DC-MOSCOW LETTERS, Part 2

Originally published on March 4, 1998

Thanks Anni for clarifying. I confess I had thought that you had written me off as just another yahoo now that you had your information, but I am now shamed by my impatience and your continued goodwill. Your commentary is much welcomed. Do continue to write when you have the chance. Translating Geffen? Bigtime stuff! So do you work in the TV industry fulltime, or are you a freelancer. I just finished reading a late 1970s biography on the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (who drank himself to death in 1952 at the ripe young but bloated age of 33). DT occasionally wrote for London TV & radio in his era, and your reference to your own connections in the business was sort of eerily coincidental.

You wrote:
No doubt that the situation we are having now in this country—political, economical, social—is hard to be called stable. And the news you get now and then from our newspapers, especially criminal colomns are frightening, though I would not say that we are unrecoverably pessimistic. People go on living, working, planning the future. I guess, that we are as a nation, despite our world-known Russian sadness wildly praised in the classical Russian literature, very induring and able to overcome the difficulties, which seem to be dreadful. This is our advantage (as it saves the nation to some extent) and disadvantage (as we tackle uor problems rather slow) at the same time.

Unfortunately, I have never been to your country and my knowledge of it is also very limited, limited mostly by our and your popular Press and some knowledge acquired at the university. But I was astonished to hear that racial problems are still rather serious in your country. I believed that in such a multinational country as yours these problems are in the past. Though I should say that with the collapse of the Soviet Union we also come across with misunderstandings between nationalities, but I do think they have a rather momentary political character than national.

Aaah—the rich truths of the stereotype. In this country, no one likes to be identified as a people, a collective with observable and predictable traits, unless they are the ones crafting the accusations. To use stereotypes is to enrage even the daintiest wallflower to screams of high fever pitch in this socially polarized "politically-correct" post-modernist milleniumized American culture, however true the mirror. It is often said that today's Russia is stuck somewhere in mid-1950s America. As far as this country is concerned, depending on one's perspective, that is a good thing, or a very, very bad thing. Crime has skyrocketed here since then, at every level in my lifetime. I grew up in a small town in Georgia where we didn't even own a key to the front or backdoors of our houses. No one locked their cars, and usually left the keys in the ignition overnight. Not anymore, nowhere in America. We have become an anxious, deliberately greedy, envious country. No one is satisfied with anything, not themselves, not their job, not their commodities, not their elders, not their children, not their history, not their future, not anything! If Russia is modernizing quickly, then what is America now creating for herself? A bleak retro-desolation it seems, balkanized and segregated much like the American prisons, where truth is lost in the prowl for power inflating the obscenities of the intellectual starvation diet of a population crippled by irresponsibility. At every bend in the road of political minds enflamed on ego and self-justification with nary a nod to accountability, the signs point towards a desperate detour from the great promises of a pure and sanctified ideology just ahead. Don't misunderstand me, Anni. I love America, despite her past and her present, but as a poet of eyes I must describe her in the battle fatigues she now wears. Hope is evaporating like so much vodka spilled on the highway to inclusion. Is racial and gender strife choking America with an ideology she desires but cannot implement to the satisfaction to all its major players? One suspects so, while these same players enrich themselves at the expense of those they claim to defend?

This strife is political and media-driven in nature. No one wants to do labor or account for their actions. The communist fear of decadence is indeed a very real phenomenon here. I have witnessed this general decay of motivation and despicable lack understanding of the true nature of men and woman in my own rather short lifetime. I am a rock-n-roll baby, born in 1955. I am certainly no advocate of oppression, the sort of ruthless unregenerative blind force oppression which nearly every culture known to mankind has to a degree indulged, but the founders of America's proud ideology (and their own imperialistic causes) would hardly recognize the bastard child ideologies perpetuated today in the name of freedom that are ripping at the social fabric like so many competing packs of clawing jackals with nothing on their mind but the sound of their own eagerness. Rights to privacy and the pursuit of happiness is one matter. Moral incompetence and social chaos is quite another. The law of the marketplace and the law of the jungle are one and the same, when there's no difference between the concrete and the flux.

You wrote:

Again, thank you very much for your letter and assistance. If you wish to buy some books or need something to get translated into English/Russian, I would love to be of any help.What particular titles of the authors you mentioned would you like to have?

Oh, I don't know. How about I pick books for which I already have an English version. Mmmm . . . lemme see. Oh yes. Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND. For now I will just mention that one. Are all these Russian language books in your collection ANNI, Russian authors, or do you have other western or oriental authors translated into your native tongue? If the latter is the case, perhaps that may present an interesting set of choices. Anyhow, lemme off my soapbox for now. And thanks again for your notes from Moscow. Until next time . . .

Best of all worlds,

Gabriel