Sunday Pages: "The Spell of the Yukon" A poem by Robert Service Greg Olear Aug 17 Dear Reader, Somehow it was even worse than I thought. Did you watch? The sycophancy (sicko fancy?) was off the charts. It made Helsinki look like Iwo Jima. A thin carpet the color of blood was laid out on the tarmac. He stood upon it for some time, fidgeting. He clapped his tiny hands with anticipation. His posture was cartoonish, his corpulent body tilted forward, almost defiant of the laws of physics. He looked as anxious and giddy as the high school loser waiting for the prom queen to show up at his house for the rager. And then the special guest arrived! Fashionably late, yes, but here at last. Back by the plane, service members stood at attention—this was a military base, after all—as he all but slobbered on his Master, like a big stupid orange dog. Holding his Master’s hand, beaming, he looked as happy as he’d looked in months. Together the two of them, the Walrus and the Carpenter, walked to a dark blue dais, where “ALASKA: 2025” was spelled out in huge white letters, as if anyone didn’t know where they were or what year it was. Imagine a similar banner being displayed when Roosevelt met with Churchill and Stalin at the end of the Second World War, and you get some idea of how ridiculous this all was: Later, inside, he sat by his Overlord in front of yet another garish display. “PURSUING PEACE,” this one read—mournful signage, reminiscent of corporate advertising seen at professional sports league press conferences, that was somehow even more ridiculous than the ridiculous banner out on the tarmac. What child came up with this? What dunderhead thought it a good idea? (They might have had the decency to tack on the word “PRIZE” at the end; at least that would have been honest.) He sat there submissively, slumped forward, his hands splayed in a vaginal shape, his ankles swollen, slavishly hanging on every word from the Botox-headed war criminal who’s intentionally killed civilians and bombed civilian structures in Ukraine every damn day for the last three and a half years—and who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” How proud he was to share the stage with his baby-kidnapping Overlord! Not that we expected otherwise. After all, he was bosom friends for many years with the two most notorious child sex traffickers in modern history—why not cozy up to a child non-sex trafficker? He proudly delivered a letter from his wife, who grew up in a Slovenian podunk in Communist Yugoslavia, not far from the East German outpost where his Master was once stationed. “As parents, it is our duty to nurture the next generation’s hope,” she—or, perhaps, Chat GPT—wrote, imploring the fearsome autocrat to safeguard the future of these unspecific children and “singlehandedly restore their melodic laughter.” Her three-word closing exhibited more defiance than anything her husband would say in Alaska: “It is time.” He offered no similar push-back. He was effusive in his praise and admiration. He called his Master by his Christian name, like a dear friend, and in violation of D/s protocols. He thanked him profusely. He acknowledged the potbellied lieutenants. He thanked his Master again. When he said he hoped they’d meet again soon, the little psychopath offered, “Next time, in Moscow.” This delighted him to no end. Oh, how the notion titillated him! It was like being asked to come to his Master’s house and meet his parents. And after all the hullaballoo, all the hew and cry, all the tough talk of ending the war “in one day” or “on Day One” or whatever when-pigs-fly vow he’d made, there was no ceasefire. There was no peace deal. There was nothing but a photo op: the despotic author of countless atrocities with the hollow man who should be, but is not, the leader of the free world. “Thank you very much, Mr. President,” he said, “that was very profound, and I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on—most of them, I would say; a couple of big ones that we haven’t quite gotten there—but we’ve made some headway.” And then, in what sounded like rejected lyrics from a U2 song: “So there’s no deal until there’s a deal.” Once the war criminal and his entourage had gone, filling the air with their melodic laughter, having sufficiently batted around their dead mouse, he lectured us, straight-faced, on what the lying tyrant’d told him about democracy. He spoke of stolen elections, of write-in ballots. His face was the color of duck sauce. A few hours later came the inevitable New York Times headline: “Breaking news: Trump backs off cease-fire demand, aligning with Putin.” Whatever our feelings about Trump—and mine are, like the sensitive documents related to the meeting his inept team accidentally left behind in the printer at the hotel, not a secret—he is our president. He is our head of state. He is our representative to the rest of the world. He speaks for us. Never before, in the 249-year history of this nation, has the United States been so thoroughly humiliated on the international stage. Who could watch that sniveling, obsequious excuse for diplomacy and come away impressed? The Dark Enlightenment fascists yearn for Donald to be a Red Caesar. To reign as a king. What did they witness on Friday? Their presumed “strongman” wilting before a smirking troll half his size. Even the worshipful Karoline Leavitt seemed to realize it was a debacle. In advance of the big “summit,” Glenn Beck, the conservative talk-radio host, noted the powerful symbolism of meeting the Russian president on territory once owned by the Russian Empire: “Alaska is EXACTLY the right place for Trump to meet with Putin. He’s not honoring Putin’s ‘claim’ on Alaska, or whatever nonsense Nancy Pelosi said. He’s sticking a finger in Putin’s eye: ‘Welcome to the United States! And one of those states is ALASKA.’” Beck was wrong about Putin’s imperial ambitions, which are very real, but not about the rest of it. Holding the meeting in Alaska would have been a genius Soviet-style troll, a proper riposte to the Kremlin’s constant trolling—if Trump had been aware of the history. He was not. He seemed not to understand that Alaska was currently part of the United States, let alone that the U.S. had acquired the land from Russia after the end of the Civil War, during the lone term of his fellow corrupt, racist, impeached president, Andrew Johnson. Trump did not stick his finger in Putin’s eye; he stuck his tongue in Putin’s ass. Rand McNally atlas: Alaska in 1895 The United States acquired the vast, pristine territory on the Bering Sea from Tsar Alexander II for a mere $7.2 million—equivalent