#39 | May 21 - June 4, 1998  

by Mark Ames

Now that technocrats are quickly being associated with collapsing capital markets and suicidal miners, once again it's that time of the year again to re-introduce The Populist...this time, all cleaned and pressed and factory refurbished, a recurring fashion theme in modern Russian politics that seems to grow stronger every year-sort of like 70s retro, a fad that has been beating against the shores of late Western culture year after year since about '89, and getting stronger and washing farther inland every time.

As we learned in the last eXile issue, no one even knows what a technocrat is, least of all the journalists who push that empty, deceptive signifier on their readers. Populists, on the other hand, have a direct, umbilical link to The People. Populists speak in a language that The People understand. They are outsiders, just like The People are. Outsiders? Tchya, right. Not a single Populist I can think of was ever an outsider of any kind. Not the billionaire freak Ross Perot, nor the career military megalomaniac Alexander Lebed. Outsider?! A billionaire! A general?! Are you people INSANE?! As the Pointer Sisters once put it, "Who's zoomin' who!"

Remember, this is the same Lebed who refused orders in 1991 to crush The Populist Yeltsin, and look what Russia got in return: economic collapse, social decay, rampant corruption and strategic humiliation. Had the Populist Lebed crushed the Populist Yeltsin in 1991, there's a chance that the Soviet Union would have survived in some form or other, perhaps like China, perhaps like Cuba... but he didn't. And wisely so: not only would Lebed have been sacrificed for suppressing the democracy movement, just like Zhukov after the anti-Beria coup, but those same desperate conditions that his 1991 inaction helped to launch are what propelled him to czar of Krasnoyarsk this week, and potentially the Kremlin in two years. It's amazing that you can take part in events which create catastrophe, then use that catastrophe to your advantage under the aegis of an "outsider."

And the strange thing is, guess who put Lebed in power in Krasnoyarsk? That's right: The People.

So, wait a minute, let's get this straight. Let's look back at the chronology of events in Russian politics this decade. The People conduct a revolution against the old order by installing an "outsider"-a provincial communist boss-who then makes The People's lives infinitely worse. So, in a moment of brilliance, The People decide that they want to wipe out the Miserable New Order by-get this-choosing a man who was key in bringing about the Miserable New Order. All the while calling him an "outsider"!

All of which goes to prove a point I'm trying to make: The People, whether here, there, America, whatever... The People ARE NOT FIT to run even a two-lane bowling alley, let alone to choose their leaders. They make no fucking sense, folks! What The People want, after the bloody pogroms and the corruption trials that end with cloth sacks over the old regime leaders' heads, a neat bullet hole blowing out the front, gray stitching crusted with blackish blood... Then the mass shame-hangover sets in. And The People come to the New Leader to make a confession: all they ever really wanted was cable TV and a social safety net. The People, that is, are EASILY BOUGHT. Which is as good a reason to KEEP THE PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR AFFAIRS!

But it may be too late for Russia. Lebed just won a massive chunk of Russian territory, which means... gulp!... that The People control up to one-seventh of their own country.

This is bad. The People, as Alexander Hamilton rightly pointed out, are an unruly mob that need to be suppressed, doped-up, flogged, hypnotized by religion... anything but empowered. The evidence in Hamilton's favor is overwhelming. Consider: The People do things like put bumper stickers on their cars. And people who put bumper stickers on their cars, as Hamilton might have said, forfeit their right to participatory government.

Writer-types aren't supposed to say this, even if it's true. In fact, writer-types are the biggest cheerleaders of "outsider" billionaires and "populist" generals, precisely because writer-types, who long ago, sometime around grade school, broke off from The People's continental shelf and floated down into warmer, more fecund waters, feel a mixture of patronizing empathy and shame for having abandoned The People so far back.

They're so easy to fool, journalists. That's what Lebed learned in the last elections in 1996. His strategists cynically and accurately predicted that the journalists and intelligentsia would be the easiest segment to snow over-if they thought that he was the voice of The People. Sort of like the Linda Blair character in The Exorcist, who imitates the younger preacher's dead mother in order to weaken his will... Lebed twists his head, croaks a few pithy remarks, and the entire journalism world is beside itself: The People! There he is! All 5 billion of him!

Lebed's former campaign manager recently wrote of how Lebed practiced those fake off-the-cuff one-liners. He practiced them over and over and over. Backstage, as it were. And said campaign manager had to listen to him repeat them, over and over and over, until it literally made him nauseous. Then The Populist walked out into the shrubbery of tape recorders and boom mikes and notepads, where the journalists would ask The People for his opinions. And The People spoke exactly how the journalists expected, hoped, believed The People to speak: terse, down to earth ... everything, that is, that the self-doubting, verbose intelligentsia are not. And that evening, and the next day, those practiced, perfected grunt-stunts became transformed, magically, into a story of the spontaneous, unmediated grunts of The People.

