Monday was Ukrainian Independence Day, and a Ukrainian friend sent me a video of an art installation some of her compatriots presented two years ago at Burning Man. Called “I’m Fine,” it consisted of a DJ playing haunting music in front of large letters that spelled out the words “I’M FINE.” As the camera zoomed in on the letters, you saw that each was made up of road signs, all of them riddled with bullets. “I’m fine,” the narrator explained, is what Ukrainians now say when people ask them how they’re doing. Many people do this, of course, when they’re really struggling, or hurting, or suffering. But for Ukrainians it is not a lie, it is an act of defiance. Also, saying “I’m fine” is a way of becoming fine.
Yesterday, CBS Sunday morning featured a piece on Tadeusz Kosciuszko and his contributions to the American Revolution. At one point the camera lingered on a large portrait of the Pole, which I knew was hanging in a room in the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City. It was the room in which I spoke about my memoir this past September. My talk, for anyone interested, is available on YouTube.
The title of the story splashed across the front page of the Wall Street Journal Review section read: “How the U.S. Lost the World Cup – and Won Over the World.”
It seemed a fair assessment; the general consensus – even in non-U.S. media – was that this World Cup was an unqualified success. Which is not surprising. We are a sports-obsessed nation – so much so that we can even embrace a sport that is not our own – and we love a party. And the World Cup combines sport and parties as no other athletic competition. It makes the Olympics look as if they were run by ayatollahs. Perhaps, instead of starting wars, we should dedicate ourselves to becoming a beloved international host, relieving the world of its cares and seducing its citizens with free refills and stuffed raccoons.
New Yorker editor David Remnick recently interviewed the British historian Dominic Sandbrook and one of the topics was the American revolution and its miniscule place in British history textbooks. Sandbrook insisted that it’s not a question of sour grapes, because “there’s nothing the British like more than a tragic defeat.” The American revolution, he said, “is eclipsed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. There seems to be a parade of quite boring men talking very earnestly about liberty, battles that involve 20 people in a field somewhere in the great vastness of the American continent. It’s not Waterloo, it’s not Borodino.”
For an American used to the deification of the founding fathers, this was refreshing and rather amusing, particularly when delivered in a smart Oxbridge accent. But as I thought about it further, it seemed a glib caricaturing – about the personalities, not the battles – especially coming from a citizen of the land of Keir Starmer and Liz Truss. (Some might add Boris Johnson, though he is anything but boring.) More than that, it seemed a willful, if witty, denial of historical reality. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams - to name just three - were, even with all the mythologizing, remarkable men, part of a group that gave birth to what would become the richest and most powerful country in the world. Their achievement, their moment, should be more than a footnote in the British interpretation of history.
Yesterday I checked the Born on This Day feature in the Herald since it was also my birthday. I knew most of my fellow June Seveners – Liam Neeson, Prince – but was pleasantly surprised to learn that Dean Martin was also a member of the club. And they left out two people: the former tennis player Anna Kournikova and the Nobel prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk, who was born not only on the same day as I was but in the same year.
I was going through my photos yesterday, looking for one that would be good to post on Memorial Day. And I came across one I took a few years ago inside Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. It showed the towering bronze statue at the east end of the great concourse that depicts the Archangel Michael lifting a fallen soldier. Installed in 1952, it commemorates the over 1,000 Pennsylvania Railroad workers who perished in World War II.