A Moment With Maya

It's not often that you get to spend time with people who are giants in their field. In my previous job as a producer for Minnesota Public Radio, I had that experience on several occasions, and while it eventually became routine, I often reminded myself that having the chance to meet and interact with extraordinarily talented individuals should always be appreciated. And so today, when I heard the news that poet Maya Angelou had died, I took a moment to remember and appreciate the hour I spent with her in October 2007.

Ms. Angelou was in town that October for a speaking engagement, and I had spent several weeks trying to arrange for her to be interviewed by Kerri Miller on MPR's Midmorning program. While her handlers indicated she was interested in doing an interview, they also made it clear that she would not be able to come to the MPR studios to do an interview. Her time was limited, and her lack of mobility made travel difficult. So we improvised and decided to bring the interview to her hotel.

We met Ms. Angelou in a section of the hotel restaurant that had been closed off to the public. She was a tiny, frail-looking woman, impeccably dressed. After introductions, the first order of business was a cocktail. She ordered a screwdriver, took a few sips, and then the interview began. And while Ms. Angelou might have been small in stature, the moment she started speaking her presence filled every crevice in the room, and she suddenly seemed larger than life. It was astonishing.

During the interview, Ms. Angelou was warm, wise, humble, funny, and sharp as a knife. She quoted Shakespeare and recited poetry with ease. She spoke about the difficulty of writing, of truly being able to capture what you're thinking, how words "run from the writer," and how hard she works at her craft. Despite all the accolades and the critics who call her a "natural writer," she said, "I've never been able to say exactly what I mean." It was impossible not to hang on every word, because every word seemed so imbued with meaning and wisdom.

Kerri Miller's interview with Maya Angelou can be found here.

Frank Sinatra, Jim Crow, and the Argument for Reparations

I've been having trouble coming up with a topic to write about this week, so I thought I'd share some reading recommendations. Here are two examples of terrific nonfiction writing that have captivated me this week, for different reasons.

The first is "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," written by Gay Talese for Esquire Magazine in 1966. The article is a terrific piece of creative nonfiction and is considered a landmark in new journalism, not only for the beauty of Talese's writing but also for his use of techniques associated with fiction. Here's how it starts:

FRANK SINATRA, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday. 

Perhaps what is most remarkable about the piece is what Talese was able to do when faced with an uncooperative interviewee. Sinatra didn't want to be interviewed by Talese. In addition to the aforementioned cold, Sinatra was preparing for the fallout from a  CBS documentary that he felt was prying too closely into his personal life, while also working on a movie and an NBC special that called for him to sing 18 songs. Unable to get the interview with Sinatra, Talese instead embedded himself in Sinatra's world, talking to the myriad people around the singer, and becoming an invisible observer.

What resulted was a piece of writing that gives the reader a fuller portrait of the man than any sit-down interview could have. It's Sinatra unfiltered. And more than just a portrait of the man, it's a rumination on the nature of celebrity, American myth-making, and the nation at mid-century. Sinatra, in Talese's portrait, is not just a singer. Without making any overt mafia references, the character that Talese draws is a variation on the Godfather: a man with tremendous power, a man who's loved, respected, and feared all at once. Talese's Sinatra is also much more complex than the Rat Pack caricature. He's a family man who stays out until the wee small hours of the morning. A private man who spends much of his time surrounded by dozens of hangers-on. A tough-guy who's very being can be threatened by a cold.

If you're a fan of Sinatra, or just someone who enjoys great writing, go read this article right now. It's well worth it.

The second piece is "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehesi Coates, the cover story of the June edition of The Atlantic. Coates has been a national correspondent for the Atlantic for several years now, and in that time has become one of the most thoughtful and provocative writers on race. He rarely approaches the issue from an ideological standpoint, and he often challenges conventional wisdom. On a side note, he was also an occasional guest on the radio program I used to produce, and he's a really nice guy.

Whatever you think of the idea of reparations, the article is a must-read, not only for the carefully-constructed argument but the power of the writing. Coates builds the piece around the story of Clyde Ross, born in Mississippi in 1923 to sharecropper parents. In his lifetime Ross has been the victim of the most overt and covert forms of racism. After escaping the violence and institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow-era south, Ross served in World War II and made his way to Chicago, where he was victim of the more insidious yet no-less-institutionalized bigotry of housing discrimination, (which Coates calls "elegant racism").

