I haven’t known what to say about the recent happenings in Georgia. Today our friend John summed things up pretty well:

Many folks aflutter about the goings-on in Tbilisi: protesters tear-gassed on Rustaveli Ave.; Imedi, one of Georgia’s most popular TV stations, stormed by machine-gun commandos and taken abruptly off the air; a blanket 15-day “state of emergency” covering the entire country. Naturally, I’m interested too…as I would be in dramatic developments from anyplace I was intimately familiar with and had personal connections. Nevertheless, I’m much struck by how distant and (dare I say) insignificant it seems from where I sit now. Page 5 news…laughably inconsequential when juxtaposed with the (superficially similar) Pakistani crisis, where the stakes are so very, very much higher.

It’s easy to imagine, though, how if I were still in Sakartvelo it would loom as an earth-shattering event, occupying the whole of my attention. Distance may “lend enchantment”—and my occasional nostalgia for all things ქართული still surprises me—but it also lends perspective. Georgia has fewer than 5 million people, half the population of Beijing proper, and less than a third that of Greater Beijing. Despite its tiny size and miniscule economy, Georgia does have some small strategic importance, but not nearly as much as it likes to imagine, and could fall off the map entirely without most of the world raising an eyebrow. With this in mind, despite my connection to the place, I read of the recent events there with a disconcerting detachment…as though hearing of the emotional collapse of a person I used to know well, but who had long since drifted out of touch.

Still, vindication for my ex-host-mother in Adjara, who, eyes flasing, never let an opportunity pass for cursing Saakashvili and accusing him of being a tinpot tyrant. For my part, I genuinely thought Misha had better judgment than that: it would seem that if he had any lectures in “crisis-management” during his years at Columbia he must have played hooky. How Vladimir Vladimirovich must be chuckling over a nice frothy mug of Baltica 9! Whatever the outcome of Saakashvili’s clumsy crackdown, Putin has gained invaluable propaganda with which he will doubtless ensure “демократы” (democrats) remains a dirty word in Russian for many years to come.