Politics

What Your Favorite Christmas Movies Say About Social Justice

Tuesday, 25 December 2018 14:30

Scott writes: "This year, aren't you hungry for more than just cozy? For you, the hungry, I offer this social justice nerd's tour of the good, the bad, and the ugly in Christmas cinema."

Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy star in the film 'Trading Places' (1983), directed by John Landis. (photo: YES! Magazine)

What Your Favorite Christmas Movies Say About Social Justice

By Joe Scott, YES! Magazine

25 December 18

Get your warm fuzzies with a side of righteousness.

hristmas movies, from It�s a Wonderful Life to Die Hard, mostly deliver the same clove-scented bromide: Sure, capitalism is destructive sometimes, but singular acts of charity spurred by the supernatural can save us! Maybe this message makes you feel cozy. But this year, aren�t you hungry for more than just cozy? For you, the hungry, I offer this social justice nerd�s tour of the good, the bad, and the ugly in Christmas cinema.

1. Trading Places: GOOD, BAD, and UGLY

This film is a firm 1980s rebuke to the demonization of Black culture. It gets ugly when Dan Aykroyd dons blackface and a Jamaican accent for some reason, but its historical take on racism is still good.

Aykroyd�s character, Louis Winthorpe III, belongs to the Founders Club (along with the film�s villains), founded at the birth of the nation, 1776. The walls are adorned with portraits of presidents. The membership: 100 percent White. The staff: 100 percent Black. Racism is the landscape of the movie. It�s not located in individual bigots, as in Hollywood�s other supposedly brave anti-racist flicks (see Crash, Detroit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), but rather in the founding of the country and in its institutions.

It�s a shame then that the resolution stays stuck in the system as Winthorpe and Eddie Murphy�s character only win by manipulating the stock exchange. So they join the system to beat the system, and then they perpetuate it. Using their winnings on a lavish vacation to a distant tropical beach, they take American wealth inequality to international waters. But this vacation is also a utopian vision�former servants, woman, man, White, and Black living together in paradise.

2. National Lampoon�s Christmas Vacation: GOOD

It�s the story of Clark Griswold, an �excellent choice to be named Food Additive Designer of the Year� for his �non-nutritive cereal varnish.� �The last true family man� just made the down payment on a pool he can�t afford without his expected Christmas bonus.

It�s clear that the film asks us to laugh at Clark�s idea of Christmas, not with it. And then there�s poor cousin Eddie. Clark loathes him, even though he�s literally handicapped by a brain injury. But after every joke at Eddie�s expense, Clark is shown to be the true fool. But Clark shows sympathy for Eddie�s children. Late one sleepless night, Eddie�s youngest asks Clark, �If Santa is real, how come we didn�t get squat last year? We didn�t do nothing wrong.� Clark tells her not to worry this year, because he knows for a fact that Santa is real. In reassuring her of the Santa myth (be good and you�ll get presents), Clark reassures himself of his adult capitalist myth (work hard, be good, and you�ll get your bonus).

But it is all a lie. His boss cancels all bonuses. Facing financial ruin, Clark is saved by none other than Eddie, who kidnaps the boss, and in the end he restores bonuses. It�s Eddie�s protest (not being good), sparked by familial love (not self-serving labor), that wins the day.

3. It�s a Wonderful Life: UGLY

The story of George Bailey deciding to live because an angel tells him he�s a hero is either a thought experiment on the butterfly effect or it�s just another Hollywood White Man Savior picture. Sure, it�s touching when the community bands together to save Bailey�s Building and Loan. (I cry. Every. Time.) But it also revises history, erasing the federal government�s outsize part in expanding housing after the Great Depression.

Writing for Naked Capitalism, professor of humanities Scott Ferguson paints the problem like this: �As thousands turn to crowdfunding platforms to shore up neoliberalism�s structural failures in everything from health care to the arts, It�s a Wonderful Life�s improbable fable of community-funded uplift stokes contemporary desires for digitally mediated miracles,� e.g., Facebook fundraising to cover a late mortgage payment. It�s workable on a personal level if you have friends with means, but it�s no fix for a broken housing system.

Ferguson recommends boycotting the movie. I recommend careful praise for its limited message about community banking. Community banking is, after all, good. Right?

4. Miracle on 34th Street (1994): BAD

Santa�real Santa�works at the department store. Of course, he didn�t mean to get the job; he was just minding his own business at a parade when he got discovered for a modeling gig, and one thing led to another.

At first, it seems like real Santa makes a bad fake Santa. When parents complain that he�s promising their kids expensive gifts (what did they expect?), he tells them where they can get a better deal. The store�s managers don�t approve until they realize that Santa�s altruism is good marketing. Somehow, in the Miracle universe, no one else has thought of this yet.

Later, after assaulting a man on the street, Santa gets dragged into court and forced to prove he�s the real Santa (how this clears him of assault, no idea). It�s a little disappointing that the prosecution doesn�t ask why poor kids tend to get fewer and lower-quality toys (�Santa, in your estimation, are poorer children less nice?�) The prosecution�s slam dunk case is routed by a one-dollar bill handed to the judge. The �reasoning� goes: The nation was founded on God, believing in God is like believing in Santa, and the judge definitely believes in the money printed with �In God We Trust� on the back, so he believes in Santa. Hooray?

5. Love Actually: BAD

There is power in the warm message of this pre-MeToo British rom-com: The world isn�t all bad. �Love, actually, is all around,� and you need only observe an airport arrivals gate to bear witness. However, they deliver this line right at the start, so you can stop there and skip three stories of boss men hooking up with their women employees. Bonus: You also get to skip the relentless workplace fat-shaming of a woman who is barely not-thin.

6. Bad Santa: BAD, THEN GOOD

At just 15 years old, this comedy has not aged well. A lot of the jokes are all constructed from a short list of 2003-approved slurs plus being mean to children.

Billy Bob Thornton�s revolting grinch character doesn�t have his first morally redeeming moment until halfway into the movie, and his backstory comes even later. If we hate him for being depressed and self-destructive, where�s our Christmas spirit?

The film is agnostic when it comes to cracking shopping mall safes on Christmas Eve. Knocking some accumulated wealth out of the system once a year, it turns out, provides enough to live comfortably, and if done well it doesn�t hurt anyone. And that�s how the movie gets us to like Thornton�s character. He�s good at what he does, which is nonviolently stealing lots of money from faceless corporations. He�s like a suicidally depressed Robin Hood.

7. The Polar Express: GOOD

Welcome to the mind of Tom Hanks. He voices Hero Boy, Hero Boy�s dad, the dadlike train conductor, the bad dadlike hobo, and, the daddy of all dads, Santa. This movie is the id of old liberal dads. Along a ride of nightmare logic that propels a series of nonsensical conflicts, we�re fed bits of cryptic wisdom meant to guide kiddos toward being good, fully formed adults. In addressing Christmas contradictions�poor kids are treated poorly by Santa, �doesn�t this holiday promote wasteful consumption?��we�re given the old liberal answer of annual charity. Inside the Leviathan of Christmas, the kiddos get lost in a tangle of deadly machinery built by a capitalist cult of CEO-worshipping elves (�Time is money,� they say). The film tries to make us feel good about this house of horror and its contradictions, but I just can�t. What�s good is the ending. Each kid gets a personal moral. To Hero Girl, who is Black, �Lead,� because you show some aptitude for leadership. To Know-It-All, a White kid, �Learn� because you might be tempted to use your confidence and disdain to shoot down the ideas of Hero Girl, but you really don�t know everything. And to Hero Boy, �Believe,� because letting someone else lead might be hard for a hero boy, but you gotta keep the faith.

