My family is from an ex-Soviet country, I'm 95% sure my nuclear engineer grandfather was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis (family lived in Cuba for 5 coincidental years), and now I'm a cog in the DoD machine. Russia is a near-peer military threat, so it has to be a boogeyman. Are you saying the U.S. isn't one of the few boogeymen in Russian culture? Nobody in their right mind would declare any citizen of another country as evil because they are members of that state. Combatants and political actors engage in warfare with other combatants and political actors, not their civilian populations. I encourage you not to associate American political and media agendas with the global outlook of American citizens.
This might be collision of terms we use. I understand "boogeyman" to mean an intentionally vague entity that is used to scare people into submission. This is how I see Russia being perceived, although... ...this exposes my bias. I don't get to see Americans: only what they get to see on screens and in the papers. How relative is public interest and political activity of the Russia/Trump scandal for an Average Standard American?Russia is a near-peer military threat, so it has to be a boogeyman.
I encourage you not to associate American political and media agendas with the global outlook of American citizens.
I understand now that you mean boogeyman to be a kind of tool for the government or media, and for the media, you're right. But that's only the case because the media will grab anything it can to snowball into the forefront of the public interest, and Russian-American relations happen to be full of theatrical events. Right now, the biggest outlets in news media are more similar to a reality show like Keeping Up With the Kardashians than a source of information for current events. News on the Russia/Trump scandal is something I personally make an effort to ignore because it is just so difficult to sift through the media until I can find actual information, so I won't comment on it. But I would say the Average Standard American sees it as a talking point that they know nothing about to debate others who know equally nothing about it, just like most other political events that stem from today's administration. I'm glad we see more eye-to-eye than was apparent at first :)
That's Quote Book material. Stealing it.the Average Standard American sees it as a talking point that they know nothing about to debate others who know equally nothing about it