Timothy Snyder, Thinking About (Substack) ; The War Trump Chooses: That wasn't Trump against Zelens'kyi. It was Americans against reason
"Even the press mockery of Zelens'kyi's clothing, perhaps the depths of yesterday's grotesquerie, reveals a similar disconnect from what is actually happening in the world. The implicit notion is that the people who wear suits and ties are the real heroes, because heroism consists, somehow, in always knowing how to adapt to the larger power structure and to blend it. But in history there do arrive moments when unexpected things happen and behaviors, including symbolic ones, must be adjusted. Zelens'kyi decided three years ago not to wear suits not, as was insultingly suggested yesterday, because he does not own one; and not, as was ridiculously suggested, because he does not understand protocol. Three years ago he decided that he would dress as appropriate to register solidarity with a people at war, his own people at war. This is, frankly, something that Americans should already know, rather than an appropriate subject for a question at the White House, let alone a mocking one. But it is the mockery itself that reveals an American illogic, or worse. Some Americans want to think that the most important thing is conformity, that sneering at human difference shows our own courage. Once we knew better. When Ben Franklin went to the French to ask for support during the Revolutionary War, he wore a coonskin cap, which was not comme il fallait. When Winston Churchill visited the White House during the Second World War, he wore a wartime outfit that not unlike the one that Zelens'kyi wore yesterday."
