on-point in 2022. In fact, I would argue that no spy thriller series has come up with more realistic-yet-exciting bad guys and bad guy plots.
I had given the previous book 4 stars because some of the one-liners and humor were just a bit too much. This time, it’s dialed in just right, much in the same way that Die Hard perfectly balanced action and humor.
Finally, the world-building continues to be great, and this book sets things up well for future sequels.
The highest compliment I can give is that I was switching between 3 different books on my Kindle, and pushed all 3 aside to fly through this book in just a few days.