The Era of Pretty Good Feelings

‘It is difficult, yet we want to believe in the victory of civilization.’

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Ukraine’s Odesa Opera reopened Friday after more than four months. With sandbags piled around the entrances, the ornate 122-year-old rococo theater that looks like the top tier of a wedding cake resounded not with air raid sirens but the arias of Puccini, and, of course, the battered but defiant nation’s anthem.

When a country’s 160-year-old official song is called “The Glory and Freedom of Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished,” you know you’re dealing with a people not unfamiliar with hardship. But Russia’s brutality in its assault on its liberty-loving neighbor has still taken its toll in the once-wealthy port city. Though Odesa is peaceful now, just 70 miles to the east, the city of Mykolaiv is enduring the wrath of Vladimir Putin’s frustrated dreams of empire. Farther to the east, residents of Kharkiv brace for the imminent return of Russian tank columns.

Everyone who attended Friday’s performance knew that the first show in months could be the last one ever, that the war could return any time, and that the crimes against humanity inflicted on their countrymen in Bucha and Mariupol could be their fate as well. So how do they sit in a gilded opera house and listen to Turandot? 

“At the start of the war the explosions and sirens terrified me, as if I had plunged into some unreality, a World War II movie, but humans get used to everything,” Viacheslav Chernukho-Volichthe, the opera’s chief conductor, told the New York Times. “It is difficult, yet we want to believe in the victory of civilization.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    There will come a day when the spirit of men shall fail, when the shield will break and the banner will fall, but it is not this day!

    (My paraphrase of memory from Aragorn in The Return of the King.)

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    Anne W (Raw5254)

    Thank you, Chris. I’ve said more than once, that things were even worse in the 60s and 70s. We are stronger than we give ourselves credit for; and frankly, it’s nice to see it in writing from someone who knows something about history and politics.

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    George.Rozes

    Yes let's all keep our heads in the sand. You need an agreed culture and set of governing principles to form a nation. When Dead Enders, Progressives, and The Republican Party of Texas speak,,, and pro abortionists attack right to life places,,, and the supreme court may allow any state legislature to overturn elected votes totals, the road to perdition is here. Do you feel like you just can't wait for 2024 when the Center breaks after November?

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  4. Peter.Meilaender

    The opening paragraphs reminded me of C.S. Lewis in the essay "Learning in War-Time":
    "I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with 'normal life'. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes."

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    CynthiaW

    I love you, Mr. Stirewalt.

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    David Eggleston

    Enter Eric Greitens, Stage Far Right

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    George.Skinner

    The difference between Watergate, the 2000 election, and today may be that it's increasingly easier to live in a partisan echo chamber where the prevailing narrative is never challenged. That self-reinforcement amplifies the rhetoric and leads to increasing extremism. Senator Ben Sasse makes the point that only about 14% of Americans are highly politically engaged, which limits the number of people infected by this sort of extremism. The problem is that they're also the people who care enough about this stuff to show up and set the terms of the political battles that the other 86% are asked to settle at the next election.

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  8. Anna A

    I wish I had Chris's optimism, but I don't. I know we went through lot of inflection points in history that could have broken the country but didn't. That's not a given that the next one won't. Almost all other countries that did fall into some autocracy had experienced a lot of close calls, as well, until one day they succumbed. We like to pretend we're exceptional, that we have a superior constitution and long-established institutions, and incorruptible courts, etc. But the way I see it, it wasn't the institutions that saved us last time, it was individuals that did the right thing. This time, many of them are no longer in positions of decision-making, and those who replaced them were chosen for the single reason of being pliable. I hope I'm wrong.

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  9. Egal.Fabrice

    You know, I entered the article with a good dose of scepticism, but the numbers on the Supreme Court and especially the 6 in 10 rejecting Trump really were heartening. For once, that's evidence in favor of careful, limited optimism.

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    Rjosephpaquette

    I agree with the premise . Parties today are less willing to punish their own. Nixon’s articles of impeachment got over 1/3 of republicans on the committee. Would he have gotten that much bipartisan effort to impeach today—I think not.

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