Many Happy Returns

 "I want the whole man!"--Ian McKellan

I would tell you that I have been stalled for many days on a Substack piece about the McCormack Oz race which I would like to finish, with hopefully some relevant insight, before the November election results are tallied, with a Shapiro victory most likely assured as Wolf’s heir apparent, but this is only a partial truth, while I reflect on Patrick McGoohan’s Number 6 caught in a rubber room, an analog rubber room, for making a disruptive choice which the MI6 of nearly 60 years ago didn’t like. McGoohan didn’t create The Prisoner as a critique of the British welfare state, but the boomerang nature of The Village is a great deal like being a rat in a maze of the Commonwealth’s static, and blisteringly deadly Waiver services. Like Enka Kohat's Shubert of 21 years ago, the mind attempts to rally around the cauterized despair burbling about like raspberry jam, knowing it’s doomed, resisting electro shocks, brainwashing, various ruses designed to make the agent believe he can outwit the closed circuit cameras, and those malignant capture balloons, no realism here in this 17 episode carnivalesque farce, but The Prisoner is violent, paranoid, anticipating Guantanamo Bay despite its cartoonish exaggeration. The series withstands age even with the knowledge that the Soviet Union is dead, in definitive terms. While I am surprised at the quick success of Zelenskyy’s counteroffensive, any student of modern Russia knew Putin was in trouble when Shoigu couldn’t bring about Kyiv’s collapse. However long it may be until Putin is deposed, or not, this sinking writer doesn’t think Ukraine is entirely free from the threat of the Russian Bear, but the nail in Stalin’s coffin has been sealed, We can breathe a small sigh of relief.