to $129 million in today’s dollars, which is slightly more than what Mark Zuckerberg has spent to buy eleven adjoining houses in the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto and slightly less than the three-year contract extension signed by Lakers superstar Luka Dončić earlier this month. Here’s the language in the formal proclamation of March 30, 1867. (I’m happy to stick it in Putin’s eye): His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias agrees to cede to the United States, by this convention, immediately upon the exchange of the ratifications, thereof, all the territory and dominion now possessed by his said Majesty on the continent of America and in the adjacent islands. “Seward’s Folly,” this was called by wags in the press, most notably old grouch Horace Greeley. The historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, in A History of the United States since the Civil War (1917), sums up the reservations of Greeley and his curmudgeonly ilk: The purchase price was small; the annual charges for administration, civil and military, would be yet greater, and continuing. The territory included in the proposed cession was not contiguous to the national domain. It lay away at an inconvenient and a dangerous distance. The treaty had been secretly prepared, and signed and foisted upon the country at one o’clock in the morning. It was a dark deed done in the night. . . . The New York World said that it was a “sucked orange.” It contained nothing of value but furbearing animals, and these had been hunted until they were nearly extinct. Except for the Aleutian Islands and a narrow strip of land extending along the southern coast the country would be not worth taking as a gift. Wrong, Horace. The only thing in Alaska that ever resembled a “sucked orange” was Donald Trump. Robert Service was seven years old, and still living in his native Scotland, when the United States took possession of Alaska. An adventurer at heart, and a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and poems of the Robert Louis Stevenson variety, he fell in love with the Yukon wilderness—not quite Alaska, but pretty close. He arrived in 1894 and stayed six years, during the heady days of the Gold Rush. His 1907 poem “The Spell of the Yukon” tells of his profound experiences in the region, which, in brief, amount to: “The Yukon! Come for the gold! Stay for the natural beauty!” With its passé sing-song rhyme scheme and too many verses, “The Spell of the Yukon” is closer in composition to a ballad by Gordon Lightfoot than, say, “Sailing to Byzantium.” But Service makes his point, and makes it well. The third of the nine stanzas is a distillation of the entire poem: You come to get rich (damned good reason); You feel like an exile at first; You hate it like hell for a season, And then you are worse than the worst. It grips you like some kinds of sinning; It twists you from foe to a friend; It seems it’s been since the beginning; It seems it will be to the end. Service goes on to extol “[t]he freshness, the freedom, the farness,” “[t]he stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,” “snows that are older than history,” and the overall lure of the wondrous place. Although he finds the fortune he came for, and lives the high life for a spell, he soon realizes that it’s not enough. The champagne begins to taste treacly. The pleasures of the flesh begin to bore him. The gold does not fulfill him—a lesson Donald Trump, now in his eightieth year of life, has still not managed to learn; hence all the tacky gilt in the Oval Office these days. Money cannot nourish his soul, Service realizes. Only the spellbinding Yukon can do that: There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace. After his first successful gold-prospecting venture, Robert Service returned to the Yukon Territory, pursuing peace. Unlike Trump, he found what he was looking for. Friday’s “summit” was not the first time there has been awkwardness in Alaska between Russians and Americans. The actual transfer of 1867 did not come off with ballet-dancer precision. As Thomas Ahllund, a Finnish blacksmith who was on hand that day, would later recall: The wooden two-story mansion of the Russian governor stood on a high hill, and in front of it in the yard at the end of a tall spar flew the Russian flag with the double-headed eagle in the middle of it. Of course, this flag now had to give way to the flag of the United States, which is full of stripes and stars. On a predetermined day in the afternoon, a group of soldiers came from the American ships, led by one who carried the flag. Marching solemnly, but without accompaniment, they came to the governor's mansion, where the Russian troops were already lined up and waiting for the Americans. Now they started to pull the [Romanov] eagle down, but—whatever had gone into its head—it only came down a little bit, and then entangled its claws around the spar so that it could not be pulled down any further. A Russian soldier was therefore ordered to climb up the spar and disentangle it, but it seems that the eagle cast a spell on his hands, too—for he was not able to arrive at where the flag was, but instead slipped down without it. The next one to try was not able to do any better; only the third soldier was able to bring the unwilling eagle down to the ground. The sad spectacle of three Russian soldiers, probably drunk, bumbling up a flagpole, like something out of Mack Sennett, to salvage their reform-minded ruler’s tattered flag, is somehow less embarrassing than what the whole world saw two days ago. The day of the “summit,” I joked on social media that this wasn’t a peace negotiation, but rather a performance review. But Friday was far worse than that. What we witnessed was a surrender. ICYMI Our guest on Friday was Antidemocratic author David Daley, who discussed the futility of the gerrymandering wars and the urgency in winning the up-for-grabs seats in the House next November: PROGRAMMING NOTES I am traveling this week to OKC for work and then bringing my son back to college, so I will be off Tuesday, Friday, and next Sunday. I apologize in advance if I am slow to respond to any emails or comments. PREVAIL will resume on Tuesday, August 26th. I have two great podcast interviews in the hopper (and some more lined up), and in the works, a piece on Epstein, a follow-up on Melania, and the second part of the 1933 Germany series. So: lots of good stuff coming down the pike. Have a great week! Photo credit: Sara Loeffler. Near Anchorage, Alaska. PREVAIL by Greg Olear is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.