Coates uses Ross's story as a springboard for a systematic review of how White America has colluded to deny black Americans the fruits of their labor and prevented them from achieving economic parity. Coates does not attempt to present a plan for how reparations could work, nor does he present reparations as a solution to the problems of black America. Instead, he asks us to consider it not as a "harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists" but as a legitimate idea worthy of rigorous, thoughtful debate. Reparations, he argues, could mean "a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history."

The article will no doubt get a lot of buzz over the next few weeks, as it should, and likely provoke all sorts of derision from the pundits of the world, which is unfortunate. Because whatever your stance on this issue, you'll learn something from reading this article.

Is the NFL ready for Michael Sam?

The NFL has a problem, and it might need a gay man to fix it.

As many of you may know, Michael Sam is the University of Missouri football player drafted by the St. Louis Rams in the seventh round of the recent NFL draft. Most seventh-round draft choices don't get as much coverage as Sam, but that's because no other player drafted is openly gay. Sam announced that he was gay back in February, to great fanfare. While there have been gay football players, none have acknowledged it while they were still playing. The announcement by Sam, the reigning defensive player of the year in the SEC, brought forth the possibility that the NFL could soon have its first openly gay player. In the hyper-masculine world of football, this was nothing short of shocking.

Then came the scrutiny that accompanies the period between the end of the NFL season and the draft. Shortly after coming out, football writer Peter King published an article with unnamed league sources stating that Sam would be a "distraction," shorthand for "we don't care that he's gay but this is not a problem we want to deal with." Then, according to some reports, he didn't perform well in the NFL Combine, the annual cattle call where league executives evaluate the athletic abilities of potential draftees. Some scouts were concerned that he was a "tweener," football lingo for a defensive player not big enough to play on the defensive line and not fast or athletic enough to play linebacker.

All of which helps account for why Sam wasn't drafted until the seventh round, which is generally where teams take a chance on players who likely won't make the team. I don't think most die-hard NFL fans could name a starting NFL player drafted in the 7th round. Sam's fall in the draft is worth questioning. Were NFL teams unsure if he was really an NFL-caliber player, or unsure of how his presence would affect the team? Did the Rams ultimately pick Michael Sam for good PR, or because they think he can make an impact on the field? And if the Rams like him as much as they say they do, why didn't they take him earlier?

Here's the reality: Michael Sam's sexual preference might be a problem for some players, coaches, and fans. For most, if the reaction of his teammates at Missouri is any indication, it won't be a big deal. But let's not pretend he won't be a distraction. From day one of training camp, his sexuality, and what all his teammates think about it, will be the story. Michael Sam has already done the hardest part by publicly coming out. But how he handles the rest of his career could be a trickier turn. Does he constantly wear the hat of "the first openly gay NFL player," or does he just go about his business as a football player who happens to be gay? I'm not sure he can be both.

The intense scrutiny of Michael Sam's every move began as soon as he was drafted, and will continue. After receiving the news that he had been drafted by the Rams, Sam embraced and kissed his boyfriend in front of television cameras. The kiss overjoyed some, repulsed others, and made the internet blow up. And soon after the initial reaction, the meta-analysis began. Was he trying to make a statement? Was it staged? Why did the kissing go on so long? For me, it was simply an emotional reaction to an emotional moment. We often see drafted players hug their moms or kiss their girlfriends. It's become part of the whole draft spectacle. These guys have worked really hard to achieve their dream. Why shouldn't they share their emotion with the one they love?

Sam said in his introductory press conference that his focus is on playing and making the team. But his decision to allow the Oprah Winfrey Network to do a reality series on his attempt to make the team immediately provides fodder for those who argue he's more interested in being a gay icon than being a football player. 

If Michael Sam becomes an NFL star, it will be huge for a league that, despite its popularity, has many problems. Let's review some of the challenges the NFL is facing: a growing list of players on the police blotter, a very public case of player harassment with racial overtones, and, most significantly, mounting evidence that the game itself is destroying the brains of its players. Yes, football is the most popular sport in this country, but it won't continue to be if these stories go on. Having an openly gay star will be a boon for the league, and for society.  While I tend to think the role of sports in fomenting social change can be overblown, Sam's success will go a long way to shooting down a host of stereotypes about gay men. It will also show that the NFL might be more enlightened and open-minded than most people think.

