THE EXILE - Let ‘Em Send Me to the Bughouse Again! - By Dar Zhutayev

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February 20, 2003

Let ‘Em Send Me to the Bughouse Again!
By Dar Zhutayev Browse author

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That's the official story, culled from various news agencies. How much of it is true, I don't know and I don't care to know. Throwing bombs or hurling jet planes at symbols of authority sucks as a method of overthrowing the Shitstem, only making it nastier and more virulent -- but, then again, there is the righteous wrath of the oppressed and the downtrodden and the plain damn losers and no Marxist wiseacres like me or my friends can do shit to hold it back. Working out your existential neuroses (I've heard of a lady terrorist who was initially drawn into the Struggle by -- I'm not kidding -- her ignorance of the joys of masturbation) by posing as the new Charlie-Manson-cum-Red-Brigades is pathetic -- but it's surely better and worthier of a human being than the mindless routine of a pseudo-Westernized cog in the wheel of the Society of the Spectacle, who earns just as little below the salary of a garbageman in LA as to be able to look down upon 99.999 per cent of his compatriots and whose only joys in life are waking up Saturday mornings with a condom on his cock and a strange body in his bed plus his masochistic hatred of the Chechen Terrorists. And, for all I know, there might have been no bomb, no terrorist plot, no nothing. Our charming powers that be are more than capable of framing whomever they like for whatever they've got a mind to. You, gentle reader, may one day find yourself accused of being an operative of the CIA or, say, the security services of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. The girl that you pick up at the Hungry Duck or wherever you filthy foreigners flush with ill-gotten bucks seduce our na?ve and trusting girls, leaving no chance to us cheapo Russians, and that you wake up together with the next morning with a condom on your cock, may, if she is a physics or engineering major, be accused of industrial espionage for Western intelligence agencies. And if she reads Chomsky or Marx, she may be framed for a bombing case like the one described above. It's all a fucking lottery. But more of that later.

Another thing I'd like my readers to understand. For all the irony and grisly sexual detail, this article is about friends. They are comrades -- erring comrades, alcohol-soaked comrades, no-brain comrades -- but comrades anyway, fellow dissidents in the same boat with us, walking, like us, under the imminent danger of being impaled on the "vertical power structure" or trodden under the heel of the "dictatorship of the law."

And now for the irony and the grisly sexual detail.

Communism Is Not Communism

Five years ago, a stocky youth with a wild look on his face and unwashed long blond hair lumbered into my obshchaga (hostel) room in my hometown of Obninsk, Kaluga Region. Hung over as hell, I was printing out a draft of my dissertation on my antediluvian dot-matrix printer that was going "Tsk-tsk-tsk-HRRR!" in an especially irritating brand of industrial psychedelic ambient trance music and, to cap it all, my cat Anaxagoras had just shitted on a freshly printed-out and especially important part of the dissertation. The guy turned out to be a young physics graduate called Denis (a.k.a. Den, Dennis and the Deng Who Is Not Xiaoping) who'd found out I was into Leftist politics and sort of wanted to join forces with me. Understandably, I was somewhat gruff in my replies at first, but soon we found out we agreed on every political issue under the sun. When Den touched upon an especially abstruse issue (I forget whether it was the dialectic of productive forces and production relations or the Althusserian theory of overdetermination) that I didn't have a ready answer to, I said, using a familiar Russian metaphor: "You know, Den, this is a tough one. It can't be solved without a half a liter [of vodka]." "Half a liter? Just half a liter? Oh, I'll be back in a sec," said the literal-minded Den, vanished and returned five minutes later with a bottle of Smirnov. This smoothed our political discussion a lot, so Den fetched another and then another.