The available weapon

 In Barcelona this week, the Formula One crowd is testing for the 2022 season, a shakedown that may or may not provide a clue to the narrative ahead. 

Right now, the narrative being suggested is that Ferrari is going to be a force again. Charles Leclerc set fast time for two days running; Ferrari teammate Carlos Sainz then hopped in the car and put up the fifth quickest time, behind LeClerc, Pierre Gasly of AlphaTauri, Daniel Ricciardo of McLaren and George Russell of Mercedes. The two Ferrari drivers put 149 laps on their ride in the second day of testing.

As for the narrative ...

Well, what's happening Ukraine right now already has partly shaped it.

What's happening there is the present overlaying the past like a double exposure, because its pattern is distressingly familiar. Tanks and troops overwhelming defenses in 2022; tanks and troops overwhelming defenses in 1939. Missiles falling on Kyiv in 2022; Stukas descending on Warsaw in 1939.

Naked aggression then. Naked aggression now.

It truly is all of a piece, right down to the justification aggressors always trot out to put a shine on their crimes. In 2022, Putin claims Russia is merely defending itself against a threat on its borders, and protecting breakaway Russian provinces. In 1938 and 1939,  Hitler claimed the same things about the Sudetenland and Poland.

What F1 has to do with this is very little, other than what it can do. And so yesterday it announced there would be no Russian Grand Prix in Moscow this season -- just as soccer has announced it will move its Champions League final from St. Petersburg to Paris.

This is pathetic stuff, matched against tanks and missiles. But is it the only weapon available to Sportsball World, and so it will wield it.

More telling could be the coordinated sanctions being applied to Russian money and Russian resources by the United States and its allies. And, of course, by the tens of thousands of people even now flooding Moscow's streets to protest Putin's thuggery.

 Russians in the streets brought down the czar once upon a time, despite brutal efforts to suppress them. Now they're in the streets again, and brutal efforts to suppress them are again being employed.

The present, overlaying the past.