How to be a Servant of the People
How to be a Servant of the People
Life imitates art, war is good for absolutely nothing, and apocalypse happens…
I watched the first season (now on Netflix) of the Ukrainian TV show, Servant of the People, starring Volodymyr Zelensky as a history teacher who, almost by accident, becomes the president of Ukraine. (His private rant to a colleague about government corruption is secretly filmed and uploaded to social media by a student, then his student-led crowdfunding raises the fee to register as a candidate, and after that, a landslide victory.)
The show is more fairy tale than psychological examination of the effect of political power on an individual (I’m thinking Borgen). It’s Cinderella/The Princess Diaries (humble person suddenly uplifted into a rarified social position) meets Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (humble person of integrity falls into position of power and tries to do good).
Vasiliy Petrovich Goloborodko, an intelligent, good-hearted man of the people, finds himself being treated like a prince (offered fancy clothes, fancy watches, motorcades, personal trainers, whatever he wants, etc.) The Prime Minister, his new right-hand-man, is a unidirectional bridge between the corrupt powers behind the throne and an inexperienced President. Vasiliy quickly realizes that he does not want to do as he is told. He wants to present his own message and take his own actions. The guy has actual integrity, which apparently is as rare in Ukraine as it is everywhere else…
The political setting is a broad strokes version of an Eastern European ‘democracy’ being steered by a few powerful men in the shadows with the help of countless corrupt and corruptible underlings. It’s a society where everything happens, or doesn’t happen, by grift and graft, by greed and coercion.
And this light-fare TV show even touches on the old grievances that we are seeing in action right now in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The tension around where Ukraine’s position ought to be on a spectrum that has a great Eurasian empire that dominates the world on one end and a globally connected, western-values dominated world on the other, is expressed by Vasiliy’s magic realism encounters (that only he sees) with historical figures who have something to say to him — in this case, Ivan the Terrible, who is all in for the Eurasian Empire side of the equation and is both shocked and offended by Vasiliy’s assertion that Ukraine wants to move in the direction of Europe. “We are Slavs! We have the same blood!”
Life Imitates Art
The fact that Zelensky became the actual president of Ukraine after this performance of several years, and is now a gutsy leader in a real war that arrived, uninvited, on his doorstep, blows my mind even more than it is usually blown by the weirdness of reality.
What I was thinking while watching the early episodes of Servant of the People (the subsequent name of Zelensky’s actual political party…!?!) is that after playing this accidental hero for several years as an actor, how could Zelensky NOT keep it up in reality? Can you imagine embodying the role of a very specific type of hero, and then, when life imitates art and you become that hero, NOT following through as that person… just becoming a typical manipulative out-for-self politician?
It’s not just that Zelensky was his own life’s understudy for several years, it’s that the spirit of that show (I’m guessing) created a hopeful vision for all the people who then voted for him in real life — a hope that an incorruptible hero could actually exist. That there is hope for a better world, a world in which people are brave and loving enough to care about each other and willing to create systems that manifest that caring. Sometimes life imitates art because art shows us what could be. And we want it and we buy it.
War… what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
And now, WAR. Un-huh, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
I know it’s complicated. Sometimes it has worked — has had to work — in a horrific way. Sometimes people have to defend themselves against overt aggression. A few nights ago I sped-watched Saving Private Ryan (speed-watching is where you keep your Mickey Mouse hand pointer on the 10 sec. ahead button and click on it repeatedly, especially during long battle scenes).
This movie’s message to me was: war is hell; sometimes you have to fight the good fight, and when you do, sometimes the values that you are fighting for go out the window, even though you are still the “good guys.” Because when you get right down to us vs. them to the death, your job is to kill ‘them.’ And it’s not pretty.
What’s going on in Ukraine right now breaks my heart. Heart-breaking examples of people hurting other people are everywhere always. Of people ‘othering’ people and then hurting them.
The barbaric aggression we are witnessing now feels like a battle between the twentieth and twenty-first century. Tanks and machine-guns and bombs and jets and naive young men as cannon fodder are so last century. Global systems of trade, finance, culture and much else that require communication, diplomacy, and strategy, are so this century.
This is a battle between the belief that violence will get you what you want, vs. the emerging understanding that complex interrelated systems R’US. RUSsia and US and the whole shebang. With abundant variations, we are one.
And by violence I don’t just mean war, guns, killing people directly… I mean all the ways that we kill people, plants and animals and insects, water and dirt, and whole ecosystems, indirectly, by using methods to get what we want that are destructive, because the goals that lead to their use do not take into account actual systemic cause and effect — do not take into account that we are one, not from a moral point of view as much as a pragmatic one. From a sustainable systems point of view.
Apocalypse now, or later?
What makes this war so scary to me is the reality that Putin seems to be operating from a world view that I can barely understand (though Ivan the Terrible explains it pretty well), and his country, Russia, is well-stocked with nuclear weapons. That nuclear weapons exist causes me extreme cognitive dissonance. Every single thing that any of us value in the physical world could be destroyed by these weapons, created by us — by the too clever for its own good human species.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s. I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I remember our little nuclear attack drills at school where we crouched underneath our desks. What do you need to survive a nuclear blast? Why, a school desk, of course.
The possibility of a nuclear holocaust was a BFD back in the sixties. In the 70s and 80s, activist Helen Caldicott and others put great energy into arousing awareness of the dangers of nuclear war.
I’m no historian and I don’t know all the permutations of how we got here from there; I just know that the overt fear of the world ending in a nuclear inferno faded, just as we saw the fear of Covid fade, even as the pandemic continued. I think it’s fear-fatigue.
We (some of us) are well aware that we have reason to worry about a climate apocalypse on our doorstep, the result of short-sighted misunderstanding of the complex systems we depend on for life. Yet we forget that we already invented, designed, and manufactured instant apocalypse. Just add nuclear fission and stir. We did this to ourselves. This isn’t us vs. them to the death. It’s us vs. us to the death.
And yet.
I have to resist despair, which is my fear all dressed up with nowhere to go. I want to go out and about. And you, my darling fear, can come along for the ride, as long as you sit in the back seat and shut up. Okay, you can sit next to me in the front… and you don’t have to shut up entirely; you just can’t be the driver. I‘m so glad we understand ourselves now.
I want to feel heartbreak at what is going on in the world, because I want to be a person who feels. I also want to allow myself to feel the ineffable joy that permeates all that is with creative possibility. We are here, in all our raging glory. The future is not yet written.
How to be a servant of the people…
I don’t have the answer to this question. I used that title as a joke, sort of. There are so many articles that begin with ‘How to.’ How helpful we can be to others depends on how helpful we can be to ourselves. How much we can love ourselves.
If I am willing and able to love myself, to take care of myself, then I have a clear field in which to care for others, because I’m not busy trying to prove something to myself, or to you, about my own worth. I’m just being myself. And what is so powerful, and so helpful, about being yourself is that you are making space for others to be themselves too.
If Putin loved himself, he would not be trying to destroy Ukraine. He would not have to identify himself so closely with a historical and cultural concept that he is willing to kill, maim, destroy, to protect his externalized sense of identity. I am not sure what he is a servant of, but it is not the people.
Janina Lamb is an artist. She feels pulled in many different directions and hardly knows what she is doing. That’s okay as long as she does it. I’d rather be here now is a way to share process and product. Please subscribe to be part of the journey.
I'm already so happy that your "I'd Rather Be Here Now" blog is an ingredient in my life. Looking forward to catching what you toss out there. Meanwhile, your bumper stickers on my car ("your ad here") reach DOZENS.