Thumb-twiddler caucus toys with funding while Ukraine fights for its very existence

Photo-illustration: Salon/Getty Images

You have to wonder what it would take to get House and Senate Republicans to get off their collective duffs and walk across their respective cloak rooms to smell the proverbial coffee. City after city after city in Ukraine has been leveled by Russian artillery and rockets.  The port of Mariupol is a shell of its former self.  Large areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, are in rubble.  Bakhmut doesn’t exist anymore.  There isn’t a square mile of Ukraine from Kharkiv in the north through Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, all the way to Kherson on the coast of the Black Sea that hasn’t been severely damaged if not utterly destroyed by Russia’s war of aggression.

Wait.  Let’s stop right there.  I’ve been writing words like these for nearly two years about the war in Ukraine, and they accurately convey what has happened in the war.  So do Ukraine’s numbers of the dead and wounded, both military and civilian.  But sitting here in Northeast Pennsylvania, or more to the point, in a limestone and marble building in Washington, D.C., there is no way to adequately conceive of the horror Russia has wrought in the country that stands between it and Europe. 

From 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany wreaked havoc through Europe all the way to the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow.  When I lived in Germany in the 1950’s and took trips with my parents through Germany and France and Italy, you could still see the damage done in World War II.  Churches from the 13^th and 14^th centuries in small towns lay in ruins with maybe a single stone wall still standing.  City after city still had not finished cleaning up the rubble from bombings and artillery shelling.  I still have images in my mind of old women in long dresses with headscarves stacking bricks along the sides of blown-up streets in Stuttgart as we drove through on our way to visit friends stationed at an army post in Baumholder.   

Today, having seen the damage wrought by World War II in Western Europe as a boy, it’s hard for me to transfer those images through 65 years to Ukraine, but there they are:  new photographs and videos of similar destruction only a thousand or so miles from the destroyed cities I saw in the 1950’s.  We founded the United Nations in 1945 and NATO in 1949 in an attempt by nations that gathered together to try to ensure that the horrors the world had just been through did not happen again.  There was a hope years ago that we wouldn’t have wars if they could be adequately described and remembered. But here we are, looking at our televisions and phone and computer screens at the tragic images all over again. 

All this because one man, Vladimir Putin, went to bed one night and woke up the next morning and said he wanted to invade Ukraine and make it part of Russia.  It didn’t matter to him how much damage such an invasion would wreak, how many lives it would take, just like it didn’t matter to Hitler what it would cost for him to remake Europe in his own image. 

This is from my bi-weekly column in Salon. To read the rest of the column, follow this link:

Thumb-twiddler caucus