So as uncomfortable as some of its players, coaches, executives, and fans might be, the NFL needs Michael Sam, and it needs Michael Sam in a big way. 

Passing on the Draft?

 

Finally, the hour is nigh. For months, the airwaves have been filled with speculation and prognostication from an assortment of talking heads. Gallons upon gallons of ink have been spilled. Candidates have been proclaimed the chosen one on one day, and then dismissed the next. The future hangs in the balance. 

That paragraph would seem bombastic if I were writing on the eve of a presidential election. Of course, I'm not. I'm writing about the NFL Draft, which begins in a few hours.

If anyone had any doubts that football is the king of sports in this country, they need only look at how the NFL has turned its annual draft into one of the biggest sporting events of the year. Yes, I just wrote that. Despite the fact that the baseball season is in full swing, and the NBA and NHL are in the midst of their respective playoffs, there will be no bigger sporting event today than the NFL Draft. An event where a guy in a suit announces the names of players selected by each NFL Team, then shakes hands with each player and poses for a photographs while fans in the audience cheer (except for the Jets fans, who boo everything).

It's really quite a phenomena how popular the draft has become. Since the clock ticked to :00 in the Super Bowl, football fans and those who cover the game have been immersed in creating mock drafts, dissecting game film, and evaluating scouting combines and pro days. "Draft Experts" Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay have been on ESPN nearly every single day and probably haven't seen a bed in months. And yes, there's even a movie about the draft (which I was convinced was an April Fool's joke until I actually saw it on a theater marquee).

How exactly did we get here? How did a sporting event that involves no physical action become one of the most watched sporting events of the year? The simple answer is marketing and television. NFL officials decided at some point that it wasn't acceptable for people not to be thinking about football in the months between the Super Bowl (February) and the beginning of training camp (August). No, people had to be thinking about football all year round. And what better way to do that than by turning the annual selection of college players in May into a three-day extravaganza, hosted and promoted by ESPN (and the insufferable Chris Berman). And the fans are eating it up.

As a sports fan, I'm not immune to the fervor surrounding this event. In baseball they say that hope springs eternal very opening day. For football fans, hope springs eternal every draft day. It's the day when every fan can dream that their team has picked the next star, or stars, who will take them to the promise land. And it's always interesting to see the machinations that team executives go through to disguise their true intentions and maneuver their way to a higher (or lower) draft pick. Still, sometimes I have to step back and wonder how an event that is so meaningless in a cosmic scale can accrue so much attention. And that's the dilemma I've always had as a sports fan. Why do I care so much about this stuff?

But, in the end, I'll likely be tuning in for some of the draft tonight, watching to see what teams Johnny Football and Teddy Bridgewater and Jadeveon Clowney will play for. But I won't feel good about it.

Ownership has its privileges

One of the most satisfying things about sports is that, on any given day, you have something to evaluate. Teams win, teams lose, fans have something to evaluate and talk about. Each game is a self-contained story with a conclusion. And even when the story is off the field, there are winners and losers.

Today, LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling is the loser. This afternoon's announcement by NBA commissioner Adam Silver that Sterling has been banned from the NBA for life, and will be forced to sell the team, quickly capped a story that broke over the weekend. The punishment came in the wake of Sunday's release of secret recordings of Sterling telling girlfriend V. Stiviano to a) not have black people on her Instagram account b) not bring black people to Clippers game, and c) generally not associate with black people. The NBA announced on Sunday that it would investigate the incident, and apparently it didn't take league officials long to conclude that the man on the tape was indeed Sterling.

The reaction from player, fans, and media observers has been almost unanimously positive. Silver is being hailed for his swift and decisive action. But as others have pointed out, what's most remarkable about this entire episode is that the NBA acted so quickly in response to this incident, when Donald Sterling has a fairly long track record of being a despicable human being. Apparently, being sued by the Justice Department and other entities for housing discrimination, paying out the largest settlement for housing discrimination ever recorded by the Justice Department, and having your own General Manager say you ran the team like a plantation owner, wasn't enough for the men who run the league. No, it took a series of reprehensible comments, made in private, to get the league to do something about a man who's owned an NBA franchise for more than 30 years.