8. Gremlins: THE BEST

At first, the villain of the movie seems to be a town scrooge, or maybe it�s the jingoist neighbor. Red herrings, both. This movie puts up an all-star villain team of the profit motive, colonialism, and technocrats. On a journey to Chinatown, a White American inventor exploits a generational culture divide (the old shopkeeper turns him away, but his grandson says they need the money) to steal a Chinese wonder, a cute creature known as the mogwai. At first, the inventor just wants a gift for his kid, but seeing how easily they multiply (just add water!), he tries to name the creature after himself (as if he�d discovered them) and he dreams of replacing the family dog (but �the Peltzer pet� isn�t nearly as endearing as �Gizmo�). His sweet, dopey dad vibe almost masks the dollar bill eyeballs. But one turns into five and five into a horde, sabotaging the city and hurling our toys at us with deadly force. It�s tempting to interpret the gremlins as a foreign invasion, but they are homegrown, spawned by our greed and our unwillingness to respect rules. So how do you stop a horde of capitalist monsters? Cast light on the nexus of consumption and colonialism, the shopping center (light literally kills gremlins).

In the end, the Chinese shopkeeper takes back his original mogwai and says America just isn�t ready. We may have survived this catastrophe, but we need a whole culture shift if we�re to prevent the next.

1 comment

FOCUS: How Much Trust Can Facebook Afford to Lose?

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6607">Evan Osnos, The New Yorker</a>

Tuesday, 25 December 2018 12:30

Osnos writes: "What is the price of trust? Or, to put the question another way, what is the cost of becoming known for doing things that don't match your words?"

Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images)

How Much Trust Can Facebook Afford to Lose?

By Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

25 December 18

hat is the price of trust? Or, to put the question another way, what is the cost of becoming known for doing things that don�t match your words?

To put a number on that, Tony Simons, a management professor at Cornell, took an unusually detailed look inside the hotel industry. In 1999, Simons and a fellow-researcher, Judi McLean Parks, interviewed employees at seventy-six Holiday Inn hotels in the United States and Canada. They surveyed more than seven thousand staff members, in English, Spanish, Chinese, Creole French, and Vietnamese�including five hundred illiterate employees, with whom they did verbal surveys. They asked workers to score, on a scale of one to five, statements such as �My manager practices what he preaches.� Those results allowed them to score each hotel on what Simons called �behavioral integrity.�

Then Simons and his team compared those results with the financial records of each Holiday Inn. �It turned out that trust had a huge impact on performance,� Simons told me this week. Hotels with higher behavioral integrity scores were substantially more profitable than those with lower scores: an advantage of an eighth of a point correlated to a 2.5 per cent advantage in revenues. Simons, who chronicled the hotel study and others in his 2008 book, �The Integrity Dividend,� told me, �This is the single most powerful performance driver ever. It�s more important than employee commitment and worker satisfaction.�

I called Simons on Wednesday, as Facebook, a company whose fortune rests, more than most, on maintaining its users� trust, encountered its latest round of difficulties. That morning, the attorney general for the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allowing Cambridge Analytica, the British political-consulting company with ties to President Trump, to gain access to the personal data of tens of millions of users without their permission. It was the first major step by American regulators to punish the company for the Cambridge Analytica case, and other suits, fines, and punishments are likely to follow.

For Facebook, it had already been a long week. On Monday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released two reports�one produced by New Knowledge, a private security company, and the other by Oxford�s Computational Propaganda Project�that offered the most extensive look yet at Russia�s efforts to divide Americans, suppress votes, and boost Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential election. The reports found that one of the most extensive campaigns was directed at discouraging African-Americans from voting for Hillary Clinton, by stoking distrust in her and in the political system. In a damaging detail, the New Knowledge report asserted that when Congress asked Facebook for information about that campaign, in October, the company �dissembled� in its responses. (The company was asked, �Does Facebook believe that any of the content created by the Russian Internet Research Agency was designed to discourage anyone from voting?� In its response, Facebook said, �We believe this is an assessment that can be made only by investigators with access to classified intelligence and information from all relevant companies and industries.�)

