the eXile - [sic]

Issue #21/102, Oct 26 - Nov 9, 2000

CANADIAN FACE

Dear [eXile],

I would love to work for you guys. I also sent a message to Mark Ames. My website below is my c.v./resume. I can make up characters, do stories, all that stuff. You know, writer stuff.

(this is not a joke, I would actually like to write for you guys)

William

Dear William,

We can’t offer you a job, but we will pay you 500 bucks if you let a 200-pound whore sit on your face for an entire day. Write us back if you’re down. Attention Ajay Goyal of the Russia Journal: this offer only applies to William.

SUCK MY VIC

Dear [sic],

You guys are amazing, and I would love to write for you. You can view samples of my work at www.vicparekh.com.

Sincerely,

Vic Parekh
Mountain, View, CA

Dear Vic,

We were about to tell you to go fuck yourself, but then we actually looked at your page. There, we saw that you had written, alongside reviews of “The Sun Also Rises” and “Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Fenyman,” a review of a little doozie of a book called “The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia.” You wrote: “This book is so funny and brutally honest, I laughed till it hurt!” This convinced us that you’re a man of taste and culture. Your appreciation of the book about the newspaper that Rolling Stone called “A must-read!” and about which Newsweek.com wrote, “Booze, sex and death—welcome to life on capitalism’s new frontier… Relentlessly un-PC!” showed us that you understand the kind of literature that tells the kind of truths that even the Scotsman admitted “no other journal dared tell,” using the kind of language that the Independent said displayed “breathtaking ferocity” while being “extremely funny.” Like CNN, which said the eXile has been “brazen, irreverent, immodest and rude” since 1997, when it first started “investigating greed, corruption, cowardice, and complacency,” you clearly know a good read when you see it. Once we knew this, we understood that you’re a man who, like Boston Globe bureau chief David Filipov, understands the need for a newspaper that is “like the bratty little brother who blabs family secrets at the dinner table—you want to wring his neck, but that doesn’t make what he says any less true.” Filipov’s blurb appeared, coincidentally, on the back of that same book you reviewed—“The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,” which is published by Grove Press, runs 238 pages, and retails for $16, while being available on amazon.com and other major internet booksellers as well as in bookstores in the United States and all around the world. Anyway, Vic, we can’t pay you shit, but we’ll be happy to accept your submissions for eventual review. We’ve also decided to send you a “Chechenz With Attitudes” t-shirt, because, quite frankly, your letter is the best darned letter we’ve gotten in the last two weeks. You’re all right, Vicster! Waytago!

A-PANADOL-OGY

Dear [eXile],

The guys in our band were sort of hoping that you could explain to your readers that it wasn’t our fault that the concert we were scheduled to give at club 54 a couple of weeks ago was canceled. What happened was that the club got raided by the cops that day, and the manager had to close the place down for a couple of days. So it wasn’t our fault.

Thanksabunch,

Marc Schleifer
Vocalist
Detsky Panadol

Dear Marc,

Isn’t Schleifer a Jewish name?

CANCER BOY (FNL PART)

Dear [eXile],

First of all, I’m a Libra...

So I don’t know what this whole cancer thing is about. Probably those drugs you do. What was it? Mercurechrome? Ethyl bromide? Something fancy sounding. Where I come from we drink 12-packs of canned beer and harvest winter wheat when we want to relax.

Second thing, this whole Edmund Pope-on-a-rope deal is just Russian payback for US harassment of a detained eavesdropper in Maryland whom the FBI caught parked in a car, with headphones on, right outside their office.

Which was in turn a continuation of the yellow-bashing Wen Ho Lee suffered in the scandalous wake of the Belgrade bombings when the US, in a big fat fucking lie only the fatheads in America seemed to believe, totalled the Chink embassy in Yugoslavia.

See, memory is a concept that most people in the West think has something to do with computers and stuff. And while you, Mr. Trabbi, have a highly developed sense of the surreal and a fine vocabulary, too, I bet you would be hard pressed to remember the chain of events leading up to today’s chicanery in Lefortovo.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the ‘duh’ and spell it out.

When the US lost a Stealth fighter over Kosovo, despite strict orders from Wesley Clark not to drop below 35,000 feet, the Jugs were as smug as a bug in a rug. They had scored a PR victory in a PR war.

Or so they thought.

Two days later the US bombed the monosodium glutamate out of the Chinese embassy in direct retribution for the Stealth, sending two reporters to meet the Buddha ahead of schedule.

Because upon further analysis of something called SIGINT, which is short for signals intelligence, which is basically satellite monitoring of cell phones by the NSA, the same people who invented cell phones in the first place, it was discovered that the Chinese had provided Milosevic’s military with the wherewithal to track Stealth fighters based on two things: bomb-pattern trajectory and airport origin. See, if you know those two things, as Jane’s Defense weekly tells us, you can more or less develop statistical models of who is blowing the shit out of your city. And the Chinese, using technology developed by people like Lucent, Rockwell-Teledyne, and Microsoft, have this capability.

Because the Chinese embassy building in Belgrade had some very powerful microwave satellite dishes on its roof that flared up like cold sores whenever crucial data was being passed.

