Ukraine's Goat With Teeth
We do now feel the need to say something. We feel a need to pile on. Because, for the first time in recent memory, the pile on the new Kyiv Post doesn’t seem deep enough.
In Ukraine, like anywhere else, the web offers exciting ways to separate people from their money with an avoirdupois commodity called “content,” lightly rearranging the ideas of others, hopping political bandwagons and making outrageous claims to competence. However, we have no choice but to fall like rain from the sky and point out that whatever the president’s former press secretary thinks about US-Sino relations is irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.
Pissing out self-serving op-eds written by fans of Ukraine’s moron president is nothing new at the Kyiv Post, and wobetide they who underestimate the greasiness of the newspaper’s current owner … and Iuliia Mendel.
Media CEOs and admen have been paid to manage media since the dawn of capital. Thank heaven for these gurus – masters of business boosterism whose fantasies come tumbling down in brainstorming sessions with soothing bolshevism. They are admirable. They are energetic. They are empathetic.
They work up a sweat at the edges of convention, then smash on through with the earnest fecklessness required to publicize informative-sounding hooey.
That said, it’s something of a reach to call killvlogger Serhiy Leshchenko – who outperforms even the sweaty little fuckpigs working in the President’s Office – an exemplary anything - probably the reason why he remains a Kyiv Post columnist. Unable to establish any sort of authoritative voice before flinging together pro-Zelensky talking points, he and Mendel have taken the lead in the steeplechase of hacks making hay out of the newspaper’s unspeakable tragedy.
They are joined by Bohdan Nahaylo, whose hilarious exclusives scream for attention amid all the sadness, though there’s no need for you to bother reading them.
Preferring to remain anonymous is not a good reason to grant anonymity, and no one is going to correct 2020 to 2022.
Rather as one keeps tonguing a sore tooth to see if it still hurts, I took a one last boo at how the other dingbats were fellating their seven paying subscribers in this time of sorrow.
I found dead white male Anders Aslund blaming Russia for bleeding Ukraine’s defenses dry, bloviating that a strong Ukrainian defense is the best peacemaking measure. Yawn. I see him somewhere on a street corner in suburban Washington DC, accosting passersby, pleading for someone, anyone, to pay any attention.
The Tooth of the Goat award this week goes to Padraig Purcell, an Irish long-time pro-Ukrainian volunteer, activist, trainer and mediator, whose job is polishing the English-language version of the president’s official webpage. He has proved a master at inserting subordinate clauses at the beginning of run-on sentences and orphaning bizarre-sounding pull quotes.
I once read that many journalists suffer from something called ‘imposter syndrome’, a perpetual fear that someone will find out they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Busted, Padraig. Now go get a real job, join the culture, see how hard it is to really make a difference and die in the trying.