"Here I stand...."
To think that Martin Luther managed the entire
Protestant Reformation without the benefit of "Twitter"!

FOR GENERATIONS, SCHOOL CHILDREN and college students throughout the English-speaking countries have tittered over the implausibly named “Diet of Worms” of 1521, where the great reformer Martin Luther was called onto the carpet by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at a meeting of the Imperial Diet, was the assembly of the Imperial Estates. Luther barely escaped with his life, although there is no record that he was actually fed night crawlers with his black bread and cheese (the German term for the Diet of Worms is der Wormser Reichstag, which has no comical overtones). This week, though, a worm-inspired “tweet” may well cost a Russian provincial governor his job.

It seems that during his state visit to Russia this week, German president Christian Wulff was actually served an earthworm-infested salad at a Kremlin banquet. While Wulff has not yet commented on whether he noticed the uninvited dinner guest lurking beneath his lettuce, another dignitary on the scene, regional governor Dmitri Selenin of the Tver Oblast on the Volga, couldn’t resist the temptation to “twitter” his insights on this embarrassing but otherwise inconsequential incident to the rest of the planet. “The meat course was served with a salad containing a live earthworm,” Selenin typed. “This was a very special way of demonstrating the salad’s freshness.” He then added his own cell phone photo to underline the point, making it onto websites and into newspapers around the world. Cute, don’t you think?

 
Bon appetit!
Governor Selenin captured President Wulff's
"meat course" on his cell phone

But this ingenious use of modern technology could cost him his seat at the table. President Medvedev’s foreign policy adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, has demanded Selenin’s dismissal, saying “I should ask our lawyers to create a legal means to dismiss governors for idiotic behavior.”

In fact, there already is such a law. President Medvedev now has the power to hire and fire the eighty-three regional governors at will, a symptom of Russia’s growing centralization and the Medvedev-Putin team’s increasingly autocratic style.

So will Selenin lose his political head over this? That remains unclear, although Prikhodko has already warned his fellow politicians in Russia to think twice before inviting the Twitter-happy governor to dinner – or at least confiscate his cell phone at the door. In the meantime, he has ordered the Kremlin kitchen to review its salad-making procedures.

 
President Christian Wulff and his wife Bettina
on their first state visit to Russia