The Ironic Case of Vladimir Putin an original essay by CutTheCrackJack [Draft]

[U][B]The Ironic Case of Vladimir Putin, an original essay on how an autocrat of the state exists because of the democracy of life.[/B][/U]

By most all biographical accounts, of which there are many, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has an affinity for vodka, stout German beers and telling vulgar jokes in even the most formal of settings.

Putin, in an effort to properly frame a vanity worthy of his post, will only deign to tranquilize bears, tigers and whales, ride horses through the Urals while topless and, though elaborately staged in the heavy handed way usually seen in the regimes of cherub-faced fat kids, when he swims the breast stroke for 200 meters in rivers or cliff dives into the Black Sea, his proud Slavic torso conjures up none of the silly and amateur shame one equates with the North Korean propaganda machine.

This is the profile of a man who, with a hard to substantiate at $40B in net worth, is estimated to be one of the world's richest men and who tops the Forbes list of “[I]Most powerful man in the world[/I]”.

Putin is also a 5'7, 160 pound, 61 year old man with a wedding singer-bad quality comb-over and a weird overbite thing going on.

He is not particularly intelligent or gifted, is not from a storied family or of wealth or prestige (actually, there is evidence that points to his actually being a pauper, ill-bred and being adopted), and he owes much of his amazing vertical march from the nadir of Russian society to his current perch on the peak to interpersonal relationships, risk and luck.

Relationships. Risk. Luck.

If those general ingredients sound vaguely familiar and comforting it is because those are exactly the same platitudes we stir together and sell as "The American Dream." Isn't it easy, then, to see how Vladimir Putin evokes such interest and fascination, if not outright empathy from American men of ability and ambition?

Ideologically neutral, joining a movement for only so long as it suits his personal and political needs until it no longer serves the self, Vladimir Putin embodies many of the characteristics of a generation- one that we deride here in America- that we call "The Millennials."

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 “You can do anything” I reiterated to my son after subjecting him to Pixar’s 2007 film Ratatouille whose democratizing and feel-good mantra “Anyone Can Cook” is underscored by the story’s ethereal donor Chef Gusteau.

And isn't that the point, that anyone can possibly do anything?

Almost. I hope to explain, and through great irony, how Vladimir Putin the despot ruler and indisputable bad ass of the world is one of the greatest threats to the world's torchbearer of Democracy* because of our world's inherent democracy vis-à-vis fatalism.

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Anyone can do anything.

What I've left out up to this point is that the above is not true. At least it is not [i]entirely[/i] true if one realizes that what is omitted -- what we either don't say, realize or consciously know-- is that our life and accomplishments are inextricably slaves, chained to what exists as the current conditions or the foreseeable future conditions (which becomes a current condition) by what we can materially affect.

So what does that mean? Truly then, we cannot do "anything".

The extreme examples we see in history**, or anecdotally, are really not amazing and otherworldly feats but only extremely (and relatively) valuable outcomes from optimal conditions, within the confines of material space and time (which is our metaphysical limit). We are fated to exist in a world with preset physical laws, societies, culture and relative morality. To the extent we can affect our world is fated by our corporal temporal shelf-life and viability within the sandbox we were placed.

So what were the optimal conditions that gave rise to Russia being ruled for the last fifteen years by a poor, orphaned, wholly average, arguably sociopathic but otherwise nameless guy?

Extreme image crafting.

If you are on facebook, image crafting is something we see everyday through our network of friends and peers. At it's essence, it is manipulating and leveraging information (whether it be words, photos, locations, etc.) in order to affect and project an outward image in whichever way the crafter deems ideal.

Putin had the perfect opportunity to be an image crafter.

Putin joined a KGB that, contrary to popular American romanticism, was not a vodka-fueled mixture of the Russian version of the Soprano’s and a Mexican Gulf Cartel with a splash of 007, but was rather a bloated, bureaucratic version of our volunteer armed forces who sit behind desks.

He dicked around for a while making minimum wage in East Germany as the equivalent of a middle manager that kind of rises up through the system and gets a little savvier with each bump in raise and responsibility instead of petering out to the peter principle*** in St. Petersburg (okay, that was obnoxious I'll edit this out) until getting a break by way of a relationship he fostered to get into politics. Nobody can really explain the truth about this relationship as these two men, Putin and Sobchak, when asked even have conflicting messages and widely varying accounts of how their partnership came to life. How even now the real arrangement between the two men can be obscured with individual agenda and egotistical lobbying is because of the optimal condition Putin had the fortune of being in, which is to say his entrapment in a closed political system with an unremarkable career in the KGB.

By the time Putin reached an unlikely position of prominence and influence, he was able to basically invent his own credibility and qualifications without any of the negative blow back that we’d see in more transparent political and societal systems. Simply put, Putin had the good fortune of growing up in a time and in a society that allowed him to write his own ticket by giving him the liberty to create his own back story and mythology.

In these optimal conditions, that of statist Russia “Anyone can be anything” if one can will it as Napoleon with deceit and mere say-so, creating a true democratic dynamic. This democratic dynamic is what lead to Putin become the antithesis of democracy, and I for one am tickled pink (no pun intended).

[i]Notes:[/i]

The presupposition is that one's psychological and physical make-up is ideal and optimal within whatever conditions one finds oneself being born into. In this instance, being a sociopath with a sizable ego and a modicum of luck was inherent to Putin and a genetic advantage.

* Democracy is Not My Standard: An Essay by CTCJ
http://cutthecrackjack.blogspot.com/2013/04/democracy-is-not-my-standard.html

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle