Mikhail Khodorkovsky

This week I flew into the Big Bagel and it was just like old times. Netanyahu was ranting against Iran at the U.N. and warning the consumer zombies that the end is nearer than they think. Strike early and strike often is his message, year in and year out. Last year he got dozens of standing ovations while addressing both houses of Congress—a Congress, mind you, whose great majority of men and women have been conceived by chimps with a dose of the clap. Never mind. Instead of making our peace with Iran, an ancient and very large country that we Greeks kicked the shit out of 2500 years ago, we are siding with those who financed terror long before 9/11. Go figure, as they used to say in Brooklyn when Brooklyn was Brooklyn and not the name of some football player’s son.

Another recent warmonger—this one wants us to fight Putin—is the once richest men of Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He’s been doing the rounds in Washington and New York and treated like the great Lindbergh was upon his return from Paris in ’27. I guess heroes are easier to come by nowadays. Khodorkovsky was as crooked as the rest of the oligarchs, but had stolen more, and then tried to buy Russia and Putin threw him in jail where he cooled his heels for eight years. (If Taki can do three months for two grams, Mikhail should do a minimum of eight for the billions he grabbed.) Instead of loving Putin for helping him cleanse his soul and ennoble his spirit through suffering—a great theme in Russian literature—this bum wants uncle Vlad to be overthrown. And Vlad even let him keep some of his millions, taking only the billions away. Khodorkovsky is no hero back home, his Jewish roots and the fleecing of the state’s assets by mostly Jews making him the least popular boy on the block. Again, never mind. Washington and New York and London and Paris and, yes, Switzerland all adore him, and if he writes a book about his years in protective custody he’ll most likely be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, a new Solzhenitsyn. And now I have to cut this column short and go and puke. Arrgh!