Photodomination

Some of you may wonder why I have been so photo-heavy in my posts of late. For one thing, I haven't had the inclination to translate anything lately - it just seems like it takes so much time to do a good job of that. Also, I've had lots of good (I think) photos to post. And let's be honest, laziness does play a role as well - a picture is worth a thousand words, and while it may take some effort to get pictures worth posting, getting them and posting one is certainly less effort than banging out a thousand words of original content.

But the main reason, I think, is that for the moment at least I've grown tired of the news here. The main story yesterday was Putin's address to the Federation Council, often referred to as something like the State of the Union address given by the President of the US. I didn't have the patience to watch the speech, read its text, or analyze it. What I was able to pick up from some of the coverage on NTV was that even some Russian political pundits are willing to state publicly that Putin's speeches in the past have had little to do with the policies his administration has then pursued. Triumphalist and optimistic talk, backed up by nothing and thunderously applauded by a gallery of careerists, sycophants, and opportunists. If things keep going in this direction, we'll have to ask the old-school Kremlinologists to come out of retirement and help us read between the lines, because more and more Putin and his team hew to one party line in public statements while the real policies are made and implemented far away from the eyes of the average Russian citizen.

Oh, and the 60th anniversary of US and Soviet soldiers meeting on the Elbe was also one of the top 3 stories on both NTV's 7pm news and RTR's Vesti news program last night. I should mention that I inherited from my father a Soviet poster commemorating this event and was proud to have it hanging in my office when I worked on a program at a US university for Russian and US military officers, and that generally I think the experience of being allies in WWII shows that the US and Russia should be able to cooperate for everyone's greater benefit.

However, I'm sad to admit that for some reason all the coverage of this anniversary on Russian TV did was spike my cynicism level. Both programs highlighted the fact that Presidents Bush and Putin had issued a joint statement on this occasion. For Putin, this is a big deal. Bush, on the other hand, may not even know that the statement went out with his name on it. And my American readers will correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt the 60th anniversary story ran as one of the top items on any of the evening network news programs in the US. So my take on this was that it's just another example of Putin desperately grasping at parity with other world leaders, and the TV coverage just another example of people here wanting to remember when their country was ascendant rather than on the decline.

So, given that I've not of late been possessed of my usual sunny disposition, maybe the preponderance of photo posts in the past few days is for the best.