Posted on 05/04/2022 10:52:05 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
I’ve known and know a number of girls and women named Karen. I cannot think of anything bad about any one of them. One Karen I dated in high school. Others I’ve met and/or worked with while becoming friends and colleagues with. All of them are very nice with nothing derogatory that I can think of nor remember.
Yet “Karen” has become a pejorative in our current hyper “woke” culture. “Karen” has become a caricature of that certain middle-aged white woman calling 911 on children skateboarding in the cul-de-sac, dog-walkers in urban parks and that bossy woman demanding to see the manager because the lid on her Diet Coke was not completely fastened on top of the cup.
I have thought that this pejorative “Karen” label is a real disservice to all of those nice Karens I have known. It seems unfair and arbitrary that a girl’s name has now become a political slur, devolved into a form of verbal banishment, like leprosy. After all, these nice Karens I’ve met had no choice in the selection of their name before their doting parents brought them home from the hospital nurseries.
Likewise, the Russian people have become an international version of “Karen.” Russians, now viewed as pariahs and international lepers, have had very little choices in their leaders for hundreds of years. Whether it’s due to the czars, murderous Bolshevik tyrants or autocratic imperialists like Putin, the Russian people never seemed to ever have had any choice in their leaders. They are just passed off from one despotic regime to another … wash, rinse and repeat.
Yet, and as I have believed for quite some time now, Russia should be part of the West. Our West. Setting aside for a moment their miseries with czars, Communism and autocrats, their culture and historical contributions from classical music to ballet, from poetry to great works of literature, put the Russians firmly ensconced within western civilization. Our western civilization.
There has always been something tragic about the Russian people as it’s easy to sense that Russians are most happy when they are at their most miserable. They can’t seem to win for losing. Is it their long history of despotic rulers? Is it the long cold Siberian winters? Is it the always plentiful vodka? Perhaps it’s all three and more.
It explains why some of the world’s greatest novels are about Russian tragedy … love lost, pain, suffering and death, i.e., the human condition. Tolstoy’s epics “Anna Karenina,” “War and Peace” and (Pasternak’s) Doctor Zhivago” are among the greatest works of literature ever penned. I would be remiss to leave out Dostoevsky’s epic “Crime and Punishment” and Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” so too are added these most honorable mentions.
In the end … it will most likely be the Russian people themselves who will dispatch Vlad The Putin. We should be making common cause with these Russians, not treating them as Karens.
Pray for the Ukrainian people and pray for all of those Russian people of good will, of whom there are a great many, this Holy Week.
Let’s just call them Hillarys.
The Deep State propaganda is getting deeper than ever not to mention piled higher.
How’s that Kool Aid you’ve been drinking, Ivan?
Екатерина = Yekaterina
No. I think just about everyone in the west thinks Russia sucks. Their culture sucks. Their books suck, Their army sucks.
The average Russian just looks miserable, and they don’t understand why we don’t want to share their miserable existence.
I am sure that ok individuals over there, somewhere, so I am generalizing. But even in the large Russian population in my area the people look miserable; they just get better booze.
Just grabbing a name and implying some sort of stereotype behind that name seems rather lame to me. Then ... many sheep feel they have to repeat the latest sayings to feel relevant.
Let’s put them out of their misery.
I’ve lived my entire life with those bastards pointing nuclear missiles at me, time to put the bear down.
Nothing good has come from Russia since Tchaikovsky kicked the bucket.
No offense, but if I lived in Vermont, I'd be miserable too. You and your Russian friends must be knee deep in your rasputitsa.
“Nothing good has come from Russia since Tchaikovsky kicked the bucket.”
...and even he was a homo...
I don’t live in Vermont.
Ever wonder why you are alway stepping in it online? You make silly assumptions.
“Their books suck, “
But we’ve just gotten started. Russians have loads of nicknames for every first name and they often don’t have any resemblance to the first name. Vova and Volodya are common nicknames for Vladimir. But the nicknames also have variations. So Vova can become Vovka, Vovochka, Vovchik, Vladik, Vovan, and Volodya can become Volod’ka, Volodyen’ka and more.
So a character in a Russian novel can be called by any of these variants. The Russian reader will know who’s being referred to but for the rest of us...
I like that better. Karen is to bland. My sister’s name, and she is not that kind of person. Conservative, Pro-Life, Red voter.
Composers like Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich...Pianists like Rubenstein, Horowitz, Richter, Kissin...Aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky...
I beg to differ.
I concede your point.
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