The Bronx…I Mean, Russia Is Burning
It's nothing like the bombings in Ukraine, but it's an A for effort
In 1977, one of New York City’s five boroughs, the Bronx, suffered an end-of-times spate of arsons. In the section of the city where the “house that Ruth built” is located, the cut in services brought about by the city’s bankruptcy was particularly devastating for the residents of the South Bronx. Sometimes, fires started and burned themselves out because firefighters didn’t come.
Watching Yankee games, it was common to hear the famed announcer Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto talking about the smell of smoke.
Has it gotten this bad in Russia? Not yet, simply because Russia is the largest country on the planet. But if it was possible to take all of these explosions of the past three months and then put them into one region of Moscow, I think we could be on track for calling this the “Summer that Russia Burned.”
Overnight in Adler, the little town between Sochi and the local airport, the one everyone uses when coming to Sochi or to Putin’s Black Sea resort, an oil storage tank was hit by a drone at 5 a.m. Locals said it sounded like a clap of thunder followed by a sunburst with flames reaching geyser-like into the sky — Good morning, Sochintzi (this is what local residents are called)!
Feeding Putin’s fear
Putin’s murderous tendencies have much to do with the fear that has turned him into a jittery and delusional old man. He is the epitome of “live by stabbing people in the back, then die by the backstab.” He is consumed with the fear that someone close to him will end him — that’s how he would do it, after all. As one of his former bodyguards who defected to the West recently told reporters, the Russian czar is so afraid he will be murdered by those closest to him that almost no one knows his travel plans.
Sometimes, two presidential planes will be sent off to different airports, and it is reported that Putin is in each of them. Organizing an assassination is hard enough, but pulling off the logistics for two in entirely different locations makes it that much harder. Few know where Putin sleeps at night, and no one can ever say with certainty where he is during the day.
Sometimes, his live appearances on TV are just staged to look live. All the way down to the time on his computer screen and his watch — which they sometimes forget to do, and observant Russians catch the slip-ups — the day and time are made to correspond with “now.”
The fact that Ukraine might now be targeting his many bat caves really makes me smile, though. The image of one of the most powerful men in the world lying in bed at night, shaking like a leaf for fear that one of those drones will get through to him, helps me sleep better for sure.
While the explosion in Adler was still about 30 miles away from Putin’s billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea, we can be certain that if he was indeed there — and it seems he was — then Russia’s eternally brave “krasovchik” was able to see the orange-red flames licking voraciously at the Black Sea’s famous purple-black sky.
Let’s imagine him out on one of his balconies in his silk pajamas, and I don’t doubt for a second that they are with footsies, looking up at the flames dancing hysterically over Adler.
Fearing that the explosion was a distraction to draw him out of his bedroom, he quickly hides behind some potted plants lest more drones come to him. Squatting down behind the mid-size tangerine tree, his puffy cheeks reflect the orange sky. The flames hiss and hiss. They are communicating something to him.
“We are coming for you, Vlad. We will find you, pal. Will you be ready for us? We are going to give you a real warm welcome, buddy. Hiss, hiss.”
From down in the garden, Putin hears one of his guards say, “Man, that fire smells like roasting meat (shashlik). I’m getting hungry.”
Hiss-hiss.