A mameligele, a pastramele, a karnatsele, un a gleyzele vayn

[sovay]

I want my country to figure out a way of being angry that its political system has been externally manipulated without becoming any more nationalistic than it already has, since that's being a disaster.

My mother showed me a one-panel comic with one of those hot dog carts on a sidewalk and two passers-by looking on. The cart's umbrella advertises it as "Vlad's Treats"; the menu is "Borscht—Caviar—Unchecked Power." One of the passers-by is saying to the other, "It's an acquired taste." It is very obviously a Putin reference, but it still rang off-key for me. I don't want to move back into an era where we have ideological purity food wars. It was embarrassing enough when French fries were briefly and xenophobically renamed in 2003. No one in my family has been Russian for more than a century (and Russia might have disputed whether they counted in the first place, being Jews), but my grandmother made borscht. I don't make it with anything like the frequency I make chicken soup with kneydlekh, but that's partly because kneydlekh will not make your kitchen look like you axe-murdered somebody in it. I order it every chance I get. For my mother's seventieth birthday, my father took her to a Russian restaurant especially for the caviar. It can't be much of an acquired taste if as a toddler I had to be stopped from happily eating the entire can my grandparents had been sent as a present.

And let's face it, if I get this twitchy (and vaguely sad that at four-thirty in the morning there's nowhere I can get borscht in Boston), I assume the dogwhistles are much louder for people for whom Russia is closer than their great-grandparents. Can we not do McCarthyism 2.0? Especially since we sort of have been for some years now and it's, see above, not so much working out?

Comments

[spatch]

Geez-o-Pete. Borscht jokes were tacky, hacky go-tos even during the Cold War. Hard to get people to understand that the food's not the bad guy here.

[kore]

This is reminding me of 'freedom fries.' For fuck's sake.

borscht

[lauradi7dw]

I don't remember where I first read it, decades ago, but our long-standing recipe for instant vegetarian borscht is a can of sliced beets plus enough V8 added to make it soupy.
Is there a 24 hour supermarket with a kosher section near you? It is available in jars, although I've never tried it, so can't vouch for its taste (says someone who eats beets with V8).
I was startled at a 1989 family gathering in a (now-defunct) Catskills resort to be served a bowl of borscht with a whole large boiled potato plunked into the middle of the bowl. My sister-in-law's then-husband said that that was the way it was served in his childhood, as well.

I'm doing the Mango (a computerized language program) version of Russian. It seems to think that what a tourist needs to eat in Russia is borscht, shchi, blini with caviar, sour cream, and pelmeni. Seems a little inadequate, but maybe later units will have more choices. Like bread, for crying out loud. Admittedly a 1976 Soviet cafeteria is not the restaurant they are expecting, but my experience was that if one got to the end of the line without bread, one would be reminded to get some.

[asakiyume]

Entirely agree.

The world's being wracked with nationalism/tribalism right now, pretty much everywhere, in one form or another. It's the toxic side of identity: the zero sum game that can't permit enjoyment of its own traditions and beliefs without denigration of everyone else's, that sees celebration of anyone else's as threatening. I've been thinking it's like Pokémon that walk around saying their own names over and over--except in the Pokémon world, this is actual communication (saying "pika pika? pika pika pika chuuuu" is actually saying "Shall I do thundershock? Here goes!") whereas all people in our own world are doing is literally saying their own tribal IDs over and over. Hashtag, not all people, of course. And: celebration of one's traditions is great--just not like this.

I don't understand your subject line, but the first three items sound like delicious foods, or possibly dances.

[genarti]

Hear, hear. Ugh.

[rinue]

I agree with all of this, including being sad that at 4:30 in the morning there's nowhere to get borscht in Boston. I love borscht. I don't even like beets...unless they're in borscht. (And they do make the kitchen look axe-murdery.)

[movingfinger]

I keep meaning to try making borscht with golden beets. I suppose that would make the place look like Danaë's tower, but at least not an axe murder. I imagine it would be exceptionally nice with crisp-fried sage leaves on top...

I want my country to figure out a way of being angry that its political system has been externally manipulated without becoming any more nationalistic than it already has, since that's being a disaster.

Yes! It's as if millions of people have forgotten how, or never learned how, to control their emotions, self-soothe, and moderate their responses so that they can deal with a crisis appropriately. A gigantic tantrum. I at times wonder whether putting a time lag on Twitter (say twenty minutes to an hour on tweets posting) would help.

[zdenka]

Yeah. Making food and sharing it is one of the ways of making connections between people. To be proud of not eating another culture's food (or enjoying their art or music or stories) seems narrow-minded and very unproductive.

And if I stopped eating dishes from every country whose government did something that made me mad, I might not eat anything American.

[dewline]

Reading that "Window on Eurasia" blog has been helpful as an prophylactic/antidote to creeping McCarthyism for me the last year or so.

[gwynnega]

Indeed. My mom's father was from Russia. (He died long before I was born.) I've never been a borscht fan (though my mom likes it), but I love caviar.

[gaudior]

Yeah! It bugs me a lot when people talk about 45's ties to "Russia" and that "Russia" influenced our election. I'm like, no, Vladimir Putin, and people working directly for him, did those things. The random 15-year-old lesbian in Novosibirsk did none of those things. People very much conflate the country and the government, and if people are doing that with America right now I am very sad.

[brigdh]

I agree with this post so much. I have several friends who are Russian, and they – the LGBT Russians, the liberal Russians, the feminist Russians, the Catholic Russians, the atheist Russians, etc – are in vastly more immediate and real danger from Putin than any American currently is, and I hate seeing their existence dismissed. I watch a lot of MSNBC, and Chris Matthews has been particularly hateful toward Russia as a general concept lately. (Of course, he's also been spending a lot of time talking about communists, so I suspect his understanding of contemporary Russia is basically nonexistent.)