13nSecond Lieutenant Spenser Rapone made an Internet splash
flashing a Che T-shirt under his West Point cadet’s uniform, and
the slogan COMMUNISMWILLWINon the lining of his cap.
Copying The Nation, if it needs a military-affairs correspondent.nOctober 7 is Vladimir Putin’s birthday, and a day that means
a lot to the Kremlin. It also means a lot to the Russian opposi-
tion. Anti-Putin rallies were planned for October 7 all over the
country. In advance, the Kremlin made sure to lock up the most
popular opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. They also arrested
and brutalized members of Open Russia, the leading democracy
group. Obviously, Putin’s government is scared. They know
their own illegitimacy. In the city of Neftekamsk, a 17-year-old
student named Almaz Imamov got into trouble for joining a
pro-Navalny group online. He asked, in his innocence, “What
about the constitution?” (This document guarantees Russian
citizens all sorts of rights.) He bad-mouthed the ruling party—
and was duly dressed down by a school administrator, whom he
recorded. “They used to shoot people for that!” said the admin-
istrator. “Stood them right up and shot them, you understand?
Nothing changes, except now they don’t shoot you.” Not
always, that is.nKim Philby dead is still useful to his Russian masters.
Government-sponsored and Putin-friendly, the Russian His tor i -
cal Society has an exhibition in Moscow in his honor. After some
30 years in which he’d risen to the top of British intelligence, he
was—more by luck than by detection—revealed as a KGB agent.
Defecting, he lived in Moscow from 1963 to his death in 1988,
officially a high-ranking KGB pensioner but in fact mistrusted
for fear he might be a triple agent, loyal after all to Britain. The
exhibition shows some of the more than 900 documents and
diplomatic cables he passed on, duly stamped “Top Secret. Not
to be taken out of the office.” In an address to the KGB he had
written, “May we all live to see the red flag flying on Buck ing -
ham Palace and the White House.” Not a hope, which may be the
reason for this display of Soviet lore from the past.nIn Saudi Arabia, the practice of religious law, that is to say
sharia, underpins rights that men have but women do not. For
instance, women must obey a dress code and under the terms
of “guardianship” may not be in the company of a man unless
he is a relation. A handful of determined Saudi women have
long campaigned for their rights and consequently been
assaulted in the street by special religious police or detained.
Refusal to let women drive a car meant that mothers had to
make expensive and difficult arrangements for the school run.
The elderly king appointed his 32-year-old son, crown prince
Muhammad bin Salman, to govern, and he has decreed that
from July next year women may at last drive. Those in the
know have long thought that the choice facing the country is
reform or revolution, and the crown prince might be the man
with a workable solution.nIn Egypt, the government is cracking down on homosexuals,
or suspected homosexuals. These men are being subjected to tor-
ture in the form of “anal examination,” among other things. This
sort of thing has been going on from time immemorial, particu-
larly in the Middle East: The goons get their kicks while admin-
istering “moral” “justice.”nFor a change, there is some encouraging news from higher
education. Evergreen State College, in Washington State, was
last heard from this spring, when activists declared a “day of
absence” on which white people were warned to stay away from
campus. When a white professor announced his intention to
come to his office anyway, mobs of demonstrators repeatedly
harassed and intimidated him, by email and in person; other agi-
tators disrupted faculty meetings, occupied buildings, and issued
the usual manifestos and lists of grievances. Evergreen State has
a long history of radicalism, with which the college’s administra-
tion is normally sympathetic, but in this case it came down on the
side of freedom and order, imposing sanctions ranging from
warnings to probation to community service to suspension on
some 80 students. A mandatory remedial course on free speech
would also seem to be in order.nEarlier this year, State Street Corporation, a financial-services
firm, caused a sensation. It did so by placing a statue called
“Fearless Girl” across from the iconic charging bull on Wall
Street. The girl became a symbol of feminism worldwide. It
transpires that State Street has agreed to pay out $5 million—to
settle allegations that it underpaid female and black employees.
Bad news for the company: Fearless Girl grew up to be a lawyer.n“Public servant” is an abused term, often only a euphemism
for “politician,” so what do we call a man who made it his career
to serve the public? As a Seattle councilman, John Ripin Miller
founded a community-garden program and helped preserve Pike
Place Market. After stints in state government in Washington, he
ran for Congress as a Republican in 1984, won, and served
through 1992. There he stood up for human rights in South
Africa, China, and the Soviet Union and its satellites. He helped
free Catholic priests and nuns from prison camps in Lithuania
before it finally freed itself of Soviet domination in 1990–91. In
2002–06, as director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor
and Combat Trafficking in Persons, he worked, and fought, with
foreign governments to relieve the plight of “sex workers” in
Europe as well as in the developing world. He did some good
but was said to be frustrated by the scale of the abomination. In
retirement he wrote a novel about George Washington, whom
he allows to be a man of character and integrity, qualities that
he knewfirsthand. Dead at 79. R.I.P.nTom Petty and the Heartbreakers
formed in Gainesville, Fla., in the
1970s, moved to Los Angeles, and
became one of the most successful
musical acts of their time. As the
band’s shaggy-haired frontman and
primary composer, Petty wrote a
series of catchy and colloquial
songs that became mainstays in the
rock-’n’-roll songbook: “American
Girl,” “Refugee,” “The Waiting,”
and more. His most ambitious
effort, the 1985 album Southern
Accents, turned Winslow Homer’s
painting The Veteran in a New
Fieldinto cover art and tried to use
DAVIDWOLFF homespun lyrics to make a grand- PATRICK
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