The US said sorry, ooops, and generally downplayed the act of war they had committed. The Chinese took to the streets of their country and massed in very angry protest against this deliberate violence. The fChinese foreign minister got up in a hall full of international reporters and read off a detailed list of why it was not a mistake, why it was deliberate, and why it was an outrage. The reporters sat silent, transcribing the translations from their headphones.

All except Catherine MacKinnon, the perky little Ivy-League lesbian Peking bureau chief for CNN, who got up and defended the mistake (quoting people like Javier Sollano, Robin Cooke and George Robertson) before asking if China was going to do something about all those unruly rioters out there throwing paint at the US Embassy. The Foreign Minister did not even dignify her question with a response, but CNN showed her standing up repeatedly in its coverage of the event.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, William Cohen made up some really ridiculous shit about ‘old maps’ of Belgrade, claiming that what used to be there, back in 92, was a Jug Defense Ministry building. People in the states bought it, inasmuch as they even cared, and PR wheels could be heard humming all along the halls of power.

The next day, in a ‘news-coup’, MSNBC reported on Chinese infiltration of Los Alamos by unknown Chinese-born spies who were stealing top secret nuclear data from unsecure files. And then selling them to Chinese people. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, a man so incredibly powerful it is downright scary, was voluminous in his reprobation of everything Los Alamos had fucked up, and vowed to cream people for this. In two-days time, while Peking, Harbin, Shanghai, Belgrade, Moscow, Lisbon, Aviano and Brussels scrambled to recover from the bombing, Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized American from Taiwan, who was in charge of document erasal and recovery at the labs, was charged with handing nuclear secrets to China.

No motive. No evidence. No confession. Nothing. Nothing but PR scramble over deliberate bombing of a 3rd country embassy (a major diplomatic no-no) that actually came off.

When doubt was cast by independent media (both of them), the FBI quickly arrested a known Russian eavesdropper and used it to reinforce the ‘them vs. us’ theory of statesmanship in the press. The Russian was deported in less than 7 days.

Back in Moscow, as a routine act of retribution, a US consulate lackey was charged with espionage and forced to leave. Though she was probably innocent, the play at the Kremlin was successful enough to warrant another round of xenophobia. Which is where poor Mr. Pope comes in.

Pope was arrested at the airport when his description met what officials were looking for. ex-military. Defense technology. Laptop. He was arrested and transported to Lyubyanka for the sleep-deprivation tank.

Pope, who must have read Natan Sharansky AND Alexander Solzhenitsyn, plus Darkness at Noon before he came over, seemed to hold up well at first. He didn’t ask for his own cell. He refused special foods. He told embassy staff not to worry. He figured he’d be out before Friday.

And he was wrong. Now his trial is entering the laughing-stages and it’ll be deep winter before Pickering steps up and swings a bat heavy enough to get him out.

But the US will lose key Start III planks, have to support more shady IMF loans, and ultimately be forced to turn a blinder eye to Russian reform through the next presidential administration.

Because the plight of Pope will get play in the presidential campaign and force Clinton to help out Al. Because the Russians are still smarting from second-stage status at the Middle East stop of the Diplomatolooza tour. Becaus in the absence of cold war parity, the United States is forced to make some very heavy-handed and thunderously blunderous moves abroad, while creating nevertheless-credible diversions on the entertainment front at home. Because politicians are fucking weird.

And all because Bill couldn’t get his wife to blow him.

Now I ask you....do I have cancer?

Sincerely,

Chris Baldwin

Dear Chris,

Do you remember Divine? Did you ever see Pink Flamingoes? Divine ate the shit straight out of a dog’s ass in that movie. That’s called doing what it takes to be famous. You just keep sending us these letters. That shows us that you’re not really serious.

FAT ANKLE SENDOFF

Dear [eXile],

I must congratulate you on something: Suzanne Thompson is leaving Russia.

After Jean McKinsey, this makes her the second fat-ankled female expat journalist you have hounded out of Russia, after singling her out for ridicule in the eXile.

You need to do a re-cap of all of them: showing an un-flattering and bloated picture of them, next to what you wrote about them, and then their date of departure from Moscow.

Jed

Dear Jed,

Old buddy, we’re just trying to do our part for U, the reader! Yes, it’s true, Suzanne Thompson has left, and she says we had nothing to do with it! Nor did we have anything to do with her mentioning a (no doubt elderly) “significant other” in her farewell column on the heels of two eXile articles which suggested she hadn’t seen a naked man since “Spartacus” was re-released! But you bring up an excellent point: between Suzanne Thompson and Jean MacKenzie, who had the bigger ass? Our experts put their heads together and came up with the following answer: Jean’s had more surface area, but Suzanne’s had more mass. The MacKenzie ass was remarkable mainly for its width and flatness. It was about the size and shape of the front panel of an Amana freezer. Thompson’s, on the other hand, was the bulging, round, crawling-up-the-back variety of American female ass. Its volume was often accentuated by the tight jeans which she wore. So which one was bigger? The answer, Jed, is that both of them were bigger! And now they’re both gone!

DOING OUR PART

Dear eXile,

I dislike your publication, but I have to say this, I disliked Suzanne Thompson more. What a stupid bitch. Thanks for getting rid of her.

Anton

Dear Anton,

Even though you’re Russian, we think of you as a human being, just like ourselves. Come and pick up your Chechenz With Attitudes t-shirt anytime! Zhdyem vas!