Let's not kid ourselves here. While one can applaud Silver for giving no quarter, and trust that he was appalled by Sterling's comments as he says he was, it would appear that this decision is about the bottom line. Sponsors have begun to distance themselves from the team, and players league-wide were reportedly discussing a potential boycott of the playoffs. Public sentiment against the league as a whole could have turned against the entire league if Sterling did not receive stiff punishment. Finally, this incident comes at the league's most important and lucrative time of year, the playoffs. Silver didn't want this hanging over LeBron James's run at a third straight title. None of Sterling's previous transgressions, no matter how egregious, ever created this type of PR crisis for the league. Nor, for that matter, did they prevent players from signing with the Clippers.

While's Sterling's comments are shocking and upsetting to many, he isn't the first team owner to publicly embarrass his fellow owners. In fact, he seems to be part of a tradition of millionaire ignoramuses who could only hide their true character for so long.

Let's run down the list: there's former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, who once told ESPN that Adolf Hitler was "good at the beginning, but he just went too far." Those comments, along with others, earned her a two year ban from Major League Baseball. Then there's former New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was banned after being convicted for hiring a gambler to extort one of his own players. How about former Twins owner Calvin Griffith? When asked in 1978 why he had moved the team from Washington D.C. to Minnesota, Griffith replied that it was because  Minnesota had "good, hardworking white people."

Some owners are simply jerks. Former Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley was so cheap that the only thing that could bring his combative team together was their universal loathing of him. NFL owners Art Modell, Al Davis, and Robert Irsay set the precedent for owners ditching cities and fan bases that wouldn't fulfill their demands for new and improved stadiums. And you can't forget Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, who has shown a remarkable tone-deafness in his handling of the controversy over the team name.

Yes, the world of team ownership has had its share of crooks and nut jobs. Maybe owning a professional sports franchise requires a certain type of megalomania. Becoming a team owner is a way of letting people know just how insanely rich you are. And it gives you control over something that many people care intensely about. You bring your fans a championship, and you'll be revered in a way that you never could be through your business dealings. And, since there are no shareholders to please, it's a gig that you can maintain as long as you have the cash, now matter how nutty you are or how many bad decisions you make.

But owning a professional sports franchise also exposes you to the media spotlight, which has a way of highlighting everyone's flaws and revealing their true character. And that's what finally caught up with Donald Sterling. Fans, players, and league officials generally don't ask much of owners once they've proved they have the cash to become a member of the club. They want them to invest in the team, put out a winning product, and hopefully be decent people. Donald Sterling failed on all those fronts for much of his tenure as Clippers owner, but the NBA ever threatened to take the team away from him. Now that everyone knows who he really is, the only option is to get rid of him.

Of course, this story is far from over. Sterling, a former lawyer, is not going to give up easily. But for now, it's NBA 1, Donald Sterling 0. 

Hey Hey, My My....

I've been down the road and I've come back/lonesome whistle on the railroad track/ain't got nothin' on those feelings that I've had

Those lyrics are from Neil Young's 1975 song "Mellow My Mind", among my favorites in the Neil Young catalog. It's a song I've been thinking while reading Young's autobiography, "Waging Heavy Peace." 

The book is less a traditional chronological telling of a life story than a collection of Young's musings on his life, career, and the things that he's passionate about. If you're looking for the definitive story of Neil Young, this isn't it. If you're looking for a deep dive into his creative process and the story behind some of his best albums, you won't find too much of that here. And if you're looking for a really well-written book by a notable musician, move on. Let's just say Neil has trouble with structure and linear thinking. Chapters that seem to begin one topic (say, his early days as a musician in Canada) end up somewhere else completely, as do paragraphs. Hell, some sentences end up on a different topic from where they begin. Knowing what a control freak Young has been throught his career, I'd be willing to bet that part of the deal with the publisher was that no substantive editing could be done to the manuscript. It shows. 

 

Here's one of the highlights, in which Neil discusses the LA scene in the late '60s:

"It was not long afterward that suddenly I realized I had the clap. There were a lot of hippie girls, and we saw them at the Whisky all the time. After the show it was time to go to the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard. I remember those German pancakes. They were delicious. How much sugar can one person eat? After that we paired off and went back to our shacks for some fun. Anyway, I had the clap and I had to go to the clinic"

You get the idea. Throughout the book, Neil's train of thought is often derailed (sorry) by a random memory (delicious pancakes!), and he's never really able to get back to the original point. 

