The Tartar Steppe

Looking at the Wikipedia page of the twentieth-century Italian novelist Dino Buzzati, the other day, I encountered the following dry account of his life and career: "As he was completing his studies in law, he was hired, at the age of 22, by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain until his death."

Because any of the random atomic facts of the universe can be made to serve as grist for the mill of one's own existential anxieties, if you squint at them enough, this sentence quickly acquired personal meaning for me: "Aha!" I said to the universe: "See? It's not so odd to just take a job at a place and stay there until one retires! Loads of people do it! I'm sure he was perfectly happy!"

Appeasement?

 Everyone can agree at this point that the "Munich analogy" has been overplayed. Not only have Hitler/Nazi comparisons of all kinds come to be regarded as argumentative cheap shots (or worse, as relativizing the exceptionally evil in human history), but the Munich analogy in particular has been abused to the point of senselessness. Throughout much of the last century, it could serve as the final closing argument to support a maximalist position in just about any negotiation with rival powers, because the idea of conceding anything could be portrayed as "appeasement," hence "reminiscent of Munich," hence ultimately likely to trigger more, rather than less, war. 

But with all those caveats in place, Putin's expansionary gambits in Eastern Europe really do seem reminiscent of the events of 1938 in a more than usual fashion. This does not mean the Russian leader is bound to follow Hitler's genocidal and megalomaniacal path by some kind of inexorable teleology; nor does pointing out the similarity of his propaganda and tactics in this limited respect mean that he is like the Nazi dictator in all ways. But the particular manner in which he has gone about gradually enlarging the territory under Russia's effective control mirrors in an uncanny way the actions of Hitler leading up to the 1939 invasion of Poland. 

Extinction

 It's hard to recapture the mood today, because the skies are blue, the sun is shining, and I haven't yet turned on the news, but yesterday it kind of seemed like humanity might be coming to an end. Not only do we have two nuclear-armed superpowers once again squaring off against each other in Eastern Europe, but we also had more than a few fresh reminders each day of the relatively slow-burn apocalypses we seem to be living through already: the pandemic and climate change.

I was barricaded within four walls yet again yesterday, after all, to hide from the raging Omicron variant outside; a friend was forwarding me tweets about how future mutations of the virus could take it in a more, rather than less, deadly direction; and I happened to catch a few articles over the course of the week about how the Siberian permafrost is melting, releasing long-frozen stores of carbon in what threatens to become a self-perpetuating chain reaction—one of the dreaded "feedback loops" that could accelerate human-caused climate change even further.