Issue #13/94, July 6 - 20, 2000   

By Mark Ames

A Screeching Halt

I’m going to do something different this issue, and that’s because something different has happened to me. I’m going to keep this as short and to point as possible.

What’s happened to me is that I’m totally out of speed. And there’s no speed in sight, no ice at the end of the tunnel. No nuttin’. The fuckheads here only believe in smack or coke or ecstasy, not to mention those filthy peasant drugs alcohol and marijuana. Every shallow dickhead just wants to have fun, and as market economics works, the dickheads dictate the market. Dickheads want fun; drug suppliers supply the dickheads with fun. All I want to do is work, to tap the dilapidated ruins of my brain synapses for you, the reader, whom I serve, but nope, they don’t let me do it. “Drink coffee!” they say. “Better yet, whyncha come and join us, man. We’ll get totally wasted and sit around doing nothing, or we’ll dance or talk each others’ ears off about how beautiful we are!”

Like a colony of housewives, no one here is serious about anything anymore. Fun! Blech! Even squid take things more seriously than these zone-fiends. I just want speed, because it gives me the confidence and discipline to work. Fun? Save it for the country club cocktail party. Fun is reading that Bob Hope finally died. That would be fun. When’s he going to die? He nearly kicked it last month from a bad case of gastroenteritis. Now that’s funny. I’d drop a hundred rubles to see that, Bob Hope dying from stomach cramps. “Ooo... I gotta tell ya... ooo-ah! Oh...”

Every time I read another Beigeist article on the horrific heroin craze sweeping Russia, I don’t think, “Oh how terrible, those poor children, their lives will be ruined, wither Russia?”... On the contrary, I screech, “You selfish miserable lazy-assed bitches! It’s because of you that there’s no speed for me! All you want is to lounge around ‘feeling good’ about life. But there’s nothing to feel good about, idiots! The reason you feel so shitty that you need to inject opium extract into your pump is because THERE IS NOTHING TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT IN THIS LIFE!!! Dontcha get it?! The goal isn’t to feel good, it’s to make other people feel worse! As shitty as we feel! And without speed, my powers to make people feel shitty about themselves are constricted to the point of... to the point of... uh...”

Ugh, I can’t even come up with a half-way decent simile. Thanks to you. The coke-sniffing, smack-jamming, E-popping, dope-smoking dickhead consumers of Moscow. You’ve squeezed me out of the market. I hope you’re... no wait, you probably ARE happy. And I don’t hope you are. I hope you all develop lethal habits and wind up in the next “Wither Russia’s Youth?” article.

I wrote that unused column a month ago, and the really exciting thing is that it’s as valid - and stupid - today as it was way back then. This is the Real Famine, folks. The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps days. When life feels like one giant office all over again. In protest, I’m going to start taping Dilbert cartoons on my wall until I find some fuel. It gotten so bad that just a few hours ago, I pulled my old Husker Du “Zen Arcade” CD from my collection, and stared longingly at the phen-cutting skidmarks that streak the plastic cover. I ran my finger over it a few times, and looked, but nothing, no residue. This isn’t even funny anymore. I’d rather not sit here and waste your time bitching about it, but you know, when a baby’s hungry, he starts to cry.

Last weekend, when I was in Samara on the trail of Gregory Fiefer’s lies (see Press Review, page 5), I found myself desperately hating the place and every single person there. The people seemed just barely self-satisfied, what Fiefer lovingly called their “savoir faire”, whatever the fuck that means (I only know the Canadian cartoon mouse “Savoirfaire is everywhere”, one of the few Hanna Barbera characters I deeply loved, along with Snagglepus; have you ever noticed how all French people actually have the same mouse-like facial features of Savoirfaire?) These Samarans have been spoiled by sunshine and the bourgeois beauty of the Volga. They’re proud of their McDonald’s and their state-of-the-art movie theater, which few of them can afford. And of course, they have their huggable Northern-Europeanabee governor Titov... I realized that Samara was the Seattle of Russia. And so I spent hours walking along the Volga promenade, from the amphitheater down to Ulitsa Lenina, cursing the Samarans. I’d developed an acute case of Tourette’s Syndrome. “Fucking Seattle! Shit! Seattle-fuck! Starfuck’s! Piss-ass!”