After that news broke, the N.A.A.C.P. called for a one-day boycott of Facebook. In a statement, Derrick Johnson, the president and chief executive officer of the N.A.A.C.P., said, �Facebook needs to acknowledge how it has undervalued people of color over the past two years.�

In Facebook�s telling, it grew so fast that it failed to protect its customers, but now that it is a behemoth, with a greater awareness of its responsibility, the company is doing all it can to mend those holes. Last spring, after Facebook was found to have allowed its users� private data to get into the hands of Cambridge Analytica, the Facebook chairman and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, visited Congress and vowed to restore control to ordinary users. �This is the most important principle for Facebook,� he said. �Every piece of content that you share on Facebook you own, and you have complete control over who sees it, and how you share it, and you can remove it at any time.� When Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, testified before Congress, in September, she said the company was now doing all that it could to prevent foreign governments from interfering in American elections: �We were too slow to spot this and too slow to act. That�s on us.�

The clarity of those declarations becomes a problem when Facebook�s actions tell another story. On Tuesday, an investigation by the Times revealed that Facebook gave other big tech companies �more intrusive access to users� personal data than it has disclosed.� For example, Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the power to read Facebook users� private messages. The goal was to let Facebook users share music and entertainment recommendations; there is no evidence that Spotify and Netflix were reading people�s mail. (Both companies said that they were unaware of the access levels that Facebook had granted them.)

But the case reflects a fundamental problem: Facebook was so determined to grow, and to cement the commercial partnerships that would help it grow, that it didn�t pause to build tools that could parcel out narrow slices of information. In other instances, it opened the spigot on private information and forgot to close it. As a result, it once again betrayed its users� confidence. On Wednesday, a former Facebook staffer who is familiar with those cases told me, �It was chaos. There was no set of principles that says this is how we do things and how we do not do things. They would forget to shut things down, literally for years.�

In a response to the Times story, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook�s director of developer platforms and programs, conceded that �we�ve needed tighter management� of data sharing but stood by the company�s claim that �none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people�s permission.� After two years of declining public confidence, that�s an astonishingly obtuse thing to say. Users did have to check a box to integrate Facebook and Spotify. But does Facebook really believe that users understood that it would give Spotify the right to read private messages? On Twitter, Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote, �Opening someone else�s mail is a federal crime. Why is @Facebook allowed to let Netflix and Spotify open your private messages? Mark Zuckerberg might think of this as just �data,� but this is people�s private lives. We need a law to protect Americans� sensitive information.�

Which brings us back to Holiday Inn and the cost of losing trust. How many violations does it take for people to think twice before they decide to do business with someone? Simons told me, �Trust is the willingness to accept vulnerability. In a personal relationship, it is the willingness to self-disclose and be honest. For Facebook, it is the very willingness of the informed to participate in their platform.�

The trust calculus can be subtle, but, over time, it shapes behavior. In September, the Pew Research Center reported that forty-two per cent of Americans who use the Web site said that they had at some point taken a break of at least several weeks from Facebook; twenty-six per cent said that they had deleted it from their phones. Since then, Facebook has suffered the largest data breach in its history, which affected an estimated fifty million users. Last month, the Times revealed that Facebook asked a political opposition-research firm to investigate and undercut its critics, in particular George Soros, a frequent target of anti-Semitic attacks.

The company�s reach remains incomparably vast, with at least 2.2 billion users around the world, and most of its recent growth has been in foreign countries, where people aren�t following every tidbit of scandal in the D.C. courts or the Times. But the damage to its reputation among influential users is unmistakable. This week, Walter Mossberg, a pioneering tech journalist, announced that he was giving up Facebook because, as he wrote (on Facebook), �my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I�m no longer comfortable here.� On Tuesday, it was Cher�s turn, in all caps on her favored platform, Twitter: �GETTING RID OF FACEBOOK ACCOUNT I DIDNT KNOW I HAD.�

�Trust is slow to build and quick to be broken,� Simons told me. �A long-built reputation for honesty can be broken by a single lie, and a single betrayal can dash decades� worth of trust. It will take a lot for Facebook to regain broken trust.�

7 comments

FOCUS: Here Are the Gifts Trump Is Giving His Billionaire Buddies on Christmas

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44519">Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders' Facebook Page</a>

Tuesday, 25 December 2018 11:30

Sanders writes: "It is irresponsible to spend billions to fulfill a campaign pledge borne of the president's divisive, xenophobic political posturing."

