4:45am a SWAT raid when a 20-member team of federal marshals broke in the door. They had automatic weapons and riot shields.
Bob 'Ryan' got 5 years ('Light or harsh? Maybe common sense.') and was out on parole in 2005, when he took Bobby to Ottawa for the National Hockey League Entry Draft, where he was picked up. A news photo showed Bob and Bobby grinning together, a no-no, and Bob was put under house arrest for 18 months. In 2014 Bobby Ryan hit the hockey jackpot with a $50 million, 7-year contract with the Ottawa Senators. The restraining order was never formally rescinded but 'love conquers all.' Or maybe a child. 'The one thing they shared with equal passion was love for their son and concern for his well-bein
A cold shower on 12/28/86 was the much-hyped Aeroflot full of Russian Americans returning to the Soviet Union, in 'the final momentous, pitiful last days of the Cold War.' Weingaren highlights Valery Klever, his wife Lidiya and daughter Karina. Klever, a famous dissident artist, and family were expelled in 1977 and he/ they hated life in America. They returned to Moscow and he died shortly after. Weingarten captures the poignancy and nasty subtext of Valery's art: like Bulgakov's 1930s novel
Master and Margarita, where people aren't 'disappeared', they literally disappear---poof!---in the middle of the street and no one seems to think there is anything unusual about it. Unsubtle but also plausibly deniable.
His wife and daughter returned to the US, where both Lidiya and Karina became high power IT businesswomen, loving and hating America.
Karina Klever: The Soviet Union infantilized people. You became entitled, compliant, complacent. On perpetual welfare, given the basics, but not well off. You learned to accept that.
Most of these vignettes show a fatally flawed country, with too much freedom, no responsibility, lives laced with tragedy -- a son dying in a freak Jet Ski accident, Jerry Garcia destroying himself on crack etc, gruesome murders, guns and more guns. Lots of prison, but also with healing and the up side of prison -- removal from the scene of ongoing crime, the chance to complete high school, even university, eventually building a new life -- all starting from some seemingly chance event on 12/28/86.
A nation of lonely people in dysfunctional situations. Where there are often worse things than being alone, occasionally better ones.
*My fateful attempt to experience the underbelly of the beast firsthand was a bike trip along the south shore of Lake Erie to the legendary Chautauqua (of Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance fame) and on to the eastern Grand Canyon, Letchworth State Park. I recommend this bike trip to any Canadian (anyone) who doesn't fear Homeland Security's Guantanamo-style greeting at any Port of Entry (all passports are on DHS computers). I had 'booked' several couchsurfing nights; the locals are generous, if mostly poor, this backwater being one of the many post-industrial failures, where only skiers and wanderers thrive. I hope none of my 'contacts' suffered for knowing me.
Other documentarists of America's slow, fitful and often outrageously violent decline are Linh Dinh's Postcards from the End of America , Belen Fernandez, Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World , on native experience, works by Estes, Treuer.
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