On the second day, I calmed down a bit. I walked some more, this time through the residential areas, the projects-designed apartment blocks, the paneli (called “panelaki” in Czech), through empty lots piled up with garbage, rusted metal, concrete chunks. And it got me a-thinkin. A-thinkin about how the Soviet Union really was a worker’s paradise, up through Brezhnev. Inexpensive, vulgar, conservative yet amoral, brutish yet bootlicking, all the basic needs taken care of, perfectly prole backslapping leaders like Khrushchev and Brezhnev. A fear-inspiring, totally unreasonable boss in the form of the Communist Party.

Just as America is a kind of paradise for the lowest-common denominator bourgeois. We have our own Soviet characteristics. We saw it on the last book tour. Every town in every state had the exact same strip malls, the same gentrified downtowns, the same chain restaurants. The architectural homogeneity was stunning, but if we hadn’t lived in the Soviet Union for so long we might not have seen it for what it really is: merely a cleaner, stucco version of the same thing. While the proles in the Soviet Union worked shorter hours with less stress and less payoff (prole paradise) and had no one to envy, the bourgeoisie in the US work backbreaking hours, dying of stress and fat, goring themselves into a sweaty lather, never imagining themselves taking a moment off except to eat, each imagining that through hard work, he can some day become an oligarch, believing that the System is fair and open to all (bourgeois paradise). Moreover, in America, no one even believes that there is such a thing as class conflict. The underclass isn’t even recognized as existing there; only racial or gender or sexual differences. Just as in the Soviet Union, class was abolished and only nationalities and cultures lived on. The longer I’ve lived here, the more I’ve come to agree with Editchka: the similarities between the Soviet Union and the U.S. far outnumber the differences. One has already been swept away. It would be nice if the other went down with it.

If the Titovites in Samara are lucky, some day, maybe in 50 years, they’ll achieve the bourgeois paradise that America has bequeathed to the 21st century, the only model that the world has left. Now I know why people develop Tourette’s Syndrome.

One girl I met there, Masha, wanted to practice her English with me. She told me she wanted to go to England to study English.

“Why England?” I asked. “It’s horrible there. Compared to America, it’s like Ukraine to Russia.”

“I don’t want to get fat,” she said in all seriousness. Her battle wasn’t going to be an easy one, and two friends of hers from school who’d studied in America had returned “terribly” fat.

“One friend of mine came back so fat. It took her several months after returning to Samara to become normal again,” she said. “Why is everyone in America so fat?”

“Because eating is the only pleasure that Americans allow themselves. And even that’s been on the attack for years now.”

It’s true. Fatness is the last way for the middle-classes to rebel against The Man, who has denied the American Masses every other pleasure. Sex was banned sometime in the early-mid 80s, replaced by tattoos. As were drugs, which have been replaced by rock climbing. Shopping is the officially-sanctioned leisure activity, our version of the Black Sea sanitoria, but let’s face it, shopping’s only so much fun. If it were frowned upon, it might be interesting, but since The Man is constantly spewing out “Buy This” propaganda from every street loudspeaker, consumption doesn’t have the same sinful pleasure that eating does.

“Every fat person is a rebel in his own way,” I explained. “Their existence really upsets the elite who live on our coasts. Our oligarchs and Bobos are all thin and healthy.”

“Well, then I’m not going there,” she said fearfully. “I don’t want to be fat.”

You already are getting there, I thought. And once you hit 30, to quote The Man On The Street in Manila, “You ovuh!”

When I moved into the Tsentralnaya Hotel on Ulitsa Frunze, the first thing I asked for was the massagist who’d set my back the last time. The beds were awful, and since I have a pinched nerve from an spinal injury I received while playing football in high school, I needed those hands of hers.

Vera is a master of the massage, although by the bony looks of the retired gymnast, you’d never know. I found out that since I last saw her, her husband has had four strokes, and can’t work. He receives about twenty dollars a month in disability, and she gets roughly the same for her pension. Their granddaughter in Moscow suffers from a serious case of scoliosis, but the owner of the hotel wanted to discontinue using her as a massagist and instead lease her room in the hotel out to a tourist agency. That would mean living off the dacha plot and only the dacha plot.

She asked me to put in a good word to the hotel director, who was going to decide her fate in a few days’ time. I forgot. And didn’t want to waste my time. As any American will tell you, it’s always easier to just feel bad for people, and feel bad about yourself for not helping them, than to actually lift your little finger.

I came back to Moscow on Monday evening. Now it’s Wednesday. The gods are punishing me for something.

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