Bernie Sanders. (photo: Jay Laprete/AFP/Getty Images)

Here Are the Gifts Trump Is Giving His Billionaire Buddies on Christmas

By Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders' Facebook Page

25 December 18

ere is what Donald Trump is doing for the American people on Christmas:

Give a $3.7 billion tax break to Wells Fargo - a bank that is closing 800 branches.

Take away paychecks of some 800,000 workers by shutting the government.

Give $1.4 billion tax break to the Koch brothers.

Take away $1.40 meals from 755,000 hungry, unemployed Americans.

Give Pfizer a $26.5 billion tax cut after it increased the price of life saving drugs.

Take away healthcare from 13 million Americans by gutting Obamacare.

Give Walmart a $2.2 billion tax break after it laid off thousands of workers.

Take away $1.1 billion a year in overtime pay from 12.5 million workers.

Our job: End the 40-year war on the working class and the poor and create an economy that works for all of us, not just those on top.

7 comments

Keep Your Eyes on the Narcissist: Donald Trump's Latest Antics Are Driven by Fear of Robert Mueller

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47190">James Risen, The Intercept</a>

Tuesday, 25 December 2018 09:34

Risen writes: "Trump is a psychopathic criminal who feels cornered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, so he is lashing out in every direction."

Journalist James Risen. (photo: The Intercept)

Keep Your Eyes on the Narcissist: Donald Trump's Latest Antics Are Driven by Fear of Robert Mueller

By James Risen, The Intercept

25 December 18

malicious loner paralyzed one of the world�s great cities this week. Meanwhile, a drone operator shut down a major international airport.

Donald Trump and the drone enthusiast who halted flights out of London�s Gatwick Airport apparently have a lot in common. Both have been willing to wreak havoc with a callous disregard for the public.

The motivation behind Trump�s pre-holiday assault on Washington � sowing chaos, breaking promises, shutting down the federal government, changing his policies from one minute to the next, forcing out one top official after another, spooking the stock market � is easily explained. Trump is a psychopathic criminal who feels cornered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, so he is lashing out in every direction.

After two years in office, at least one thing about Trump has become predictable: He reacts violently whenever Mueller appears to be making progress in his investigation. When he hears Mueller�s footsteps, Trump has one go-to move that he cynically uses time and again: He returns to the issues and slogans that energize his base, no matter what the cost. He embraces his base because he believes it will provide him political protection from the fearful Mueller.

Trump has plenty of reason to worry about Mueller these days. The signs are everywhere that Mueller�s investigation is intensifying and closing in on Trump and the crooks around him. It is even possible that Mueller may soon complete his work and issue a final report � or even a criminal indictment of Trump. What�s worse, from Trump�s point of view, is that in January the Democrats will take over the House of Representatives from his Republican enablers, making it far more difficult for him to get rid of Mueller. In fact, the House Intelligence Committee, which has been a laughingstock under Republican rule, will soon have a Democratic chair with subpoena power to conduct an aggressive investigation of Trump, perhaps picking up where Mueller leaves off.

So it is not really surprising that Trump is throwing a tantrum.

In fact, there�s been so much news about the Mueller investigation and related inquiries recently that it has been difficult to keep up.

Just last Tuesday, Michael Flynn, Trump�s former national security adviser who made his name with the Trump crowd by leading chants of �lock her up� about Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Republican National Convention, was dressed down by a federal judge who harshly mused about whether Flynn had sold out his country and could be charged with treason. Flynn was in front of the judge to be sentenced for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition after the 2016 election, but his sentencing was delayed to give him an opportunity to cooperate more fully with Mueller�s office in order to win a more lenient sentence.

