a value judgement
This text is my translation of a LiveJournal post from 2012, written about Russia and Russian politics, though I believe it is relevant for the whole world. I hope the author of the original won’t deny me the liberty to publish it (if you are the author, please know that I tried to contact you but my attempts were futile; you can always ask me to withdraw this page and I will comply). All the stylistic and punctuation choices are preserved to the best of my ability.
many people are talking about this, but I feel an urge to discuss it one more time.
the most disgusting thing the current regime has done to the country - it has eroded the concept of norm. to be honest, even five years ago I felt that the country was in the hands of lunatics, but these days I'm starting to realize the former ones were more or less bearable.
are you allowed to drink kefir1 and drive?
are kids allowed to read the Cookbook Digest2 magazine?
are you allowed to sign up to a social network without your passport?
all those issues are being seriously debated by people who live off your and mine taxes.
during the crazy nineties, by the way, there was nothing of the sort. sure, there were many freaks and deranged ones back then (probably even more than now), but they were recognized exactly as freaks and deranged ones. people understood that if you're talking to someone and they start foaming at the mouth, they're not a very good fit for the position of the chief physician of russia, or whatever it’s called these days (despite the fact that foaming at the mouth has some relevance to medicine).
these days it's impossible to tell apart real and fake news stories.
whatever shit you can come up with, it probably already happened in, say, belgorod oblast about half a year ago.
that being said, I find it easy to believe that at the beginning, injections of outright bullshit in the information stream were quite intentional and motivated by a cause. for example, such stories could have diverted society’s attention from certain undesirable topics. but eventually, the process began feeding on itself and went out of control.
and it doesn’t really matter if someone was born crazy, or if that’s just a strategy they adopted for efficiency.
it’s like we were sitting at a cafe whose chef is not very good at cooking.
and at one point, in the midst of a regular discussion on food quality, he strolls up to the center of the room, gets undressed, and does a cartwheel.
and he thinks that’s a great decision because people actually stop talking about the food that is still not very good.
as soon as the public tires of his naked acrobatics, he thinks of something else.
little by little, other creative people join the chef in his antics.
someone is kicking the crap out of visitors who order eggplants, someone pours vodka into sour cream, and someone, excuse me, is shitting on a table.
and when people start shitting on tables in your establishment - that’s a little bit different format.
the quality of food vanishes from the agenda, forever.
you should also take into account that it’s pretty hard to explain to the kids why a person who shits on tables in cafes is crazy since they have a job in the government and appear on TV where nobody laughs at them.
people are pretending that everything is alright.
people are pretending that something is wrong with the table.
even if you explain to your kid that shitting on tables is not completely okay, the kid still forms a very weird mental picture where people either do shit on tables (not okay but it happens) or they don’t. while in fact, cafes and restaurants are generally about something slightly different.
and so we have two models. in model number one, we’ve got a president, a prime minister, a government, representatives, and so on. that model suggests that its actors are somewhat qualified to govern the country. accidents happen, of course, not without that, the efficiency of management is probably not that high, but overall, the cart is slowly trudging forward.
the second model turns out to be rather freaky. we've got barefooted cobblers, plumbers whose own houses are leaking. people who should have been steering the cart, have instead disassembled it and are dancing naked in the moonlight. and the better someone dances naked in the moonlight, the more chances they have to reach the top. questions from confused passengers are addressed in a rude yet pointed manner. it becomes a faux pas to express doubt that the cart is moving at all. no one cares about the direction in which it’s allegedly moving. the opposition’s biggest point of contention with the faction currently in power is the choice of music for the trip.
these two models are strongly incompatible. they beget schizophrenia, and the second model begins devouring the first one, even though it cannot exist without it, because shitting on tables is much easier than cooking proper food, shitting on tables is not a question of having any skills or quality ingredients, it’s a question of having political will (and a table).
out of everything that happened to russia in the last ten years, that’s the worst one. people come and go, no one lives forever. money is important, but it comes and goes as well. political prisoners? awful, surely, but political prisoners can be released, and then the issue is handled. what else do we have there - khimki forest?
such trite things.
what do we do with the lunatics who think they are normal?
what do we do with the lunatics who have been receiving positive feedback from the world for years on end?
what do we do with the lunatics who warp reality so strongly that the concept of normality shifts or loses its meaning completely?
and they are hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
putin will be gone sooner or later, but they - where will they go.
A fermented milk-based product that might contain minuscule amounts of alcohol.
Originally, it was “Афиша-Еда” — a weekly or monthly digest of recipes and restaurants.