Putin’s Aggression, Trump’s Betrayal, and Europe’s Challenge

  • Photo by Ukraine.ua on September 07, 2023.

You may not have heard of Tim Snyder, but he’s worth knowing. A Yale professor of Eastern European history and authority on the Holocaust, his vitae includes sixteen books and many academic awards. A Brown and Oxford graduate, he speaks five European languages and reads in ten.

I mention him because of his ardent defense of a free Ukraine, whose fate now lies in jeopardy. This month he’s been in Ukraine, a participant in a dedication of a new underground school for children a mere twenty miles from the front and within twenty second reach of Russian cruise missiles.

Today marks the end of three years of Ukraine’s brave resistance to its Russian invaders, who now occupy twenty percent of its land. The school has to be underground, as Russian targets include schools as well as hospitals, civilian housing, energy infrastructure, and even shopping malls.

Now Ukraine confronts its most insidious danger—Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine. Snyder reminds us that Trump cares little about Europe. What matters is making deals in exchange for profit as seen in his demand Ukraine grant rights to fifty percent of its minerals. Like Gaza, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, it’s about adding real estate to his portfolio.

Ukraine’s destiny now lies in European hands, but their commitment isn’t assured. Rewarding Kremlin aggression makes more aggression likely, particularly involving the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, each with a considerable Russian minority similar to that of Ukraine.

There are ways you can help Ukrainians. Snyder sponsors Documenting Ukraine, which affords Ukrainians a voice. There is also Come Back Arrive, supporting Ukrainian soldiers; RAZOM assisting civilians; and United 24, the Ukrainian government’s site for donations.

Few will read my lengthy post, but for those who do, donate, if you can—and while at it, join the resistance. You know what I mean.

—RJoly

Defending Democracy: What We Must Do

A year ago this month, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in a labor camp under circumstances that strongly suggest Kremlin involvement. His courageous fight against Russian despotism should have inspired a global recommitment to democracy. Instead, we see authoritarianism advancing—both abroad and at home.

Donald Trump, long an admirer of Vladimir Putin, has once again echoed Kremlin propaganda, calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and blaming him for the war—simply because Zelensky rejected his negotiating Ukraine’s surrender on Putin’s terms.

Unsurprisingly, Russian state media has embraced Trump as a political rock star, amplifying his rhetoric to weaken Western resolve.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, our own democratic values are under siege, the rule of law undermined, institutions eroded, and authoritarianism on the rise.

The threats we face today, both at home and abroad, make the world more dangerous for all who believe in freedom.

But we will not stand idly by. We must resist—through the courts, in Congress, and in the streets through peaceful protest.

The fight for America’s soul is far from over. If we stay united, we will prevail. In two years, we have the opportunity to reclaim Congress, hold those who threaten democracy accountable, and ensure that America remains a beacon of freedom—not an ally to autocrats.

—R Joly

Reaping What We Sowed

Like many of you, I shudder at each day’s news. I ask, what have we done to ourselves, electing a convicted felon, rapist, and con srtist, wielding bluff, vengeance, and ridicule to smother dissent—a man nefarious in his acumen for malice, his syntax simplistic, governing by impulse and running the country by the seat of his pants; impulsive and isolationist, bent on walling out the interweave of the world’s nations and reviving imperialism.

Devoid of any empathy, he deigns to displace two million Palestinians from their homeland, negotiate Ukraine’s fate on Putin’s terms, bully allies Canada and Mexico, cut off aid to those in need, disenfranchise America’s working class, while deepening racial divides and fueling the oligarchy of greed.

Denying climate change despite accelerating consequences, he imperils evolution’s age wrought marvels and forfeits our children’s future.

Alas, we will reap what we have sowed; harvest tares and not wheat. —rj

When the Pen Speaks: The Buried Life

Some years ago, I was a National Humanities Seminar student at Claremont Graduate University in southern California.

It was an eight week seminar devoted to myth study, meeting several times weekly. On a given day, one of us would be responsible for introducing a thematic topic, followed by extended discussion, monitored by a chair nationally recognized for excellence in the subject.

