Yevgeniy Lauer, the editor of an Internet news site Tribuna, contributed to Leonid Amchuk/Kuchma's Son of God-1 piece a few days ago. Here's the ending of Lauer's own impassioned text about Andriy Yushchenko, his daddy, his car and his cell phone, in today's Tribuna (in Russian):

P.S. It somehow reminded me of an episode from my very distant childhood. I lived with my uncle's family then - Mykola Bazhan, a poet and encyclopaedist, who still represents to me all that is called Ukrainian culture and culture in general. Anyway, as I was getting ready for school, I took an orange from the fridge and threw it into my backpack. Mykola noticed this and said it'd be better if I didn't take the orange to school, to avoid inspiring envy in my friends, whose parents were not able to buy oranges, and to avoid putting myself in an awkward position by showing off my undeserved superiority. Oranges were rare at that time - a defitsit, as they used to say. It has to be taken into account that Bazhan was a really famous writer, vice president of the European Pen Club, as well as a CPSU member, Hero of the Socialist Labor, laureate of the Lenin Prize, etc. The president [Yushchenko] hadn't been given advice like this, it seems! Unfortunately!

Why are Victor Yushchenko's watches so different from Lauer's childhood oranges?

Is pretending not to have something equal to actually not having it?

Is having this expensive/rare something outside the country/classroom full of poor people more moral than having it in front of everyone?

Would all those Soviet morality freaks feel happier if Yushchenko hid his son and his car away - as he has already done with his watches?

So sickeningly pathetic.

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Here's a brief bio of Lauer's uncle, Mykola Bazhan:

[...]

During the terror of 1934–7 Bazhan wrote the trilogy Bezsmertia (Immortality, 1935–7), which was dedicated to S. Kirov, and entered the company of poets enjoying official recognition. His later works, written in the spirit of Stalinist patriotism, all belong to the corpus of official Soviet poetry. [...] After Joseph Stalin's death Bazhan did not take part in the cultural renaissance launched by the Shestydesiatnyky (poets of the sixties); his later collections and poems [...] were also written in the spirit of Party ideology.

[...]