I'm Almost Done with Season One of House of Cards!

So look:

I was going to write about House of Cards and how I fear that as TV gets more complex I am slowly going to be left out because I don't have the time follow such complex shows.....Not, maybe, that House of Cards is especially complex, but here was my opening move:

...I have a half episode to go in "Season" 1, and in episode 12 (Spoiler Alert?) the indefatigable and fairly well fuckable Zoe Chase has gone back to some trailer park in the deep south to meet with some guy but instead finds some woman working at the "gentleman's club" which of course is full not of gentlemen but rather a few not-clad women dancing about on a stage being carefully watched by a scrag of ruffians. One of them is the woman used to live with the guy that Zoe wanted to see originally and she gave Zoe some information about an editorial that that one guy may or may not have written and for some reason that was incredibly important, as it tied Frank Underwood to the suicide of Peter Russo, I think.  Maybe.  

It seemed like an important moment in the story, and I really only had a vague idea of what was going on.  

In my defense, the man from the trailer park and his rather titillating partner were introduced only briefly very early in the series.  Now here we are, a good 10 episodes later, and the creators of the show are expecting me to remember who these two very minor characters, mere pawns in the game, are with very little preamble.  

I've been in similar situations before.  I call it pulling a Tolstoy."

And then I was going to talk about the number of characters in War and Peace aka War What is it Good For?  and tie it somehow back to the complexity of TV dramas.

But then I remembered that Russia is maybe about to go to war with the Ukraine over the Crimea, and I paused.  If buying a Chik-Fil-A sandwich can be viewed as an act in support of intolerance, than I suppose extolling Russian Literature for its beauty and complexity might be viewed by some as being insensitive to the Ukrainian cause of freedom, a sort of "Pro-Russia" speculative factoid.  That is the world we live in today, where every statement and every act and everything we consume carries with some kind of existential meaning that says something about ourselves even when it doesn't.

I think it's a sad state of affairs, where being a consumer has defined ourselves to such a great extent that the very act of consuming different items gives us meaning, aligns ourselves with a certain story we tell about our values and beliefs.

At any rate, the post blew up, and I don't think it was going to be a very good one anyway.  As to the Ukraine, I am ambivalent, though that does not mean that I do not care.  I'm not a fan of Putin and Putin's Russia by any means, and it sounds like the Ukrainian protesters had good reason for doing what they did.  As to the Russian military intervention, with an ethnic population of mostly Russians and 60% of the the Russian Navy based at Sebastopol I'd have a hard time imagining any nation doing things much differently.  Even our illustrious Republic would have probably at least considered something similar if it found itself likewise challenged.  The only hope is that a deal can be worked out, the tension defused, and further blood shed be avoided.