This world is unjust. Sometimes I find myself thinking that scoundrels live long lives. James Mace died so suddenly, so prematurely. We miss his calm, wise words so badly these days.
Prof. James Mace was The Day’s consultant and wrote a regular front-page column. His short features were always interesting and topical. This American professor had an excellent knowledge of Ukraine and Ukrainians, and their tragic history, hardships, and problems after the proclamation of independence. He closely followed every statement and action of our politicians, the leadership of this young state, the debates in parliament and its resolutions, and ideas and suggestions in the Ukrainian media.
Mace remained a patriot of his country, and we good-naturedly called him Ukraine’s son-in-law. A tolerant man, he never taught Ukrainians what to do and how they should do it. Instead, he cited examples of how the US solves difficult problems. He was an expert on the Holodomor, this heinous crime of genocide and ethnocide committed by the “evil empire” in Ukraine, and predicted a long period of convalescence. In My 2003, almost a year before his death, he wrote that our postgenocidal society needs a “healing process which, sooner or later, the Ukrainian people will have to undergo. This will be a long and painful road, but it is necessary for Ukraine to become the kind of country it should be.”
Dr. Mace was the first to refer to our nouveaux riches as a “kleptocracy” and convincingly refuted imported concepts about Ukrainians being allegedly alien to the idea of civilized development. He stressed that, in order to implement it, they need freedom and assistance from the government. He refuted the myth of Ukrainians’ “inferiority” in comparison, for example, with the Russians. About Ukraine’s northern neighbor he wrote in The Day that it is actually a Third World country, which exports raw materials to pay for finished products from the advanced First World. Many Ukrainians probably heard this kind of assessment of our “elder brother” for the first time, as few people dared to broach this subject at the time.
As a lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Dr. Mace paid serious attention the younger generation. (NaUKMA students, led by their rector Viacheslav Briukhovetsky, would eventually take a valiant part in the Orange Revolution.) He had great hopes for young people, although he wrote: “Politics is governed not by generations but by forces within society that are capable of making something happen or preventing something from happening.”
I was not personally acquainted with Dr. Mace. I was just a regular reader of The Day. How badly this newspaper and all of us miss this wise man! I ask myself whether we were attentive to him during his lifetime. Did we know him well? What did he like and dislike? What kind of music excited him? Did he like the lofty and enigmatic “Peruvian Song,” Elvis Presley, or passionate country music? What Ukrainian songs did James like?
Friends, let us order a song in his memory.
Above all, let us remember him.