My presentations differed from that of my cohorts, who confidently offered their insights orally, a few notes at the most. For some reason, I’ve always preferred a text, perhaps from being a very deliberative person, mindful of nuance and wanting to find a way of simplifying complexity. I like sorting out enigmas, something requiring reflection and precise articulation, all the bits and pieces I fear I’m likely to omit without a text.

I’ve often felt remorse for this, envying those who verbalize freely. It’s a gift I lack. Were I a more relaxed person, more confident in myself, maybe I could pull it off.

But then I remember that some of the greatest presentations, motivating a nation, inspiring action, were delivered from chiseled texts. We dub their articulators “orators,” but they spoke from manuscripts. Abraham Lincoln, Frederic Douglas, Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama; perhaps the most eloquent of them all, Martin Luther King.

One day, a seminar member told me I became another person when I spoke from a text. I wasn’t offended. I knew its truth.

Franz Kafka comes to mind: “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

And that’s perhaps the best excuse I can offer for my addiction to a text. When I take a pen in hand, I become a stranger to myself. Myriad voices tumble forth, competing to be heard. Writing taps an oceanic source, deep, fathomless, a wellspring the ancient Greeks called daimon, not evil, but spirit entities acting as intermediaries between man and the gods, or what Matthew Arnold termed “the buried stream” :

The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
…
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes (“The Buried Life”).

Older now, I no longer view my reliance on text as a shortcoming but as a conduit that allows me to distill complexity and find precision in the tumult of thought. Perhaps I do become another person when I read from a text, but maybe that person is closer to the truest version of myself.

Writing is not a retreat from spontaneity, but an invitation to clarity; not a crutch but a way of channeling what might otherwise remain unspoken. If history remembers its greatest orators as voices of change, it also remembers the words that gave them their power—carefully chosen, painstakingly shaped, delivered not despite their deliberation, but because of it.

–rj

Profits Over People: Trump’s Environmental Rollback

Multiple brown bear at McNeil River State Game Sanctuary fishing for salmon

This past week has been disastrous for the environment and public welfare. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, ramped up efforts to expand fossil fuel production, attacked clean energy initiatives, rescinded EV rebates, placed environmental justice employees on paid leave, and halted crucial environmental litigation.

Trump, who dismisses climate change as a hoax, prioritizes profits above all else. His actions will have dire consequences: higher cancer rates in cities like L.A., more asthma attacks, skyrocketing hospital bills, and increased deaths among Americans.

Meanwhile, Alaska, now opened to massive drilling, is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and threatening the survival of indigenous communities. —RJ

David Lynch: Visionary Filmmaker, Advocate for Inner Peace

Famed director, screenwriter, and actor David Lynch died on Thursday at age 78. Accolades have praised his visionary, surreal contributions to the film industry, featuring productions such as Mulholland Drive and the TV hit series Twin Peaks.

Although no official cause of death has been announced, informed sources suggest he may have been a victim of the LA fires. Forced to evacuate his home, his chronic emphysema reportedly worsened. In November, he said he required oxygen for “walking across the room” (Lynch death). A year earlier, he told sources he was unable to leave his house.

I owe a personal debt to Lynch. A few years ago, I began exploring ways to lessen my daily anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy, though offering insights for changing my mindset, hadn’t sufficed. I didn’t want medication with its potential side effects. I wanted to be me.

I turned to meditation, having been impressed by multiple neurological brain imaging studies at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. They showed that meditation conducted on Transcendental Meditation practitioners facilitated anxiety reduction by promoting pacifying beta brain waves.

Looking first for a way to begin, I came across Lynch, who’d begun TM in 1973:

“I started Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since. Twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within. This level of life is sometimes called ‘pure consciousness.’ It is a treasury. And this level of life is deep within us all,” he wrote.

Lynch dedicated himself to spreading the word, establishing the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education to financially assist adults and children throughout the world to learn TM.