Michael Cohen, Trump�s former personal lawyer, has repeatedly been in the headlines in recent weeks, and is now emerging as one of Trump�s biggest potential legal problems. In November, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a proposed Trump project in Moscow. Cohen had told Congress in 2017 that the deal had been abandoned by January 2016, but in fact the project was still under consideration as late as June 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign, when Trump was about to become the Republican nominee. In a separate case in New York in December, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for a series of criminal acts, including violating campaign finance laws by making payments to two women to keep their past affairs with Trump from becoming public during the presidential campaign. Cohen says that Trump authorized the payments.

Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, meanwhile, faced Mueller�s wrath in late November, when the special counsel accused Manafort of violating his plea agreement by lying rather than cooperating fully.

In early December, Maria Butina, a young Russian gun rights activist, pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent by infiltrating the conservative movement in the U.S. on Russia�s behalf and has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Butina previously worked with Alexander Torshin, a powerful Russian politician with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican operative and Butina�s boyfriend, may also be charged, the Daily Beast reported in December. Though not part of the Mueller probe, Butina�s prosecution sheds light on a related web of Russian influence operations aimed at promoting rightwing ideas championed by Trump and his allies.

In December, the parent company of the National Enquirer admitted that it had paid a woman to suppress the story of an affair with Donald Trump during the campaign and reached a deal to cooperate with federal prosecutors in order to avoid prosecution. David Pecker, the chief executive of the magazine�s parent company AMI, has reportedly been granted immunity in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors.

Meanwhile, the House Intelligence Committee agreed to turn over to Mueller the transcripts of testimony by longtime Trump ally Roger Stone. That suggests that Mueller, who has been pursuing links between Stone and WikiLeaks during the campaign, may be considering charging Stone with lying to Congress.

To top it off, there were reports in recent days that an unidentified foreign company has been fighting a grand jury subpoena issued in connection with Mueller�s investigation. Although it�s not clear what role the company might play in Mueller�s probe, a federal appeals court ruled this week that the firm must cooperate with the grand jury, according to press reports.

With so many of his cronies facing serious legal trouble and ready to cooperate with Mueller, it�s no wonder that a weak and frightened Trump has started insulting them in public. He called Cohen a �rat� for being willing to talk.

Bottom line: Anyone who thinks that Trump�s frenzied troop pullouts and government closure this week have anything to do with substantive policy issues hasn�t been paying attention for the last two years. Anyone who thinks that Trump actually cares about immigration, border security, the well-being of American troops, or U.S. involvement in Syria or Afghanistan will be deeply disappointed when he suddenly reverses himself again a few days or weeks from now, if and when he believes such a reversal will help him survive Robert Mueller.

Never forget that everything Trump does is about saving his own skin.

17 comments

This Is Not What Vladimir Putin Wanted for Christmas

Tuesday, 25 December 2018 09:33

Kounalakis writes: "Vladimir Putin won't find many great presents under the Christmas tree this year."

Vladimir Putin. (photo: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

This Is Not What Vladimir Putin Wanted for Christmas

By Markos Kounalakis, McClatchy DC

25 December 18

ladimir Putin won�t find many great presents under the Christmas tree this year.

Orthodox Christian religious leaders worldwide are weakening an important institution that gave him outsize power and legitimacy.

The Russian Orthodox Church is being broken up, and an independent Ukraine Orthodox Church will be established. The Ukrainian flock soon will be led not by the Moscow-based church and Patriarchate, but rather by its own independent church and youthful leadership. Ukraine and its political class are suddenly freed from an influential Russian institution that has been fiercely loyal to Putin.

This was not on Putin�s Christmas list. Instead, the news is like a lump of coal in his stocking.

