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The Dispatch

Dispatch – January 27: Ship of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus is an ancient philosophical paradox that grapples with the concept of identity. Rooted in the tale of the Greek mythological king Theseus, whose ship docked in Athens was gradually rebuilt and repaired over time, it left ancient philosophers pondering whether it remained the same ship after all its parts had been replaced. Needless to say, this thought experiment does not give us, modern-day Georgians, much peace, especially amidst the uncertainty surrounding a political change in the United States, a longtime ally. And every effort to divert our minds from the paradox—whether by observing imaginary rat races or indulging in collective gloating— made the question all the more unavoidable: Is this the same America? Can we afford to stay the same?


Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to sail you through Georgia’s strange and desperate attempts to deal with local repressions and international uncertainty.


Lowe and other misunderstandings

We first heard about Kimberly Lowe in early December from her interview with Georgian Public Broadcaster. The Georgian translation of the interview showed Lowe identifying herself as someone who’d become “a U.S. special envoy to the EU” and, echoing the main talking points of Georgian Dream leaders at the time, promising to help fix the West’s troubled relations with Georgia, which she said had been treated unfairly. Her remarks immediately sparked jubilation in the Georgian Dream bubble, who carried the interview across the internet as a sure sign that Trump would be putting an end to Georgia’s growing international isolation.

The celebration was short-lived. Georgian fact-checkers did their digging and soon found that the closest Lowe, a Trump supporter and aspiring Virginia politician, ever came to holding big office in the U.S. were her unsuccessful attempts to become a Republican nominee in the 2022 and 2024 House and Senate races. There were no reports that Lowe was being considered for any position in the incoming Trump administration. Meta – while it was still doing that – flagged viral posts as false information, while the cheeky opposition camp promptly turned Lowe’s colorful persona into a meme.

Lowe’s misadventure would have been forgotten amid boiling discontent in Georgia had it not been for her January 14 Facebook reel, in which she, dancing (or attempting to dance) to Gandagana folk music, announced her upcoming trip to Georgia. The reel put her back on the Georgians’ radar and booked her a spot in a competition she probably didn’t know existed.

DC Measuring Contest

When, on January 20, Lowe innocently posted a video showing her freezing in the streets of Washington DC after she “almost made it inside the Arena after hours and hours in the line” for Trump’s inauguration, Georgian activists rejoiced: Georgian Dream’s American friend never stood a chance against President Salome Zurabishvili, who, easy to spot in her bright red coat, kept posing and posting from INSIDE the warm indoor event, sitting just a few feet away from President Trump.

Zurabishvili was in Washington at the invitation of Rep. Joe Wilson, the most loyal and (hyper-)active American ally of the Georgian protesters. She emerged a clear winner of the who-gets-closest-to-Trump contest. The pro-Georgian Dream media, which also found itself drawn into the imaginary race, had to settle for the consolation prize of spotting other opposition leaders, also in DC, for the inauguration – similarly fighting for their lives somewhere outside in the cold.

As for Ms. Lowe, her consolation prize (for losing a race she knew nothing about) must have been her planned trip to sunny Georgia.

Coming to Georgia is always fun, something we cannot say about having to live in Georgia. The country glorifies visitors, something that wasn’t supposed to change even amid intensified efforts of Georgian Dream mouthpieces to portray their anti-democratic turn as some bigger struggle against U.S. imperialism. After all, Lowe’s designated hosts from Anti-Maidan, a pro-Georgian Dream reactionary movement, hoped that Lowe’s mission to turn the country into a “peace hub” would further boost tourism, which, according to every government Georgia ever had, whatever its ideological stripe, is the best thing that can happen to us. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that international peace efforts are rarely peaceful themselves, and Kimberly’s own peace was about to be disturbed the moment she boarded her flight to the Promised Land.

Kimberly’s character development journey

As luck or fate would have it, around the same time, another Georgian power duo was also roaming the streets of Washington, tilting at their own windmills. Tamar Chergoleishvili and Giga Bokeria are a married Georgian couple leading the Federalists, a liberal-conservative political party recently reforged on the ashes of their previous outfit – the European Georgia party. The final bosses of Republican-ish proselytizing, the couple also traveled to DC for some inauguration thrill.

