Stefan Lutak was Ukrainian. He owned the Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Mark’s Place.
Despite its name it was a beer-and-shot joint I stumbled into by chance after settling in the East Village.
The clientele was Ukrainian and didn’t care for strangers. A disapproving silence would attend my entry but after a while they got used to me.
I liked the anonymity of the place, and the prices.
Stefan told me he had played pro soccer in West Germany. Everyone had a story in the East Village of the 1970s and I didn’t delve deeper.
One thing there was no doubt about – the local Ukrainians didn’t like Russians.
They didn’t care for any empire, including Britain’s, and would occasionally congratulate me over some bombing in Belfast.
Much later on I played some gigs in the USSR, shortly before it collapsed, and witnessed first-hand the iron fist of that empire, so I celebrated with Ukrainian friends when their country gained independence.
Like most Americans I doubly celebrated the Ukrainian people’s resistance to Emperor Putin’s invading army over the last years; though the sheer scale of slaughter is staggering – over a million Russians and 400,000 Ukrainians dead or wounded.
The question remains, why doesn’t President Donald Trump share the same view?
Doesn’t the man from Queens realize that if Putin does manage to subjugate Ukraine, he’ll then set about destabilizing Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and perhaps even Finland, in his zeal to restore the Grand Imperial Russian Empire.
Doesn’t Trump understand that Ukrainians have changed the very nature of modern warfare by their use of drones.
He should, for when he rained down bombs and rockets on the Houthis in Yemen, he was soon forced to declare victory and skedaddle for fear of some U.S. billion-dollar battleship getting blown out of the water by a Dollar General Houthi drone.
Leaving aside such treasured American values as freedom and democracy, think of the economics, Mr. Trump.
There is so much to be learned from the Ukrainians and the Houthis that could lead to a slashing of American defense budgets.
Advanced drone technology allied with AI will rule in the coming years no matter what you, or Hegseth and your other sycophants think.
But then, do you ever think? Or is life one big TV reality show – to be trotted out in neat chunks of blowhard fantasy week after week? You disrupt the world’s economic system by slapping ridiculously high tariffs on China without ever considering that Comrade Xi controls 90% of the global supply of rare earth elements that enable cars to run and arms to function.
Duh! Didn’t one of your cabinet minions point out that little fact? Nah, they were too busy telling you how wonderful you are.
So now it’s back to square one in the tariff-bluster negotiations, and the ever astute Xi Jinping has your number. Luckily, you got out of the casino business or he could have really taken you to the cleaners.
All this talk about bringing back manufacturing, coal mining or whatever to the U.S. is just that – talk! What young person wants to work in a factory - or even an office - when they can sit at home in their parents’ basement coding on their laptops, or dreaming of becoming an influencer – or even president.
Of course, there are people who would gladly work in factories or fields. But there’s not much hope in recruiting the undocumented with masked ICE patrols prowling Home Depot ready to ship them off to rest homes in El Salvador or Sudan.
Not even six months into round two of the Trump regime and already Gaza is rubble, the Marines are on the streets of Los Angeles, Tehran and Tel Aviv are burning, Trump Family Inc. is cleaning up, Brian Wilson is history, and God Only Knows what plans Bibi has in Iran for an ever compliant US of A, especially now after the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuke sites. Stefan Lutik is dead a long time.
Just as well. I wouldn’t be able to explain to him how an American president feels more comfortable propping up Vlad Putin the Impaler than supporting the freedom loving people of Ukraine.
Time for another beer and a shot in the ongoing fantasy of making America great again.