Convinced, I hired a TM instructor and did the training. But it’s important you have the right teacher. I did not.

I couldn’t stop the incessant mental gossip known as “the monkey mind.” That is, until I read Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s The Joy of Living. Everything fell into place. You listen to the chatter, returning to your mantra or breath when the mind engages or pursues.

I learned technique, using any of the five senses.

But it was Lynch who did the convincing. As he said, “If you don’t already meditate, take my advice: Start. It will be the best decision you ever make.”

–rj

Crossing the Line: Humanity’s Reckoning with a Planet on the Brink

The Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Jan. 9,2024. Photo: Mark Terrill

As Los Angeles burns, news comes that 2024 was the hottest year since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Alarmingly, humanity has surpassed the critical 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming threshold—a limit meant to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. The fallout is clear: rising seas, relentless heat waves, severe droughts, catastrophic fires, and violent storms.  Currently, atmospheric CO2 levels have reached 410 parts per million—the highest in 3 million years—and continue to rise at an unprecedented pace.

At the heart of this crisis lies human-induced CO2 emissions, fueled by our continued reliance on fossil energy.

A 1.5°C rise may sound modest, but even at this level, irreversible damage has been done: collapsing ecosystems, intensifying weather extremes, emerging diseases, species extinction, and widespread social and economic turmoil.

The UN’s latest IPCC report demands urgent reflection: each additional 0.1°C of warming exacerbates extreme weather, disrupts food systems, and threatens a human population set to exceed 10 billion.  Between 2010 and 2019, heat-related deaths worldwide totaled 489,000 (WMO). Factoring in climate-induced malnutrition, disease, and disasters like floods and droughts, that number swells to 4 million. 

In short, neither humans nor other species evolved to survive an increasingly uninhabitable planet.

As Guardian columnist George Monbiot reminds us, “With the exception of all-out nuclear war, all the most important problems that confront us are environmental. None of our hopes, none of our dreams, none of our plans and expectations can survive the loss of a habitable planet. And there is scarcely an Earth system that is not now threatened with collapse “ (The Guardian, 28 September 2022).

–rj

RJ’s 2025 Reading Recommendations

As I share my annual New Year book recommendations—curated from informed sources—I’m mindful of the diversity in readers’ tastes and the many deserving books inevitably omitted due to space constraints. That said, these lists primarily reflect my own reading aspirations for the coming year, centered on literary fiction and thought-provoking non-fiction. I read most of the titles I recommend here. For you, I hope these selections kindle interest, expand horizons, or simply offer the pleasure of well-spent reading time. To all of you, a Happy New Year!

FICTION:

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. (Auster, the great explorer of the fluidity of human identity, in this early work establishes his literary mastery with themes of identity, grief, loss, and loneliness, presaging those of his subsequent fiction and non-fiction).

Bernieres, Louise de. Corelli’s Mandolin. (A war story of Axis occupation of the Greek island of Cephalonia, inflicted cruelties and devastation, but also of human resilience, cultural conflict, and the enduring power of love transcending tragedy).

Byatt, A. S. Possession. (1999 Booker Award winner, explores themes of obsession, the nature of love, and relationship between art and life. The story moves between the two timelines, Victorian and contemporary, offering poetry, letters, and journal entries that provide insight into the inner lives of the characters and evolving notions of love).

Cather. Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. (A historical novel of the American Southwest, telling of two French priests sent by the Vatican to establish a diocese in New Mexico, the challenge of physical landscape and cultural conflict, faith, perseverance and friendship).

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. (Ahead of his time, Defoe depicts a woman’s descent into criminality as means to survival and purview of a society obsessed by money and status).

Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Blue Flower. (A historical novel centered on the Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis’ obsession with a young girl, Sophie, exploring the nature of love and the tension between imagination and reality).

Haruff, Kent. Plainsong. (Set in a rural town in Colorado, the cyclical interweave of ordinary people and nature, life’s undulations of circumstance, and solace found in community).

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. (Comments on other writers).

