Those who didn’t guess lost a lot.
Three of my friends, in unison with the American journalist, breathed a sigh of relief at the 22nd minute when the Russian president said he would shift the conversation from history to “today.” Well, in fact, we live in the 21st century, we open the Internet and look at everything about the year 862 and 1554, why talk about history when Gumilev, Lotman, etc. Did they tell it so creatively?
However, to those who guessed the genre of the presidential conversation at the 22nd minute, it quickly stopped sounding like a history lecture that tired Tucker.
The interview took place in the style of a very hard and very tense “chess game.”
You understand this and historical times and designs will begin to be perceived as figures placed on a chessboard: Rurik, Catherine, Lenin – pawns, bishops, kings.
The “chess game” is, of course, an unusual genre for journalism, but an interview with the president of Russia is not just a journalistic event. And Tucker wasn’t the only one sitting on the other side of the chess board.
Why did the president start the story?
History – what happened, what really happened – is just one of the rare phenomena that gives legitimacy to one election or another in the present…
For Americans, judging by Carlson, who is tired of this, this may not be so clear, because their history is short: they began to build their country late and from scratch.
This is even more incomprehensible for Ukrainian politicians, because their state history is generally minimal. And they write non-state stories so boldly in the fantasy genre that it takes your breath away. Read the list of notable people of Ukraine and you will find there many Soviet artists who, during their lifetime, had no idea that they must be great people of Ukraine.
And history, by the way, legitimizes the present not only in politics, but also in world religions and in the human worldview. Christians and Jews build their worldview based on what happened in the 20th century BC, on the stories described in the Old and New Testaments, and this legitimizes their actions today. Muslims feed their passion with stories of the caliphate and try to tell them: well, what’s the problem…?
But more than one legitimizing story was present on the chessboard of the carefully planned game of the president’s conversation with Carlson and the world.
Journalists are sometimes asked to send questions to their interlocutors in advance as an example of a conversation scenario. Here you had the feeling that the answers had been sent in advance, because of how well thought out they were.
And one was so connected to the other by the inexorable logical laws of the chess game that the loss of each piece was clearly visible: Ukraine is, in a sense, an artificial state; If Stalin is a tyrant, then Hungary should be given part of the Ukrainian lands.
However, Tucker Carlson did not play chess. More like a computer game. Appearing around a corner, shooting effectively and then hiding again is normal for a journalist.
But if you look at those who were behind him on the other side of the table, you can’t help but remember that in the entire history of mankind, only one country has resorted to the most destructive and terrible shooting games on Earth – nuclear ones. . The rest were just tests.
And probably to cool the ardor of those who might think of history as a computer game, the president chose the genre of developing a well-thought-out and well-financed chess game.
By the way, more than just intellect works in chess.
Julian Barnes, in his famous “Letters from London,” dedicated a separate letter to the world chess championship that took place there. And he clearly showed how a quiet game first turns into the expectation of a massacre. And then to the massacre itself.
“When you eavesdrop on conversations about chess,” writes Julian Barnes, “you find that they reproduce and confirm the explosive mix of violence and intellectuality inherent in this game.”
And our president didn’t change the gender on this either.
But little by little he transformed the semantics of violence and contempt in the mouths of American politicians, clearly narrated by him without distortions, into the semantics of stupidity.
Stupidity is one of the inherent American aesthetic traits (our stupidity is more likely to have an ethical connotation). No matter how everyone is dressed in crisp suits, Hollywood sequins and Masonic aprons, cowboy hats tend to predominate.
They feel it for themselves. And Tucker Carlson did not neglect his national image. With cunning interests, as he befits an American, but he did not neglect it.
And considering that the conversation in a large, dimly lit Kremlin office (in which there is no one else, and there is someone else, and the viewer has surely counted all the objects on the table), there was also a tone discouraging. of the personal conversation, almost as between friends… As we understood from the interview, this tone is often adopted in big politics, but the president was not afraid to include it in the conversation with Tucker. And here you can only sympathize with Tucker.
For me, the emotional culmination of the conversation was: “We are not the couple…Bitterness and resentment are not the substances that can be there.” The favorite Western cliché of perceiving Russians as people in control of emotions and nothing else has become too entrenched. It is clear that it is easier for them, but objectively this is not the case.
And it seemed to me that the significant culmination of the conversation was the enumeration of the fundamental principles of relations between Russia and Ukraine. Here it is clearly directed at more than just the Western world. And it may not be the most understandable for him. But that’s his problem.