 

But if an autobiography can be viewed as a window into how an artist thinks about his art, "Waging Heavy Piece" does provide some explanation for Young's enigmatic, meandering, and inconsistent career. And I make that statement as a longtime Neil Young fan who was hooked after first hearing the plaintive voice on "Sugar Mountain" (which struck me as the saddest song I'd ever heard). After the Goldrush and Harvest are among the best rock albums of the '70s, and are merely two highlights of an incredibly prolific decade for Young. But when you put out as much material as Neil Young has over his 50 year career, there are bound to be duds. And there have been several of them since the '70s. Hell, his own record company sued him for making albums "uncharacteristic of Neil Young."

But that's the beauty of Neil Young. Just as he shows no ability to edit himself in his autobiography, it doesn't seem there's been much music in Young's career that's gotten left on the cutting room floor. And that's either an indication of his ego as an artist or of how much the recording industry has changed. It's rare in today's music business to see established bands put out a stinker of an album, a real shit sandwich of misconceived and poorly produced songs. Which, in a way, is too bad. It's kind of nice to have a record (again, sorry) of the dross and not just the gold. What music fan hasn't flipped through a stack of old vinyl and thought "how did this album ever get released?" Musicians today seem to be so careful, and so carefully managed, that their subpar material rarely sees the light of day. Or maybe they just have a better sense of what the audience deserves.

The '70s were a different time for the music business. Record labels nurtured young artists and stuck with them. And after Young made Harvest, he could pretty much do anything he wanted. He was a star, and he got to make the music he wanted to make. Not all of it was good (and, according to Neil, some of it was intentionally bad, simply to piss off his record label after they sued him).

But for whatever critical filters Neil Young lacks in his music and his writing, he certainly makes up for it with his passion, whether it's for model trains, electric cars, high quality digital recordings, or the music itself. And it's clear that Young's belief in the power of music has been the driving force in his life. 

Which brings me back to the song "Mellow My Mind," which appeared on the 1975 album Tonight's the Night, an album recorded in an alcohol-induced fog after the drug-related deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young roadie Bruce Berry. The album was controversial both for it's dark content and the raw quality of the recordings (Young calls it "audio verite"), and it sat for two years because the record executives were nervous and Neil was unhappy with the remixes. But he fought to have it released, and his artistic instincts were right on this one. 

 

Tonight's the Night is my favorite Neil Young album because of its rawness and emotion, best exemplified when Young sings the lines I cited in the beginning of this post. With the song building to a ramshackle crescendo, he strains to hit the high notes as he sings "ain't got nothin' on those feelings that I had," his voice cracking with weariness. It's pure and aching and beautiful, and no amount of added production or remixing could make it any more poignant. It's as pure a Neil Young moment as anything he's ever recorded.

So go on Neil, keep following your muse. Sometimes it leads you to beautiful places.

Cold War Kids

Like many others, I've become a fan of the new breed of TV dramas that have become so ubiquitous on cable TV. Although I was slow to join the bandwagon on shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Mad Men (and I'm not even halfway through the first season of Breaking Bad), once I got a taste I quickly became addicted. My latest addiction, and this one I've been on from the beginning, is the FX show The Americans, which chronicles the lives of two KGB sleeper agents in America in the early 1980s. Reagan is president, it's the height of the Cold War, and our two protagonists are deep undercover, posing as travel agents and raising a family in Suburban DC. 

In many respects, the show is preposterous and requires some suspension of disbelief. As the story goes, KGB officers Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Matthew Rhys and the very fetching Keri Russell) were set up in an arranged marriage by their handlers and have apparently been in the U.S. since the mid-1960s, building their cover as an average American couple. The occasional flashback scenes to their initial arrival are incongruous because the actors don't really look much different from their early '80s versions. When Philip and Elizabeth aren't at their travel agency or parenting their son and daughter (and they never seem to be doing much of either), they're directing other operatives, arranging secret information drops, bugging the house of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, assassinating CIA agents, and doing all sorts of other spy things that involve not-so-elaborate disguises. All while maintaining their cover. Even with an FBI agent living in their housing complex.