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. (The novel to begin one’s reading of America’s most critically acclaimed novelist since Faulker, a saga of lost innocence in the quest for authenticity.)

Munro, Alice. A Wilderness Station: Collected Short Stories 1968-1994. (Told via documents, letters, and recollections, a series of stories centering on Annie, married to an abusive husband, whose death raises questions).

Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. (The aftermath of post-colonial transition, displacement, alienation, corruption and violence).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. (Nietzsche’s salient philosophical novel, consisting of parables delivered by sage Zarathustra, introducing readers to Nietzsche concepts of God is Dead, The Übermensch, The Eternal Recurrence, and Critique of Morality).

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive, Again. (A continuation of Strout’s Pulitzer Prize novel, Olive Kitteridge, featuring Olive as she ages, profound in its themes of loneliness, transformation, community, and mortality).

Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. (Penn’s classic novel, exploring the subterranean machinations of politics through the rise and fall of Willy Stark; the complexities of human nature confronting ethical dilemmas).

Wright, Richard. Native Son. (Unsparing, explosive indictment of American racism, injustice, and violence.)

Zola, Emile. Germinal. (Steeped in naturalism, Zola’s depiction of class struggle, social injustice, and the harsh realities of industrial life among miners in 19th-century France.).

NON-FICTION

Balcombe, Jonathan. Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals. (Replete with examples, Balcombe maintains that animals have an emotional as well as instinctual life, requiring changes in how humans regard and treat them).

Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin. American Prometheus. (Pulitzer Prize winning biography of atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer and basis of the Academy Award movie, it reveals a highly intelligent scientist troubled by his role in creating the atomic bomb and of his victimization in the McCarthy era).

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. (The classic 18c biography of the prominent critic, essayist and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson. Lively and detailed, it provides not only in-depth portraiture of a genius, but of an era.)

Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. (A moving autobiographical work set in the context of WWI and its aftermath, critically acclaimed as among the best of war narratives; exploring, as well, the changing status of women in the new century).

Graves, Robert. Goodbye to All That. (Graves’ autobiography of his war years as an officer in the trenches, disillusionment, and rejection of society’s pre-war idealism).

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (An essential read, exploring the nature of governance, laws, and civil rights still widely debated, influential, and helpful in comprehending contemporary political structures).

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. (Regarded as one of this century’s most accomplished writers, Norwegian Knausgaard’s autobiographical book, comprised of six volumes, explores love, death, and time, inviting comparisons with Proust).

Miller, Lucasta. Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and an Epitaph. (In a blending of salient biographical, critical analysis, and personal reflection, Miller focuses on nine of Keats’ most famous poems, offering fresh interpretations without being pedantic).

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Nature and Destiny of Man. (A seminal Christian theological work first delivered as a series of lectures in the 1940s, it focuses on sin, grace, and human destiny).

Renkl, Margaret. The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. (Reminiscences of 52 weeks of nature’s transitional moods amid climate change, triggering reflections on joy, grief and hope amid ecological demise.)

Said, Edward. Orientalism. (Said refutes the binary mindset, linked with imperialism and colonialism, that treats the East as exotic, but inferior to the West, justifying its dominance.)

Salfina, Carl. Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. (Safina narrates his and his wife’s rescue and nurturing of an orphaned screech owl to good health, leading to reflections on human alienation from nature).

Sontag, Susan. The Pain of Others. (Unfailingly profound, the great essayist wrestles with what troubles her most, and by extension, ourselves.)

Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson. Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes. (Stevenson wrote this travelogue while in his early twenties, seeking space from a romance gone wrong.)

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow. (Psychologist Weller teaches us how to accept grief and allow it to work its gifts and become our greatest teacher).

Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. (Woolf wrote 26 diary volumes. In this posthumous work, her husband Leonard distills from her diaries the architectonics of a mind engaging its artistry).

No Easy Fix: Climate Change is Coming for You!


I’ve always liked environment activist Bill McKibben, longtime prof at Middlebury College and prolific writer, though sometimes I disagree.