They attended pre-inauguration parties, including one hosted by Donald Trump Jr., exchanging business cards with influential American politicians while at the same time exchanging fire with the Georgian media, which they accused of snubbing their patriotic efforts to connect Zurabishvili with important people. We don’t judge right or wrong in that controversy. But if the couple was unfairly treated, the gods of politics promptly granted them another chance to get the breadth of coverage their effort deserved – by booking them a ticket on board with no other than Ms. Kimberly Lowe, the Georgian Dream’s American Idol.

The January 22 plane selfie posted by Chergoleishvili looked like a crime scene. The photo showed Lowe in gleeful confusion, surrounded by the beaming Chergoleishvili-Bokeria duo, whose reasons for feeling victorious must have been lost on Ms. Lowe. The caption informed that Lowe had been duly educated about the (multiple) sins of the Georgian Dream, briefed about the precarity of that party’s claimed link with American conservatism, and told that the regime was nothing more than a “Putin-serving gang of hypocrites who instrumentalize ardent conservatives like Kimberly.”

But no caption was needed. Those familiar with Ms. Chergoleishvili’s personality and career knew full well that her political life, personal battles, and struggles to find her rightful place on the Georgian political scene had primed her for this moment. Even her worst critics (of whom she has many) wouldn’t want to stand in her way now that she has finally found the appropriate target for flexing her passion for delivering harsh truths. But…

Truths and their paradoxes

… but no truth, no matter how well delivered, has a chance against the royal treatment reserved for visitors like Lowe in Georgia. The moment she set foot on Georgian soil, the American guest was greeted with flowers and cheers by members of Anti-Maidan, a group whose name – you might have guessed – stems from the determination to dab the ongoing Georgian resistance as “another Maidan” and fuel subconscious fears of death and destruction to be visited by Russia if the protests succeed.

The warm welcome kicked off Lowe’s eventful road trip across the country, complete with her:

  • speaking to a very colorful group of Women Leaders Society (because whatever concerns GD circles may have about US hegemony, they still choose to save its worst products for themselves);
  • posing at Supra and various art exhibitions;
  • petting a stray dog – a must for high-profile Western visitors these days;
  • warmly embracing Father Shalva, a controversial priest serving in Tbilisi’s posh Vake district who loves to pick colorful attires and fights with protesters;
  • sharing photos of militant Georgian protest graffiti that she must have thought (wrongly) matched the patriotic spirit of her actual hosts;
  • and, perhaps the most controversial part of her peace-keeping mission: posing with Dodo Gugeshashvili, the infamous female warlord (warlady?!) from Georgia’s dark and violent ’90s.

The visit is still ongoing, and Ms. Lowe is likely to leave Georgia with a myriad of somewhat confused emotions. She will leave Georgians with a myriad of hard-to-place emotions, too. Yet, hate won’t be one of them.

Whatever she is endorsing here, it’s hard to hate Lowe. She looks too much like that one distant relative we remember for her early kindness and now can’t get mad at when she spontaneously and innocently expresses a desire to wipe out half the universe. She probably fell victim to some malicious algorithm, but who can really blame her?

And yet, all this gloating and comedy aside, Lowe’s journey, just like the transformative journey of those distant relatives, leaves us with a paradoxical feeling of being stranded on the ship of Theseus.

Is it the same ship if every part has been replaced over time? Is it the same generous relative we remember from childhood if she now preaches destruction? Is it the same America whose flags Georgian protesters faithfully carry, after it has changed so quickly and so dramatically? And how much can we allow ourselves to adapt to these changes without risking losing our own identity along the way?

As Georgians wait for the dust to settle and for the international uncertainty brought by Trump’s victory to end, a quiet consensus seems to be forming: no matter how much the ship has been rebuilt, no matter whether its sails have been painted white or black, we are ready to embrace it as long as it is still willing to sail into our deep-water ports.

Perhaps because the only alternative in our current grim state is like that of the mythical King Aegeus, Theseus’ father – to give up and throw oneself over the cliff and into the raging sea.

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