Where's Putin?

I Thought I Knew

So Putin has not been overthrown after all? Potential usurper Yevgeny Prigozhin — former wiener-peddler turned oligarch and commander of a private army of ferocious thugs — has fled to Belarus and Putin is secure in his dacha?

Damn. If Putin had been the one to flee, I could have told his pursuers where to look.

Find the nearest swamp, I would have told them, and look for someone struggling to stay underwater while breathing, splutteringly, through a hollow reed.

As longtime readers of this column will recall, Putin wrote in a memoir that his father once recounted how he, the father, had escaped from German soldiers and dogs during World War II:

"My father jumped into a swamp over his head and breathed through a hollow reed until the dogs had passed by."

This, we know, is the bunk. Works only in old movies. How do we know this? It was proven by Charles Portis in his brief memoir, "A Combination of Jacksons" (most recently reprinted in The Library of America's Portis: Collected Works). As a boy in Arkansas pretending to be pursued by Nazi soldiers and Japanese saboteurs, Portis made every possible due-diligence effort to enact the hollow-reed evasion. And here's what he found:

            (a.) that reeds "tended to collase, like wet paper drinking straws, with the first sharp intake of breath."

            (b.) that a bamboo tube could be breathed through, if you had time to ream it out with a rattail file, but it wouldn't fool anybody: "standing stark upright in the shallows of Smackover Creek, it looked just like a breathing tube."

            (c.) "When I was underwater, clutching a tree root, lying more or less supine, and took a deep draft of air through my mouth tube, an equal volume of water would come rushing in through my nose, with a strangling effect."

            (d.) "Couldn't I simply have pinched my nostrils shut with thumb and finger? Yes, nothing easier, except that both hands were already occupied, with the tube and the root. And as I lay there struggling to breathe and to hold my upper body down, then my telltale feet would rise. Feet unfettered float, for all their bones, and when toes break the surface and bob about, they will catch the eye of the dullest observer."

            So I was just about to send out a bulletin:

            You want Putin? Go to the swamp. Look for floating feet.

            But Prigozhin let me down. Putin never even had to get wet.

            And I didn't get the International Consultancy in Strategic Thinking I have long been angling for.

            Everything seemed possible when I was a boy. Including, to be sure, the hollow-reed maneuver.

            I'll say this for myself: unlike Putin's papa, I never sold my children any bunk.

And Here's Another in a Long Line

Of Limericks About Deplorable Men

That resolute bachelor, Brad,

Who dismissed fatherhood as "a fad,"

            Now is alone,

            Except for his phone;

And no longer can pass for a lad.