I say they're wrong, those myth-making journalists who created the Lebed phenomenon. I say, it doesn't matter where you are-Russia, Indonesia, Las Vegas-The People are always wrong. It's not fair to blame Lebed-that's like blaming your pimples on pus. No, blame The People. They're the ones who don't wash properly. They're the reason pus has risen to the surface.

If you want to see The People in their unmediated, concentrated selves, then head to the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. You won't get any Tolstoyan sentiments towards the masses there, I assure you. Walk through the endless, crowded, red-pattern carpeted hallways of slot machines and souvenir junk stores, look down the rows and rows of pear-shaped middle-aged women sitting leashed to the slot machines-and I mean literally leashed, thin rubber-coated coil around the neck attached to a SMART card, which is fitted into a slot machine for convenience... leashed to the machine, pulling the lever without emotion, without desire, from morning until night, in the long between-meals, until the god-fearing husband bets and loses the motor home in craps, and blames it all on the fact that he lusted after the busty young cocktail waitress who kept delivering Bloody Marys to the old fool... "God is punishing me." Well, of course he is, you fucking idiot! God doesn't like old smokers who bet their entire RV against the line. Walk further into the massive carnival room, crowded with card and roulette tables, while above, huge Mardi-Gras floats hang overhead and ride around an upside-down ceiling-track. The People-literally hundreds of them-stand transfixed on the red carpet below the floats, holding their hands in the air as though they're at some Pentecostal service, hoping that one of the smiling, peacock-feathered stars of the hour riding in the tracks above will notice them. Hundreds of pear-shaped American families in shorts and imitation Izod shirts standing, crowded, with arms raised in the air... That horrible scene is imprinted on my short-term memory, and I haven't been able to delete it since. It made me want to hide, to flee that paradigm of pear-shaped People.

One way to avoid The People is to get rich and fly first class. But I missed that plane. So instead, I've got to fight for my seat.

On my return flight home to Moscow just this past Monday, I made a big stink at the airport to get a free upgrade from economy to business class. I deserved it: Delta misplaced one of my bags on the way in, and left it locked up in an Aeroflot office for three days. They offered me a measly $150 bucks for my troubles, but I wanted those business class seats, anything to get away from being stuck with The People.

The San Francisco manager of the Delta check-in was a Japanese American, name of Lewis Kawahara, or Kawahara Lewis, I couldn't tell which way it was supposed to go. We got into a bit of a shouting match. I wanted that god damn seat.

Kawahara/Lewis got his revenge. He placed me in seat 3A, business class, from SFO to JFK. In seat 3B sat an old, toothless man, wearing a crisp new 49ers cap and shiny gold nylon 49ers coach's jacket, flannel slacks, and thick, wire-rimmed glasses. In other words, a sort of retired member of The People-retired with honors. But no teeth. Or brains.

The People started out slow enough. He warmed up with a few innocuous platitudes. "Wonder what kinda gas mileage a jet like this gets?" "So, they drink a lot a vodka 'n caviar out there in Mo-scow?" No amount of burying my head in the newspaper would repel him-he was determined to converse with me. The People are like that-they like to talk.

Inevitably the conversation turned to religion. I tried to ignore it, because the last people on earth I want to waste my time hating are the born-again Christians. A waste of my precious bile, my Spice, my Muse. But The People literally could not be repelled, no matter how much Rude Spray I aimed in his direction. He was a charismatic Pentecostal, and he waved a tiny Bible, with strips of scripture, at me, quoting passages from Daniel and Revelations and John. Charismatic Pentecosts aren't exactly known for their shyness.

He had a shtick all worked out, a shtick he seemed to earnestly believe. He was genuinely hurt when I didn't buy his vacuum cleaner or life insurance policy or whatever it was he was selling me. He told me about the great epiphany that changed his life-like bumper stickers, every People has to have an earth-shattering epiphany to share with the world-and then somehow, he got on the subject of his own petty hatreds: Mexicans, Arabs, communists, Catholics, Greenpeace-a People's Checklist of the usual suspects, although for some weird reason he left Jews and blacks out.

"Between platitudes and pogroms lie The People"

His son, he claimed, was a famous Charismatic preacher, beaming his tongue-gurgles via some 70 East Coast radio stations. The old man kept repeating that his preacher-son had "a corporation," although I think he understood the meaning of that less than even I did. His flock of cunnilingus-whistling missionaries was, is, at this very moment scouring Russia for converts. He knew people in Siberia. Right then, I thought of my flight out of Moscow two weeks earlier: packed full of tan, infertile American couples in Timberland boots and Price Club baby carriages, and their confused, freshly-adopted Slavic babies. The one to the left of me cried and rocked wildly in her seat like one of those monkeys from a psychology experiment. A lost cause, and her depressed parents knew it: they'd been handed a lemon. The one behind me was calm and composed, perfectly baby-like, and her adopted Tim Allen-like father knew it. He walked it up and down the aisle, bouncing it, talking to it, and showing it off... you could already see him during Little League games, forcing his depressed son to bat fourth in the line-up, even though he couldn't so much as bunt...

