Kiryas Joel Lite

As I was mulling over today's current events—I do that for half an hour or so every morning in preparation for my little ongoing FB feature Today's Exciting Memes—it occurred to me that headlines are really a lagging indicator.

Meaning: The geopolitical currents they reference took place days—sometimes weeks, sometimes months or years—ago.

So how do you figure out what's actually happening right now?

You can't.

You really can't see what's happening until the spin wears off.

And that can take years. Many, many years.

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Consider, for example, Ukraine.

Under the Biden administration, the Ukraine narrative was simple: FACT: Imperialist Russia invaded Ukraine on a genocidal quest.

But there are other ways of arranging the Legos:

FACT: NATO lost its raison d'etre with the fall of Communism and the end of the Warsaw Pact (itself a response to NATO). NATO's subsequent expansion was partly due to electoral politics around emigre communities in critical states throughout 1996 and partly due to Russophobia.

Things got complicated in 2014 with a coup in Ukraine against the democratically elected—& distinctly pro-Russian—President Yanukovych. Russia claims the coup was instigated by the West.

But the March-April peace deal agreed on by Russia and Ukraine in 2022 basically had intact 2020 borders for Ukraine (so much for Russian territorial ambitions!) and no NATO, a neutral Ukraine. That deal was sabotaged by the U.S. & the UK...

Which version is true?

I have no fuckin' clue. Maybe neither of them.

But it's always interesting to hear people spouting narratives as though they were objective truths. There is an emotional investment there. Where does it come from?

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In other news, I got a fair amount of Remuneration done yesterday, and will strive to do more this weekend.

On my way home from the gym, I started daydreaming & went on autopilot, & so, missed the turn that takes me home, ending up instead in Bloomingburg, deepest, darkest Sullivan County.

Bloomingburg is in the process of metamorphosing into a Hasidic shtetl.

Kiryas Joel Lite!

Even under that omni-layer of white ice that leaches the uniqueness out of every landscape, Bloomingburg was distinctly creepy.

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One of my very earliest memories is of a Hassid.

My mother was forever leaving me at my grandfather's house in Brooklyn, now part of the tony neighborhood of Lefforts Gardens but then smack in the middle of Crown Heights, a Hassid preserve.

And I can remember walking down Eastern Parkway with my fist in my grandfather's hand—how old was I? Three? Four?—and seeing a man collapse on the sidewalk. He hit his head. There was blood.

And then seeing another man—a tall skinny man in a black suit with a bushy black beard wearing a wide-brimmed black hat—step right over the collapsed man, barely breaking stride.

"Grandpa, why didn't that man stop to help that other man?" I asked.

"I don't know, sweetie. I don't know," said my grandfather. "Do you think you can walk a little faster?"

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There's a Hassid-financed development going up in Wallkill, right behind the library on the grounds of an old factory.

Supposedly, these are luxury apartments, which the Hassid plan to rent out to raise money—for what, I have no idea.

But I wonder...

Pre-Hassid Bloomingburg & the hamlet of Wallkill actually have a lot of demographic commonality.

Are these so-called luxury apartments the front wave of an invasion?

Who knows?

One thing I know: In 30 years, communities like Bloomingburg are going to have an outsized effect on U.S. policies & culture.

Because orthodox Jews, and the Amish, and evangelical Christians seem to be the only groups interested in reproducing.

That's the hidden story of what Right Now will be then.