Ashamed to be an American

I sent an email the other day to the Hotel Leopolis ("Lion Town") in Lviv, western Ukraine, formerly Lwow in eastern Poland where my one-time girlfriend was born, a connection I celebrated in Poland's Daughter. I'd long wanted to visit Basia's hometown, and to knock on the door of 99 Chuprynka Street where she spent the first five years of her life. (It was then called Potocki Street, celebrating a Polish count. When the Germans took it over in the summer of 1941, they named it Siegfriedstrasse, and when Stalin took it back in 1944, he swapped out Siegfried for a Ukrainian nationalist and added it to the Soviet Union.) I booked a visit from March 26 to April 3.

But how could an American show his face in Ukraine, now that Trump and Vance betrayed the country and set out to make Putin its master? It's as if Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 had thrown in his lot with Hitler and paraded Winston Churchill through "our cherished Oval Office" to be scolded by his vice-presidential attack dog, "Cactus Jack" Garner. (And in fact, FDR came close to something similar in the Yalta Conference of 1945, when he sidelined Churchill in order to win favor with Stalin. Yalta, by no coincidence, is in Crimea, where Putin began to dismember Ukraine eleven years ago.)

So I canceled. Vladimir Putin with his rattesnake eyes -- now America's best buddy! It's sickening.