Big-League Bluster (co-authored with Marissa Gemma)
THERE’S AN OLD JOKE about Soviet Russia that you might have heard, where you reverse the two parts of a sentence: “In America, you break law. In Soviet Russia, law breaks you.” The joke is an example of chiasmus, a rhetorical form that repeats words or clauses in transposed order—but this particular version has a name: the “Russian Reversal.” In the United States, the Russian Reversal flourished during the Cold War. Bob Hope, for example, told a form of it at the 1958 Oscars, reminding his audience that though there was a television in his Moscow hotel room, “it watches you.” The comedian Yakov Smirnoff popularized it in the 1980s, hawking Miller Lite with the slogan “In Russia, Party always finds you.” It’s easy to see how the Russian Reversal and Cold War–era Soviet politics relate: the joke turns a subject into an object—something, or, more tellingly, someone, who does not act but is acted upon. The individual becomes subordinate to the agency of some abstract force—the law, say, or the media, or the social order. The politics of democracy versus communism, neatly distilled into rhetorical form.
The Trump Train Is Actually a Trump Plane
Much has been written and filmed on the allure and narratives of the American road, but far less on American air travel. Perhaps this is because the road represents the America we’d like to think we inhabit: patriotic, free, individualistic, and largely democratic; whereas the reality of contemporary air travel may be closer to the America in which we actually live: global, uncomfortably communal, highly regulated, and intensely class-stratified.