On Thursday morning I woke up to listen to an obviously intelligent man speaking on my bedside radio in full sentences using occasional big words and teaching me a lot I didn’t know about what we used to call “The Ukraine”. That would be the modern struggling nation of Ukraine, whose capital, now Kyiv, is what we used to transliterate as Kiev. And Trump’s henchmen, Rudy, Lev and Igor, had recently been detected hanging out there.
There was a time, when I was taking the Russian History course and/or reading Russian literature, that I fancied I knew something about Kiev. All I’ve been able to remember recently, fifty years or so down the line, was the origin story about how Orthodox Christianity came to what we called Russia.
The star of that story was Prince (or Saint) Vladimir of Kiev, who round about the end of the first millennium decided that his “pagan” people needed to take up one of the Abrahamic desert religions to keep up with the modern world. He did the grand tour of Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Legend has it that he settled on the last of these because when he visited the gorgeous golden-domed Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople (previously Byzantium, now Istanbul) and heard the sumptuous Greek liturgy “he didn’t know if he was in heaven or in earth.”
I’m not sure if I learned this in my history or my language/literature classes, and even that much I had to look up on Wikipedia to remember the names.
From my radio lecturer I learned a whole lot of new things, notably the recent history of the post-Soviet independent Ukraine, now separated from Russia, even though Prince Vladimir in his day ruled most of Russia. I turned on the computer to livestream what turned out to be the impeachment hearings, and learned a whole lot more.
Based on how George P. Kent explained his understanding of what’s happened lately regarding relations between the United States and Ukraine, at a guess I’d say he’s Clark’s younger brother. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see him step into a phone booth, remove his trademark bow tie and three piece suit, and leap into the air clad in spandex. I wasn’t at all surprised to see that he’d studied Russian history and literature some thirty years later that I did. Smart, articulate, well-educated, humane—in other words, the anti-Trump. In the movie, he’d be played by Jimmy Stewart, if he wasn’t dead.
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