Marina Morlok is a Russian woman in her early thirties who can talk a “blue streak” in Russian. That is no surprise. She is Russian after all. She just opens up her life to the entire Internet, and, as long as her viewers are as fluent in Russian as she is, they can learn about what she eats, what she wears, her makeup, her hobbies and artistic endeavours. We all get to watch her cats, her enigmatic hairless cats, jump about the apartment, and enter and exit the camera frame.

She is now my friend, not really. I merely lurk around the periphery of her life, partitioned by language.

You, Marina, and I are the new peasants in this Mega Domain, hopeful that Soros, Buffett, the Russian Oligarchs, and who knows who else won’t be able to acquire everything, but leave us enough to live on. We’ve been lucky so far.

I fear, sometimes, that there are virtual Courts, the modern version of Versailles, Vienna, Constantinople. They are based on news feeds, the covers of supermarket tabloids, business journals and broadcasts. The news reporters are the news makers. Here are the Murdoch children, There is a television journalist married to a powerful central banker. Here the rich play their games, plot their intrigues, seduce their next lovers. Maybe that next lover that a would-be tyrant takes will be the next Evita for him or her. And our drab lives will find colour in their travel, travails, sport, and dalliances. And somebody will write a musical intended for even more comparing and longing and admiration and envy

If we are smart, we will let Marina Morlok entertain us, rather than the Kardashians or Kennedys. Or whoever else can snag a reporter’s attention and pay a public relations firm enough money.

Now Marina is eating tomatoes, cucumbers, yogurt, and something else. She chatters on. And we love her. She opens the yogurt cup, licks the yogurt off the top, as we all do when we think no one is looking. Would Hillary or Bill, Melania or Donald, pig out like that? Reason enough there not to trust them.

We watch Marina’s cat drink water out of her cup on the table. On the stove it looks like Marina is heating up pierogies in a pot of water, or whatever the Russian equivalent of Polish pierogies may be.

This is my world today. Marina’s groceries have more meaning for me than the pathetic blathering of the inept plotters of the Democratic Congressional Leadership. They are Twentyfirst Century’s most spectacular failures at court intrigue to date. They wouldn’t have lasted a week in Byzantium.