It was all too depressing. And representative. Just one scene from one act in a 5000 act tragi-comedy: ship the Russian babies out, then send in the Baptists to tell the Russian People that it's all part of God's plan.

My only revenge on the Pentecostal windbag: to break wind in this sealed jar of air, 39,000 feet above Lake Michigan... I let 'em go, one after the other, like artillery shells, in the hope that I'd shut him up. But he didn't. Instead, he became energized, quoting from the Bible like some horror movie sage quoting from Nostradamus, about how the European Community was foretold in the Book of Revelations as the "10-toed kingdom" of Satan. I didn't tell him that the EU was already 15-toed and due to expand into a 30-tentacled jellyfish. It was all too B movie in a way that wasn't scary or interesting in the least. At least the old Catholics could really scare the shit out of you, but these guys, these born-again Americans... it was like listening to worn urban legends in a rural bar. I shut up and tried blocking out his sermon, all the while hearing Lewis/Kawahara cackling vengefully in my ear.

The second leg of the flight from New York to Moscow was a different story. They put me back in economy and sat me next to some American version of a Komsomol Youth leader: he was tan, stocky, and wearing a uniform T-shirt, the same uniform T-shirt worn by about fifteen other Americans on my flight. They had on these strange, very Soviet-looking T-shirts that read "The Freedom Support Act" and "Future Leaders of Tomorrow" with some kind of technocratic-Masonic graphic in the middle. His shirt was red (!), signifying some hierarchy in this Komsomol group, while the teenaged American girls wore turquoise T-shirts with the same design. Most Russians would be embarrassed to wear uniform T-shirts in public, while Americans, employing their "free conscience," proudly and eagerly slip into uniforms on a daily basis.

A border war commenced the minute he sat in the seat next to me. We were locked in a serious elbow-jousting tournament, albeit undeclared, on the shared armrest. The border skirmishes went on for about the first two hours of the flight as we both jockeyed for the best spot. See, the back of the armrest, closest to the seat, was the prize territory, the Golan Heights of any shared armrest. Whoever controls the rear of the armrest controls it all. And I won. He-the American Komsomolets-was afraid during takeoff. I watched him nervously flip through the Boeing 767 safety card, then compare notes to the exits around us, while I, veteran of some 40 Aeroflot and Air Moldova and Air Ukraine flights, sat unmoved. A real macho passenger. With, thankfully, a quiet, overachieving technocrat-type next to me.

But The People followed me onto this flight as well. The People this time came in the form of a pear-shaped Southerner. He sat in the row in front of me, and loudly boasted to his neighbor that he was born and bred in Orlando, FLA. The guy sitting next to him came from good New England stock. You could tell he came from a good family because he had one of those Kermit the Frog Ivy League voices. I've heard it before. And I thought-hoped-that Kermit would successfully resist The People's conversation with a more effective Aristocratic Rude Spray Repellent. I watched it unfold: The People talked to the aristocrat. And to my surprise, the aristocrat answered back, note for note. In fact, they seemed to get along just dandy.

Frustrated by their cheery populist conversation, I aimed my pelvis in a forward-direction, lifted about an inch off the seat, and fired a few tear gas canisters somewhere over Nova Scotia. And it worked! They shut up. Each probably thought the other did it, and they lost their appetite for conversation.

For dinner, our side dish included beans and corn-ammunition, which I stored and stuffed into my firing chamber, packed down with beef brisket, bread rolls and cheese.

After dinner, The People and Kermit slowly started talking again. It was The People's fault-the aristocrat was more terse and non-committal this time. I had to suppress The People before they got uppity. So I fired another tear gas canister. And they shut up. My aim was good. So I fired two more. The guy from Florida turned around and scowled at me, nudged the aristocrat and said, "Whew-hoo! I can smell that, yep! And it smellin' gooood, too!" It looks unbelievable written-down, but he really did say it like that. They did this weird neck-roll turn-around to me about four or five times, laughing, expecting me perhaps to laugh with them. I pretended not to notice or understand. And finally, The People stopped turning around. And started talking again, louder and louder, straight to Moscow.

Which only goes to prove: you can't win against The People. Hell, they're even impervious to high altitude intestinal gas, making The People BARELY HUMAN! My war against the people had come to a quiet end.

These are the same people who, it is said, back Lebed, and backed Perot before him, and Suharto before that, and so on, and so on, one brilliant choice after the next... I say to the Yeltsin regime, strip Lebed of his victory. There's more than enough precedent to justify it, a dolly's worth of files documenting election fraud. Put a technocrat in Krasnoyarsk, sort of like what you did in Nizhny. No one really cares about this democracy facade anymore. The main thing is... don't be fooled by The People. They're congenitally wrong, as Lebed will prove. And they've been known to bite.