You Don't Want to Know Who's the Real Gas Station Attendant with a Nuclear Bomb

But, as is so often the case, the answer is hiding in plain sight.

Evidently the most recent invocation of Vladimir Putin/Russia itself as a gas station with nukes was enough to trigger — in me at least — an acid-like flashback to my experience with another radioactively current thing: the college essay.

For my — successful! — college application essay, I wrote, maybe not to your surprise, about the apocalypse. Only the real ones, however, might recall that, more specifically, I wrote it about Stephen King’s sprawling and surprisingly allegorical apocalyptic novel The Stand.

BORN IN A CROSSFIRE HURRICANE

Of course, it’s very easy to understand how, since the Cold War, Americans have largely followed along with leaders from both major parties in thinking and talking about Russia in richly pejorative terms. It’s not too difficult either to track how and why said leaders have converged over the decades on a sort of rhetorical and symbolic boilerplate, one that seems to solve the puzzle of how to portray the country and its head of state as both pathetically minor league and majorly threatening to our interests, our values, our identity, and our existence.

In fact it was Moscow’s occupation of Crimea in Spring of 2014 that triggered the framing. Days after the March operation, Barack Obama belittled Russia as “a regional power” evincing “weakness not strength.” Later that month, John McCain called the country “a gas station masquerading as a country,” which would soon morph into “a gas station with nuclear weapons.” The template was set: here was a loser with the resources to destroy us all.

One may want a refreshed recollection on what triggered the ordeal in the first place. From a 2015 report:

Putin recounts an all-night meeting with security services chiefs to discuss how to extricate deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled a pro-Western street revolt in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

"We ended at about seven in the morning," Putin says. "When we were parting, I said to my colleagues: we must start working on returning Crimea to Russia."

Four days after that February 2014 meeting, unidentified soldiers took over the local parliament in Crimea and deputies hurriedly voted in a new government. The Ukrainian province was then formally annexed by Moscow on March 18, triggering international condemnation.

While conversation about the ultimate causes of the Euromaidan uprising will doubtless continue, we can no doubt agree at least that the precipitating event that began the gas-station-with-nukes meme was actually not about gasoline or nuclear weapons, which makes the choice of epithet perhaps more interesting, and paradoxically more sticky, than it might otherwise be.

What else is it masking?