Ah, crap. Another high school shooting in America, I thought, except this time it's someone I know-slash-care about. Of course, when I discovered that the victim was 74 it brought into sharp relief how long it's been since I lived vicariously through the all-American antics of Archie and the gang.
I had a mild panic when I thought about all those cute girls that might also have gone down in a hail of nouveau-emo teen-angst semi-automatic gunfire. Thank ye gods Cheryl Blossom survived.
Then I learned that noble Archie Andrews had died taking a bullet for his gay pal Kevin Keller, a Senator who stands for gun control. Egad - as Mr Lodge might have exclaimed - I have been out of the loop for a while. This sounds like a fair departure from the picture perfect postcard vista of wholesome middle America that Riverdale used to paint for us in the 80s. (And, no doubt, the even wholesomer 70s, 60s, 50s and 40s. Eh, maybe not the 70s.)
I'd never even heard of Kevin Keller when I was reading these comics. It got me wondering: is he perchance related to Chris Keller? Not that Chris would likely have showed up anywhere near Riverdale, even in these pre-apocalyptic 20-teens.
And this, in turn, got me thinking about New Cold War. While US pop culture is celebrating heroic self-sacrifice in defence of gay rights, Russian politico-culture is - I believe the legally safe word here is "allegedly" - deliberately shooting down a passenger jet filled to the brim with 100 of the planet's best AIDS research minds.
Hang on, breathe. Forget I brought it up: it's too wild a conspiracy theory. Could such a proud, artistic nation - that brought us the Bolshoi, Rachmaninoff, Garry Kasparov - really take the anti-homosexual rhetoric of its leadership to such a base conclusion?
There's a bit of background context here. One of the reasons that HIV, like other viruses, is so successful is its ability to mutate, to adapt. It finds the most opportune transmission vector for the local environment. And so it is that, in the US, AIDS is seen to be a gay disease: over there the virus has spread farthest and fastest through the homosexual male population. In Europe AIDS has been most prevalent, in the main, amongst intravenous drug users, dirty needles being the most efficient vector over there. While in Africa, the ignorant posturing of political leaders notwithstanding, HIV/AIDS afflicts predominantly heterosexual people (and inside that demographic, unsurprisingly, girls and young women are most at risk - even those who don't identify as heterosexual, but this discussion I'll leave for another time).
So the virus behaves differently in different regions of the world.
Lately, though, things are changing in Europe. Increasingly risky sexual behaviour amongst gay men - probably an outcome of increasingly-effective anti-retrovirals and an emerging view of HIV as a manageable virus, as opposed to an automatic death sentence - combined with a growing preference for intravenous recreational drugs amongst gay Europeans is seeing HIV make a demographic leap in Europe. Now it's a gay disease in Europe, too.
Factor in Vladimir Putin's reknowned anti-gay posturing, and perhaps it's not so difficult after all to imagine that flight MH17 - of all the planes crossing Ukrainian airspace - was deliberately picked off by a group of separatists looking to curry favour with Moscow.
There were 55 planes flying over eastern Ukraine on that fateful night, including Emirates, Etihad, Jet Airways, Thai Airways, Austrian Airlines and Pakistan International Airlines. A Singapore Airlines intercontinental flight was only 15 miles away from MH17 when it was shot down.
There's also the wider question of why Russia would want to destabilise (even annex) eastern Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, there's an economic incentive. Firstly, Russia's population is declining, so absent some sort of external stimulus it faces the economic shrinkage of an aging population.
In parallel, Russia and Ukraine are embroiled in a long-running dispute over gas supplies, prices and debts - this dates back to the days of glasnost and perestroika in the early 1990s. Most recently:
1. In February 2014 Naftogaz (Ukraine's state-owned oil and gas company) sued Chornomornaftogaz (its Crimean subsidiary) for delayed debt payments of almost €1 billion.
2. In March 2014 the disputed Crimean separatist government (led by Rustam Temirgaliev, almost certainly an agent of Russia's military intellligence, the GRU) announced that Chornomornaftogaz was being "nationalised" and would henceforth be owned by Gazprom (the Russian parastatal; majority staked owned by the Russian government).
3. In April 2014 the US placed sanctions on Chornomornaftogaz, to prevent Gazprom from having any dealings with it. In May 2014 the EU followed suit.
So: in these energy-scarce times, this is certainly about access to resources. (But you didn't need me to spell that out for you.) And perhaps there's an even more insidious agenda to weaken this planet's support base for those whose sexual preferences aren't - let us say - on the straight and narrow-minded. They play excellent chess in Russia.
Of course, if you think being gay in Russia is tough, it's not much easier being out in the US. Just ask Simon Cowell. He's spent years loudly proclaiming his straightness, even going so far as to stipulate what age he "likes them" (27, he once said, in case you're wondering). Now he's just been outed in a British court. One wonders why he'd want to keep his preferences such a secret. Could it be that he's nervous about whether he'd continue to enjoy such unfettered access to his wealth-generating target market (fame-hungry adolescents) if their parents knew he were G-A-Y?
Somehow, I suspect that in these Everybody-Gets-Their-15-Minutes times, these doting parents wouldn't be too fussed. Hell, even Riverdale can deal with it.
On a completely unrelated note, I just read that a great white shark beached itself in western Australia, writhing and choking on an undigested piece of sea lion. Damn shame. It's a magnificent creature, Carcharadon carcharias. Still: Sharks 297,013,495 - Sea Lions 1. This is probably why Tony Abbott wants to off them all - he's got a predilection for preserving fat mammals.
