Who knows what animates Gorbachev? Maybe he hopes just to be remembered. He won't be. Certainly not by the Russian people. A passing figure. Not even one on whom American colleges will bestow honorary degrees.

This is world-beater Marty Peretz calling Mikhail Gorbachev a passing figure. I concede that Marty is probably better at extracting honorary degrees than Gorbachev, and conclude that it's a shame Raisa wasn't some sort of sewing-machine heiress so her husband could purchase some endowed chairs in, say, yiddish literature.

Actually, I stand corrected. It turns out Gorbachev possesses honorary degrees from Brown, Northeastern, Emory, the University of Alaska... but look, Marty can't possibly mean this, right? Then again, he writes that the "dreams of imperial residue" of the, uh, Spanish make them "intrinsically anti-Israel," so anything in the Martyverse is logically possible.