the eXile - editorial

Issue #28/83, February 10 - 17, 2000

Mike Tyson defeated British heavyweight champion James Francis last weekend in impressive fashion, scoring five knockdowns before finally earning the TKO in the second round.

Tyson did three years in jail, and he still packs a mean punch. As of this week, we’ve done three years with the eXile, but unlike Tyson, we’ve got nothing left. We’re punchless, as they say.

The number 3 carries great significance in Western culture. Peter denied Christ three times. Even the atheists among us were raised in the shadow of the holy Trinity. In America power has been divided in an uneasy equilibrium among three governmental branches for over 200 years. We had three wise men, three bears, three sisters, three witches. Lear never had a fourth daughter. Thesis and antithesis were followed up by synthesis. Three was company but it stayed on the air for six years. Caesar conquered and that was the end of it. We even had three musketeers. Have you ever seen just one musketeer? Never. But you see three all the time.

Computers like twos, but human rhetoric is rich with threes because threes have a rhythm pleasing to the human ear. A third step is the simplest mathematical conclusion of a sequence. Beginning, middle, end.

It’s like with a career. You start off as a little schoolboy with no friends. Later, you join the KGB and spend 15 years laboring in anonymity as an agent. Then, finally, you leave the service and rise rapidly to the Presidency, stealing lots of stuff all along the way.

Vladimir Putin knows all about the number three. His penis, for instance, is just three centimeters long. At rest, it starts off at one centimeter. Then, when aroused, it quickly grows to two. Finally, at the rhetorical end of the sequence, it tops off at a semi-erect three. Three centimeters.

Coitus for Putin generally lasts three minutes, which is to say, he generally makes it to a third minute. He discharges his load in three audible spurts and climbs off his wife in mute embarrassment three seconds after ejaculation.

Within nine seconds after this--three times three seconds--the acting president is sound asleep.

Once asleep, Putin after a certain period of time may begin to dream. An angel may appear to him out of the blackness and bid him cross a vast desert on a golden camel whose hooves float over the sand, never touching down. Or he may find himself chased down a black marble corridor by a woman with a hairy chest. Or he may dream of meeting a chubby Ingush boy in a bathroom stall who blushes as he removes his blue-and-white sailor shirt...

One centimeter. Two centimeters. Three centimeters. A three second pause. Nine seconds. And back to sleep again.

There are three things we at the eXile can say definitively about Life After Yeltsin. One is that it seems to be the same as Life Under Yeltsin. Two is that we’re not getting any younger and we no longer have any idea why we’re still here and didn’t relocate long ago to some place like Fiji or the Azores. Three is that February in this city sucks. A lot. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s slushy, and it’s too soon after our last vacation to think about the next one. Not that that wasn’t also true about February under Yeltsin, but it’s definitely still true after him. You see our point.

Three years ago, the newly-born eXile was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in our lives. Today the paper is merely the biggest part of our lives. Which is not quite the same thing--but close. Mike Tyson would understand. At his age, the thrill of the fight is diminished, but the pain of boxing is more pronounced. But he’s not giving it up, because... well, because, what the hell else would he do? Write operas? Think again. Guys like that don’t change.

Three years of the eXile. It ain’t literature. But it’s something. For three minutes or so, anyway.

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