Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Lately I’ve been slogging my way through Tito’s Secret Empire: How the Maharaja of the Balkans Fooled the World by William Klinger and Denis Kulji š , recently published by Oxford University Press. The profusion of South Slavic surnames has made the book a bit bewildering, but one name I wasn’t expecting to see was that of actor Christopher Lee, who reinvigorated the role of Count Dracula in a long-running franchise for Britain’s Hammer Films and would go on to appear in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series. Tito’s Secret Empire offers this account: The importance of [the Bosnian city] Drvar cannot be overestimated. […] Also, this redoubt of Tito’s has symbolic importance as the center of resistance in Hitler’s Fortress Europe. No wonder Churchill also sends to Drvar a strong British political mission – the people who will provide reliable information about the character of this protagonist who came out of nowhere and set up an army that has great strategic potential,...

  The number of relatives I can count on seeing on special occasions has dwindled as family members have died off or drifted apart, and my principal connection now is a rustic libtard Boomer aunt who lives with her husband, a dog, and sixteen cats on an unmarked road in a nowhere-town several hours from where I live. I recently visited her home for the first time – family gatherings always having taken place at my late grandmother’s house until now – and it was a nightmare. I expected the home to be messy and figured it would have an odor, but I was unprepared for what awaited me. The cat-stench hit first, so acrid I could feel my body being polluted just by breathing the air. Then there were the floors, so thoroughly smutty and encrusted with filth and hair that there was no decent place to walk. Flies were in every room, and cats had the prancing run of the house, putting their asses on everything. I could see hair on my backpack almost as soon as I set it down on the “clean” s...