halfway

Another useless letter to David Brooks....
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Dear David,

Sometimes it seems like you make an art out of ignoring the obvious. What a
a shame, considering you received what was no doubt a fine Chicago education.
::suppress guffaw here:: (ahem.)

In reference to your column "Mourning Mother Russia":

"When those totalitarian regimes fall, different parts of society recover
at different rates. Some enterprising people take advantage of economic
recovery, and the result of their efforts is economic growth.

But private morality, the habits of self-control [actually, it would seem
that good self-control would have been a trait critical to survival in a
police state, and would therefore be quite well trained in the older
population...it is the cult of the individual and the misperception of
whatever-the-hell-i-want as freedom that lead to lack of self control] and
the social fabric take a lot longer to recover. So you wind up with
nations in which high growth rates and lingering military power mask
profound social chaos."

And yet,

"The more shocking reason Russia's population is declining is that people
are dying younger. Russians are now much less healthy than their
grandparents were in 1960. In the past three decades, Russian mortality
rates have risen by 40 percent."

As you are aware, those "lucky" grandparents in 1960 had already been
living under decades of totalitarian control. An inescapable conclusion of
your own words taken at face value is that this particular communist
regime, even as it "destroy[ed] the bonds of civic trust and the normal
patterns of social cohesion ... rule[d] by fear, [etc.]" nonetheless
managed to maintain a functional if limited health care and social
security system, and was socially conservative enough to preserve the
family (even if only as a defense against the ravages of the government).

It is more likely the conversion to a particularly rapacious form of
capitalism, the elevation of profit and every man for himself above
social responsibility, the abdication of the government from concerning
itself, in however small proportion, with the welfare of the people, that
has contributed to the (yes, terrifying) declines in the Russian condition
of which you so compellingly write.

However corrupt and ideological the old government may have been, it
nonetheless existed in the name of the people; even as it warped that people's
interests to pursue geopolitical military might, it still provided for their most
basic needs. Corporate power, by contrast, is answerable to no one but the limits
of human greed. As you point out, we all have a stake in the well-being of
the Russian people. It seems that the investors (often living abroad) in Russia's
economic development, arguably at the cost of her social stability, may not know
or care. (Do they read the New York Times editorials?)

Replace fear with profound poverty and lack of security for most, replace
the abuse of political power with the abuse of economic power, and public
life still becomes brutish. Replace traditional values with the exaltation
of wealth above all else, replace governmental power with corporate power
and private and public morality nonetheless become perverted.

Sincerely,

Rosa Cao