A Picture Truly Worth A Thousand Words
In a brilliant response to the infamous meeting in Miami in which Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner attempted to sell their country and all their allies to the Kremlin in exchange for some financial kickbacks for themselves and their immediate supervisor, i.e., Vladimir Putin’s American branch plant manager, Donald Trump, Ukraine has sent its own team of negotiators to the same city to meet with the same grifters, along with alleged secretary of state Marco Rubio, to make some suggestions of their own. One photo from the meeting, published by RBC Ukraine, tells the whole story of these so-called “peace talks” in colors almost as amusing as they are shameful. Please click this link to view the photograph from the original RBC Ukraine story.
In the image we see a silk-tied Steve Witkoff in the foreground, shoulders slumped, eyes down, playing with his fingers under the desk, as two mature, upright, firm-gazing Ukrainians stare directly, challengingly, at his cowardly face, while another, seated directly across from him, sits with arms folded, not only refusing to look at Witkoff but visibly dismissing the words of Marco Rubio, who is speaking at this moment. Rubio looks flabby, meek, and fey, like a little boy trying to act like nothing is wrong while knowing that he is viewed (correctly) by everyone on the other side of the table, not to mention everyone in the entire world, as an impotent wee man. In the background, Jared Kushner sits, suitably irrelevant, nepotism incarnate, a skinny little tagalong among broad-shouldered, mature, serious men.
All three of the Americans look trapped, weak, beyond hope of saving face and rather hoping this uncomfortable charade will be over soon so they can go back to calculating their prospective rubles without having to run such gauntlets of shame as this one: sitting, before the eyes of the world, face to face with a row of men who are dealing with real world difficulties and national hardships the way proud and dignified adults would do, a living demonstration of virtues that all three on the American side of the table have, in their petty greed and bootlicking power lust, long since forfeited any hopes of possessing.
In short, in this one wonderful photograph — god, what photographer wouldn’t wish he had taken that photo? — we are looking at something more than a conflict of positions. We are looking at a contrast of species. Leeches versus men. Bloodsuckers versus people willing to shed their blood for a righteous cause. Profiteers without a shred of human decency versus the brave faces of intransigent will.
As ugly as are the events underlying this photograph, and as humiliating as are the treacherous Putin-serving of Witkoff, the mewling self-seeking of Rubio, and the cold-hearted business-as-usual machinations of Kushner, there is nevertheless cause for something close to real rejoicing in this one image of a meeting so obviously undesired by the Trump administration. It offers a revelation as brilliantly satisfying as Milton’s reduction of Satan to a worm in the dust at the end of Paradise Lost. Souls are exposed in this image. Souls of individuals, and souls of nations. Two nations, responding in opposite ways to the same historical realities and thereby delineating their respective national characters as they now stand — one nation ennobled and strengthened by an external threat of annihilation, the other mired in the ignobility of spiritual and practical self-annihilation.
I hope this photograph survives a thousand years as a lesson to future civilizations, if there should happen to be any. In any case, it is sure to survive longer than The United States of America, which has already all but ceased to exist as anything more than a fancy name and a piece of fool’s-gold-decorated real estate occupying the dirt where modernity’s best chance to vindicate itself once resided, but has since chosen to fulfill Nikita Khrushchev’s empty threat voluntarily, namely to bury itself.