 

Philip and Elizabeth are also having inordinate amounts of sex with a variety of American dupes (apparently being a spy involves having sex with multitudes of people in order to get information). One of Philip's alter egos is actually married to an FBI secretary. I haven't done a full tally of hours yet, but I'm pretty sure there isn't enough time in the day, let alone a week, to do everything they do. It's exhausting just watching them.

While the show clearly takes some liberties, it's not without some connection to reality. As in Mad Men, the period details are spot on. The creators of the show, one of them a former CIA agent, got the idea from the bust of a Russian sleeper cell in New Jersey in 2010. And there were Soviet "illegals" living in the U.S. in the late '70s and '80s, though this interview with an intelligence historian makes it clear that such sleeper agents would not likely have been engaging in spying themselves. Their whole purpose was to blend in, recruit Americans to do the dirty work, and be contacts for the real spies. Obviously, that would make for a less interesting TV show.

Perhaps the show's best feature is the way it captures the heightened tensions in the U.S.-Soviet relationship in the early 1980s. After a period of detente in the 1970s, the relationship between the world's two superpowers was as bad as it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the period that the show chronicles, psychological warfare conducted by the U.S. Military (including air and sea operations held very close to Russian territory) had the Soviets convinced that the U.S. was planning a surprise nuclear attack. In response, the Soviets and the KGB began a counter-operation, using sleeper agents in America and other countries, to gather as much information as they could on what the U.S. Military was up to. 

 

Philip and Elizabeth appear to be at the very center of this effort. Need some submarine plans stolen? Call Philip and Elizabeth. Need a scientist defector kidnapped and repatriated to the Soviet Union? Don't worry, Philip and Elizabeth will take care of it. The whole KGB operation seems to rest on their shoulders. Don't their employees at the travel agency, not to mention their kids, ever wonder where the hell they are? Where's all the tedious minutiae of adult life?

Of course, details like these can be overlooked because the Americans is not so much a show about spycraft as it is about the personalities involved and their relationships. Just as The Sopranos wasn't really about the mafia and Mad Men isn't about advertising. While those shows are about lost little boys looking for something to fill an aching void in their lives, The Americans is about what gets sacrificed in the name of a cause. Like Tony Soprano and Don Draper, Philip and Elizabeth are anti-heroes, people we root for no matter how despicable they are. They're cold-blooded killers devoted to Mother Russia, yet somehow I find myself cheering for them to succeed.

What also makes the show interesting is the creeping doubts you see in Philip about what they are fighting for, and his growing realization that living in the land of plenty isn't so bad. In the very first episode of the show, we see Philip trying on a new pair of cowboy boots and liking what he sees. In the most recent episode, he gives in to his urges and buys a Corvette. Then, after being shamed by Elizabeth for the purchase, he asks if there isn't a small part of her that likes everything they've acquired. In one of the best moments of the current season, Philip sits in cowed silence as the defector he's helping to send back to the Soviet Union calls him a monster and begs to stay in America. Philip clearly has his doubts. Meanwhile, Elizabeth remains devoted to the cause. In an era where there are still too few strong female characters on TV, she's one tough mofo. (And totally hot, to boot. But I digress).

While I can't say the show evokes any Cold War nostalgia for me, I can't help but wonder if Vladimir Putin has been watching it and getting a little misty-eyed. Even if captures an era in which the Soviets were deeply paranoid, it also harkens back to a time when the Russians were a force to be reckoned with, and there was a deep belief in what they stood for (well, at least among KGB sleeper agents). Elizabeth is a true believer deeply committed to the struggle of the workers against the injustices of Capitalism. Despite her fears for her children (yes, Sting, apparently the Russians do love their children, too) and some growing unease with the amount of killing she has to do, she wants nothing more than to destroy the American imperialists.

As events unfold in Ukraine, it's clear that anti-U.S. and anti-Western rhetoric is among the tactics being used by Putin to fan the flames among ethnic Russians living in eastern part of the country. Maybe it's easier to play that card than it is to appeal to patriotism. It seems like it would be hard to feel patriotic toward a nation being run by oligarchs and kleptocrats. Maybe Putin thinks reviving Cold War paranoia is the way to return his country to the good old days when Russia was feared. I don't know. I'm not a foreign policy analyst, nor have I looked into Putin's soul lately.

Whatever Putin's doing, I think he could use a little help from Philip and Elizabeth. They'd take care of things, and no one would ever know.