When speaking about my teaching career working with Russian speakers, I always say that there are two parts to the history. The time before the Russians arrived and the time after. The Russians are bullies. There is no other way to say it. You can say Nazi. That’s an irony right there. But they are bullies and they are elitists and they believe that Moscow is more important than other people. It doesn’t take a genius to understand this. But nevertheless, this is the situation. There was the time before the bullies arrived. And then there is what we have now or what remains after their occupation.
One telling sign is what people were like before the occupation and then what they were like after. Before the occupation, Belarus was a feisty little upstart. We had no chance to survive. No natural resources. No opportunity for genuine tourism. No industry. Really, it was just a quiet little place known for clean air and expansive forests. Tough to deal with such a place. Ironically though, people were overachievers. This is before. They knew they had to try harder. They knew they had their back against the wall. They knew they had little chance of success and that they had to work as hard as they could and pay attention to as much as they could. These are the folks I fell in love with. Easy to do, wouldn’t you say?
But then we have what comes after. Because the rule of thumb is not to be an independent country but to be diligently adherent to your masters from Moscow. You must buy our products. Most of the anti-Americanism was simply to stop the American market from flooding before the Russians had a chance to make their analogs. And they have made analogs. We have Amazon. We have Uber eats. We have everything all built inherently into the Russian national system which is allowed to work abroad as a profit generator for Moscow. Any irony there? And apparently for Moscow it’s a good deal. We get their deep flow of garbage, disease and assholes looking for cheap women and gambling and they get our profits and our time and our blood, sweat and tears for basically nothing.
Well, as you can see, this is basically gangster stuff so, just as logically, the style of speaking became gangster. That’s right. You had to speak as if you had enough money not to care and that included all laws or morality. You were a badass and a killer and you would just assume shoot someone as listen to them. You don’t care. You don’t have to care and you are so completely relaxed that you’re lucky your heart doesn’t stop beating. That is what started to come into my English classes.
How do the Russians get away with it? Easy. They control the media. Everybody has phones now. Everybody’s locked into their own head. If you are the state and you control everything including anything that could ever go online, you can say whatever you want. What was the first thing they said? Cruelty is cool. They showed us pictures. They showed us the most horrible things that could possibly do. And immediately, everybody fell into lying.
It’s not me. It’s someone else’s pain. I don’t care.
Mike Tyson used to say that boxing was really easy to dismiss until you got punched in the nose. Now, I’m not going to become full-on Che Guevara revolutionary but we are looking at exactly the same terms and exactly the same ideals with the difference that we have the evidence of what happens if we allow capitalism to play itself out unchecked.
How do they get away with ruining the world? We don’t care.
Why are we electing clowns who are obviously serving the military industrial complex as well as their own interests? We don’t care.
How is it that we agree to give up the entire meat of our lives, our ability to be with our children, our ability to choose beautiful things for ourselves or our ability to take our time and develop skills. Or how about just taking our time? How about just worrying about our own lives? How about caring about our own lives and the people around us? Why is it that we have to listen to you? Why is it that you are everywhere and we are nowhere?
I just wanted a breath of fresh air. They were running their cars day and night. The way my apartment was built, there was nowhere for the fumes to go. I was being choked to death in my apartment by too many auto fumes. And all of these new cars were from new Russian patriotism! We were going to be an economic giant because we had gas and oil and our job was to spend at all! Did this make sense to do anything but destroy the fucking planet? No! Did it do anything but destroy every human being you touched? No! And that’s why they did it! That’s fucking why they did it.
Because they hate themselves because they are people. They hate themselves because they are fagots. They hate themselves because they are weak. They hate themselves because they are bloodless. They hate themselves because they have compromised away everything beautiful in their lives for drugs and comfort and power.
Me? I’m not opposed to spending an alternative day. I remember I used to like going to the beaches and taking my clothes off. I remember truly loving riding my bicycle. But then, as a writer, there have been some truly interesting times where the job of creating not only a moment of text but that this particular component fits well into a whole. This is a backwards way of saying I like caring about what I do. I like people who care very much about what they do. And if we have the money contract, a professional services contract, how can you not begin with everybody at least at the height of their interest in doing well? How can you begin with someone who says they don’t care?
Well, that’s how it works. When I was translating for the independent journalist in Russia, Sasha used to love talking about the apparatus of the corruption. It wasn’t so much that they completed a crime, it was exactly how they got away with it. The voting manipulation. The coercion. The phony public meetings set up and these strange groups of people who suddenly show up in time for the votes. He loved figuring out how these things worked and writing about them. Indeed. He did more journalism simply reading the court records then most people do following celebrities around for years.
There is an apparatus. It is in place to do one thing. People are to be pushed back into their addictive sugar circle or something very similar to this. An alcoholic addiction is a normal way of life and if you don’t act like someone who does day labor for enough money for vodka and sausages at the end of the day, you are an entrepreneur and worthy of being followed. The only problem is, when you meet the entrepreneurs, they are exactly the same or even worse. They can actually afford the cocaine and the prostitutes.