Russia�s wider designs on � and power over � Ukraine have included a wide hybrid war from the Donbass to the recent naval blockade in the Black Sea. Moscow has its fingerprints on the shoot-down of the Malaysian MH-17 passenger plane over Ukrainian territory and its paw prints on an annexed Crimea. Every step of the way, Putin has found legitimacy in his actions and the nation�s military activity through reignited Russian nationalism and the silent acquiescence of Moscow�s spiritual leadership and clergy.

Religion did not always play a central role in Russia. Not long ago, when Communism ruled the Soviet Union�s people and territories, an officially encouraged atheism led to secularized churches and iconoclastic behavior. Marxist ideology did not support both a Communist system and religious beliefs. But people continued to worship, both privately and surreptitiously. Putin himself admitted to being a closeted Christian during those dark days.

By the end of the Soviet era, however, when Mikhail Gorbachev was making overtures to the West and meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome during a state visit. Gorbachev saw religion as a means to bridge a godless Soviet Union to a secularized West, that nevertheless respected religion and religious freedom. As a Newsweek reporter, I traveled to Sicily with Raisa Gorbachev and Russian Patriarch Alexey II for a symbolically important trip that highlighted a mutually beneficial Russian church-state relationship.

That relationship grew and strengthened after the Soviet Union collapsed � a relationship I observed while a Moscow correspondent living next door to Alexey II�s Arbat residence. Putin now openly embraces the church, its power, and, seemingly, his faith.

For a while, it seemed that the Muscovite church was unstoppably ascendant. Tax-free revenues, powerful patrons and Putin-primed subsidies made it a rich realm. In a post-Soviet Russia, the enriched Moscow Patriarchate imagined a new, unique role and envisioned the glory and opportunity to take the spiritual crown from an Eastern Orthodox church, whose Ecumenical Patriarch lives and works in an increasingly inhospitable Turkey. Moscow�s religious hierarchs and political leaders believed that Russia�s time had come to fulfill its historic destiny: Moscow as the �Third Rome.�

The Third Rome doctrine asserts that Moscow picks up the Christian mantle following the fall of Rome and after Constantinople (known as �New Rome�) succumbed to Islam�s Ottoman Empire. The updated version of the doctrine continues to drive Moscow�s belief that its time for ascendance is now.

Except it�s not.

Constantinople still holds sway. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople � today it�s Istanbul, not Constantinople in modern day Turkey � decided affirmatively that Ukraine needed to be ecclesiastically free and independent. Politically, this move weakens Moscow�s claims, but it also shores up the Ukrainian leader�s fortunes. In his annual marathon press conference this week, Putin said he considers the decision to split Eastern Orthodoxy as gross political interference directed by Washington and the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarchate. Putin further warned that the breakup could lead to �difficult, even bloody� conflict over things like church property ownership.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, whose popularity was recently sagging, has hitched his wagon to the fast-moving Kiev church�s new status. If Putin, Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church today see themselves as inseparable and unitary, then Poroshenko, too, wants to tie himself tightly to an increasingly popular Ukrainian Orthodox Church with loyalties to Kiev, not Moscow, able to name its own leader and not under the authority of an outside patriarch.

Russia celebrates the winter�s big religious holiday not on Dec. 25, but on the 12th day that follows and concludes with the Jan. 6 Epiphany. That soon-arriving day will mark the end of the Russian Orthodox Church�s monopoly over the Slavic-speaking Christian world and end Russia�s dominance over Ukraine�s believers. The breakup of the church is the greatest Christian schism in a millennium. Eastern Orthodoxy now becomes a church in the lurch.

Putin recognizes this holiday-season development both as a strategic threat and a political blow. Despite the bad news, Putin may have just received a nice little Christmas gift from President Trump�s abrupt decision to call for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Assad�s Syria, where Russia maintains troops and keeps a naval base. This, perhaps, unexpected gift gives Putin increasing influence and access to the warm waters and oil-rich fields of the biblical Middle East.

Merry Christmas, after all, Vlad.

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