STAY A-LIVELY IN ‘25
I looked at the “weird” predictions for 2025 from this week’s photo survey on page 15 and the predictions either seemed to be a.) statements of existing fact, or b.) hardly weird.
If I were being asked the question, I’d say something like …
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are still besties by the end of the year. Now that would be a longshot.
Or … The drones hovering above New Jersey are in fact alien spacecraft and the Earth will be colonized by April.
Or … Donald Trump will not be president by the end of the year.
Or … LeBron James will retire from basketball.
Or … Vladimir Putin will launch a nuke.
Or … the next big earthquake will rock SoCal.
Or … by the end of the year, I will have watched the film “It Ends With Us” and suddenly give a shit about Blake Lively and/or Justin Baldoni. This, I’m afraid, would be the longest shot of all.
Received the following belated reaction to a house ad we ran during election season which illustrated how little various developments were required to pay in housing mitigation fees.
Reader: Just wondering if there was any reaction to the “Sweetheart Deal” housing mitigation ad that ran during election season, highlighting the ridiculously low housing mitigation fees charged to The Limelight, Rocksprings, FiftyFifty Brewing and Residence Inn projects? I can’t believe that the Town is still letting developers build massive projects and pay so little in impact fees. Is there an investigation into the possibility of payoffs to Town officials in return of such low fees? Seems like a perfect opportunity for massive grift.
Lunch: It’s amazing how little anyone seemed to give a crap about it. I’d suspect a payoff, but I don’t think the council is crafty enough to have thought it through like that. I think people are so used to kowtowing to the rich at this point that there’s not a second thought about it.
Reader: Wow. Just wow. Amazing that no one cares about this – when everyone complains about the lack of workforce housing. Where are 225 new employees (projected from the four cited developments) going to come from, and where are they going to live? Or are these new developments just going to steal from the existing workforce by offering better pay and benefits, forcing older businesses to close because they lost their employees?
I showed the ad to my neighbor here in Colorado. She works remotely for Pitkin County as a building and plan inspector. She was shocked by the low fees and said Aspen/Snowmass would have charged many millions in developer impact fees for projects like these.
I remember when Intrawest was supposed to build a big parking structure in The Village as part of the initial developer agreement. That never happened. As I recall, Intrawest got away with a lot of things, threatening to take their ball and go home if they didn’t get their way.
Guess Mammoth will never learn. Is Town Council in a coma? Is Town staff so incompetent that they don’t compare fee schedules with other resorts? Is everyone consuming too many gummies and just don’t give a shit?
Best part about the holidays, for me anyway, is the opportunity to read.
I’ve been hopping between two books – neither a lighthearted romp.
The first won the National Book Award in 2017 for nonfiction. “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia” by Masha Gessen.
Good for someone like me who sort of forgot about Russia in the wake of
the 1989 fall of communism – I was too busy embarking on my life to focus too much on international affairs.
But now, given Ukraine and Trump’s reemergence/weird bromance with Putin, I felt like it was important to catch up.
And the takeaway is really … once a people is terrorized and benumbed into servitude, it’s almost impossible to unlearn that behavior.
Russian sociologist Yuri Levada, writes Gessen, hypothesized a detailed portrait of “Homo Sovieticus,” a type of human being the totalitarian regime forms and whom it relies on for stability.
“The successful member of Soviet society, suggested Levada, believed in self-isolation, state paternalism and ‘hierarchical egalitarianism’ and suffered from an ‘imperial syndrome.’ Self-isolation was a key strategy for both the state and individual; as the Soviet Union sealed itself off with the Iron Curtain, so did the Soviet citizen separate himself from everyone who was Other and therefore untrustworthy. Ideology supported these separations by stressing class enmity, but keeping one’s social circle small was also a sound survival strategy during the era of mass terror, when excessive trust could prove deadly …
The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed and educated its citizen; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning; it rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong, no matter how small the transgression. By its very design, the Soviet socialist state is totalitarian because it must not leave the individual any independent space.”
So what happens when you overturn that apple cart?
It creates utter discombobulation.
Rather than the old standard – the state pretends to care, and the citizen pretends to be grateful – there’s no standard.
And we all apparently prefer fake tears at a funeral as opposed to no tears at all.
After a few years of flailing about (transitioning to a free market system is no small task), what the Russians really craved was stability.
They were also obsessed with nostalgia. “An entire channel was launched to show Soviet television 24-hours a day. It was called Nostalgia and its logo, shown in a corner of the screen, contained a red hammer and sickle.”
They were collectively like a prisoner who’s finally been released from prison and finds the outside so unfamiliar and scary that he commits another crime just so he can get back in.
Into this void steps Vladimir Putin, the third prime minister appointed by Boris Yeltsin in less than a year.
So what happened? Within weeks, there were a series of apartment building explosions which killed hundreds.
This gave Russia the excuse to launch a new offensive in Chechnya, one of its former separatist republics.
Military action!
And in response to the apartment building explosions, Putin said simply, “We will pursue terrorists whereveer they are. At the airport, if they are at the airport. And that means, I apologize, that if we catch them going to the bathroom, then we will rub them out in the outhouse, if it comes to that. That’s it, the issue is closed.”
Putin projected resolve. His job approval ratings went from 31% to 80% within three months.
By New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin resigned and Putin took over. And the second half of the book revolves around Putin’s consolidation of power in the name of stability.
Stability being achieved by promise of a restoration to glory (see Ukraine) and tapping into the Homo Sovieticus fear of Other (consolidating mainstream support by bullying the LGBTQ and Jewish communities at home).
There’s a book called “Blows from the Russian Gods” which becomes essentially required reading in Putin’s Russia. Every soldier receives a copy. It purports “to uncover the real crimes of the Jews – and the sexual traits of the Jews … not only was homosexuality widespread among the ancient Jews but it was known to take over entire cities, such as Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Putin also had some luck. Oil prices remained strong for the first several years of Putin’s reign. As Gessen writes, “Money was what the Kremlin used to defuse the protests of the disenfranchised.” By dramatically increasing pensions and social progfram spending.
The promise of stability comes from a familiar playbook.
“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”
And then post-Stalin, order was maintained by punishing a few (just to prove that you still would) in order to neutralize the many.
The parallels to current American society? It sure feels like social media has contributed to a lack of independent space.
“Other” is seen as untrustworthy.
We’re a country infatuated with nostalgia (Make America Great Again) and have elected the “stable” genius to lead us once again.
In the book, there’s a bargaining that sort of takes place. Russians will live under a dictatorship in exchange for stability so long as it’s a “soft” dictatorship.
In America, that dictatorship seems to be taking form in the outsized power and influence of heavy-handed government mandates, and depending upon where you live, those mandates are either culturally oppressive or small business/entrepreneur oppressive.
