Support the Latest Thing
Greetings, noble and virtuous serfs! You’ve faithfully upheld the One And Only Science the last two years by being Very Concerned about the Worst Disease Ever. Now it’s time to distract you from the failure of the things you did because you were Very Concerned (locking yourself in your home, avoiding other people, wearing useless face diapers, and taking experimental gene therapies). Now it’s time for you to Very Concerned about the Latest Thing: Russia!
Remember how Ukraine used to be a slime pit of corruption, neo-Nazis, and money-laundering? Well, it’s reformed and now it’s a Noble Bastion of Freedom! And guess who is the Latest Enemy about which you need to be Very Concerned, and even Righteously Hateful? That’s right – Russia! You know that for years, you’ve wanted to hate Russia because both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, whom you hated, were Russian agents. But you couldn’t prove it, which was terribly frustrating. Now you can virtuously redirect your hatred toward Vladimir Putin.
Sure, both Putin and Zelensky are autocratic bastards. But Zelensky is our bastard, which makes him a good bastard, and by the process of elimination, Putin, who is not our bastard, must be a bad bastard.
This means that everything Russian is now Very Bad. If you are pianist, you must stop playing music by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, or Mussorgsky, even though they wrote some of greatest piano music of the last two centuries. You must now struggle to find Ukranian piano music to replace all of the Russian music you’ve burned and forgotten.
Similarly, if you like to read books, you must throw away all those Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky novels. They’re too long and boring anyway, so good riddance! And if you’re making movies based on those novels, or teaching college courses about them, you must stop immediately.
If you happen to know a bit of the Russian language, now would be a good time to deny it. Fortunately, the Ukrainian language is similar to the Russian language, so it won’t be too difficult to retrain yourself.
But even after you’ve immersed yourself in the glory of Ukrainian culture and the hatred of all things Russian, please don’t forget the Worst Disease Ever. Lately, it’s turned into the common cold, but be prepared for new scariants to scare you with scary graphs and statistics very soon. Keep signalling your virtue by wearing face diapers even when you don’t have to, and keep getting your regular booster shots – sorry, we mean updates. We’ll keep you posted about any New Things about which you’ll need to be Very Concerned.