For example, he recently parried a reader’s hint that just maybe overpopulation poses our greatest challenge in mitigating the exponential fallout of climate change by saying he didn’t think so, given that where population is rising most, Africa, there’s little contribution to carbon discharge .

While that may presently hold true, the reason for this is Africa’s falling short on Western amenities that along with their comfort and convenience, foster carbon discharge.

The fact is Africa is incipiently engaged in catching-up to the follies of more advanced economies in adopting technologies promoting carbon discharge, especially with regard to excavating industries in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As Africa’s clamor for meat likewise grows with surging population, more deforestation is occurring, and we know that spells diminished carbon sinks, fostering destabilization of weather patterns.

As I write, prolonged drought plagues Africa, creating a vast risk of starvation and malnutrition. What it doesn’t need are more mouths to feed.

In game refuges, elephants and even rhinos, seen as competitors for flora and landscape, are being slaughtered to feed a growing population in Angola, Zimbabwe and, yes, in Bechuanaland, Africa’s last great elephant sanctuary.

McKibben entangles himself similarly in joining the chorus advocating more wind turbines, despite emerging evidence of their dire consequences, at least for seabirds and whales, according to the recent 600 page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

On the other hand, he’s right about so much of our climate morass.

This year was the hottest on record, with next year unpromising. Phoenix, our fastest America growth city, endured 31 days of 110F temperatures, its emergency rooms overflowing with the burned and dying.

And he’s right—there’s no safe place to move. Vermont, where he lives, sheltered by its mountains, suffered an atmospheric river this past summer, resulting in unprecedented downpours inflicting catastrophic flooding.

Last night, I learned of America’s new housing crisis, this one weather related. It seems 30-year mortgages can’t withstand climate change, natural disasters occurring not only more frequently, but with accelerating violence.

Take Florida, for example, where home insurers are pulling out. Where they remain, and I mean across the nation, annual premiums increases are eroding many homeowners’ ability to pay.

Currently, 9% of the world’s population, or 600 million of us, lives outside what’s known as “the climate niche,” meaning safety zone. By century’s end, an estimated one third of us will fall into this doughnut hole.

Now comes the orange hair threat assuming office, January 20, 2025. Denying climate change as a hoax, he pledges “drill, baby, drill.”

Fasten your seatbelts everyone. Turbulence ahead!

–rj

Celebrating Emily Dickinson’s Birthday

Yesterday, Dec. 10th, marked the 194th birthday of Emily Dickinson (b. 1830), one of America’s most gifted poets.

Her love of nature, keen observations on life’s ironies, and daring truthfulness won me over early. I know of no poetry with more nuance.

Of her many poems, my favorite is “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” with its nature analogies exhibiting the incongruity of the outer appearance with the inner reality. We are often masters at concealing life’s griefs.

Though I’ve visited The Homestead (Amherst , MA) on several occasions, I’m ready to visit again to take-in the Dickinson Museum updates, which include the restoration of Emily’s beloved garden, her father’s gifted conservatory to Emily and her sister, Lavinia, and the recently completed reconstruction of the family’s carriage house.

In short, The Homestead is my literary Mecca, as there is much in Emily’s sensibility that resonates with me.

Below, Emily’s upstairs bedroom where she composed her nearly 2000 poems and many letters:

It was cerebral musician Patty Smith who reminded me of Dickinson’s birthday in her substack post, replete with quotations from her poems and letters.

I’m repeating them here, as they superbly express Dickinson’s keen sensitivity and writing acumen. Smith observes that any of them would serve well as a writing prompt:

“Forever is composed of nows.”

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

“That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

“The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul–BOOKS.”

“The lovely flowers embarrass me. They make me regret I am not a bee…”

“I don’t profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.”

“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”

“Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.”

“To shut your eyes is to travel.”

“your brain is wider than the sky”

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,–you must have noticed them in the street,–how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

“I have been bent and broken, but -I hope- into a better shape.”

–RJoly