The fog of unreality that has crept on little cat feet to blanket Joe Biden’s Washington for over a year now has yet to move on, I have to report, in spite of the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the end of February. Here, it might have seemed, was a real-world disaster of potentially global dimensions to dwarf all the hypothetical ones, such as climate change or a Trumpian “insurrection,” with which we have been so much preoccupied lately—at least, if we are among the remaining followers of “the news.” Yet both the news media and the political leadership of the country remain largely fog-bound, huddled together with their treasured disaster scenarios, to which the real world is only permitted to make an occasional, pre-screened contribution.
The fog of unreality that has crept on little cat feet to blanket Joe Biden’s Washington for over a year now has yet to move on,
Thus to our media and political moralists it was not just Ukraine that Vladimir Putin’s evil empire was attacking, it was “democracy” itself. It was truth, justice, and the American way. It was, in short, us—us and everyone else in the world who loves freedom and hates tyranny. That’s why the heroic Ukrainians were said by David Brooks of The New York Times to have inspired the rest of the free nations of the world to fight their own battles for democracy. “They’ve shown us that the love of
