MOSCOW, September 9, 2007 -- Getting into her new fall teaching schedule has disrupted the Red Queen’s life a bit, and she begs your indulgent forgiveness for skipping her deadline last week.
September 1 is officially the first day of autumn in Russia and the opening day of school. So even though it was Saturday, Russia’s kiddies all traipsed to “first bell” to bring their teacher flowers and get re-acquainted with their classmates. RQ administrator Basil snapped a couple of shots of fashionable school bags, including one with a gas mask (see photo).
RQ administrator Basil caught these backpackers on their first day of the new school term Sept. 1. One can only guess the significance of the gas mask.
Not sure what the implications of that are.
As the official first day of autumn, Sept. 1 also heralded the onset of a wave of moderate – even chilly and occasionally cold – weather. I had to wear a jacket to meet with fantasy Peter last Sunday – which was also Moscow’s 860th birthday -- to chat and bring each other up to date. It turns out he has been as broke as I, and wouldn’t have been able to go with me on a trip – even to Pitr – even if I could have afforded it. Despite his patriotic bent revealed at my birthday lunch (Chapt. 256, Independence Day: Why is there tyranny?), I’ve decided I’ll keep him on as a pursuable fantasy.
Sept. 1 was also the date that new referrals from former Inst. of Diplomacy students Andrei and Maxim came close to filling up my schedule and to assuring a weekly income of over $ 1,100 from private students – not including classes at the Institute of Diplomacy or Potemkin U, which starts next week.
Former Inst. of Diplomacy student Maxim is decorating my fall scheduole as a private student, along with his brother and his best friend. Life has taken a brighter turn.
The nicest part is that one of the new students will be beautiful Maxim himself (see photo), who will have lessons on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. He’s also adding to my stable his older brother Alex – not as good looking, but incredibly nice -- and his best friend Emil.
Student Masha’s husband Andrei, who last week committed himself to daily early morning lessons for the next several months (Chapt. 263, The KGB IS the State), gave up his Tuesday mornings so that long-time students Dima and Sasha, who are also hockey-playing friends of his, could continue their one-day-a-week lessons Tuesday at 8 a.m. Andrei will meet at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays.
So I’m not having to kick anyone off my schedule except the deplorably unreliable 8 a.m. Information Plus students, who since May have missed more classes than they have attended, putting me into the financial bind I suffered the entire summer and from which I now seem to be very quickly recovering.
But the Red Queen’s diary is one victim of my new schedule, as I noted above. Teaching or traveling between 65 and 70 hours a week doesn’t leave much time for chronicling her peripatetic ramblings.
I’ll continue to try to meet weekly deadlines, but last week I obviously didn’t make it.
Sorry, dahlings.
I finally put Igor on the train to Moldova a week ago Friday afternoon with an extra $ 150 -- for bribes, for activating his Moldovan health insurance, and for celebrating his birthday two days later.
He was to arrive in Chisinau, the capital, the next day, then would go on to his mother’s house in Svetliy. I was to call him on Sunday, his birthday. I called. Several times. He wasn’t there yet.
I called the next day. Still no Igor. Finally on Monday night, I got a hang-up call from “grandma Anna” in Chisinau. When I returned it, he was there. He said the border guards had taken all his money at the border, and he didn’t have a kopek left.
I sent him another $ 70 on Tuesday, and he arrived in Svetliy the same day.
In the meantime, I had promised him I would buy Denis a ticket to Moldova and put him on the train with enough money to get him home. He and Sergei both agreed that on narcotics, Denis’ health has deteriorated to the point that if he doesn’t get off them and get medical treatment soon, he’ll die.
So I called his friend “Little Sasha” and told him to have Denis come to my apartment on Monday at noon. Sasha called to say he hadn’t been able to find Denis. That evening Denis called. I told him to come to my apartment Tuesday at 10 a.m.
By the time I left for my 1 p.m. class with Andrei, Denis still hadn’t shown up. He finally showed up later in the afternoon looking gaunt, dirty, haggard, and barely able to walk from a horrible infection on his butt that he says was caused by a faulty hospital injection. Or was it from one of his own dirty needles?
He, Sasha, and I bought him a ticket for Wednesday night. Sasha accompanied him to the station and gave him the $ 70 from me for road money. On Thursday night Igor called to say Denis had arrived safely. In a phone call today, Igor said he is still in very bad condition and Ivan will take him to the hospital tomorrow.
I wish him well, but I don’t want to ever see him again. He’s a loser. I’ve already lost several hundred bucksi on him, plus whatever he stole to support his habit – my grandfather’s watch, my Oxford English Dictionary, students’ mobile phones, and lord knows what else.
In the meantime, Andrei is up to his old tricks again – though this time I’m not the victim. He’s decided he’s going to steal enough money from somebody or from some place to get a phony passport and go to Europe. Lots of luck, and the sooner the better. Both Sergei and I are tired of living with him, despite his exemplary behavior in the apartment – he fixes dinner nearly every evening, hasn’t gotten into a fight since Artur left, and is being thoughtful and considerate.
Russian army hazing claimed another victim last week when two drunken officers beat a 21-year-old recruit with belts, then tossed him into a cage for guard dogs, where he was found the next morning – still alive but brain dead.
The last national scandal over hazing, when 19-year-old Andrei Sychyov had to have his legs and genitals amputated after a gang of army sergeants kept him kneeling while they beat him for several hours on New Year’s Eve (Chapt. 185, Glue frees Zhorik and me from Sergei), occurred while Sergei Ivanov was head of the army. Shortly afterward, Putin removed Ivanov from the post and promoted him to Deputy Prime Minister so the public would forget about it by the next election cycle, just in case Putin should anoint Ivanov as his successor.
So this new scandal won’t taint the election process, and the ploy seems to have worked. Most Russians have already forgotten any link between Ivanov and the army’s atrocity.
But said Russian army has committed another atrocity, this time on Zhorik. Zhorik SMS’d me Thursday afternoon that a cylinder of oxygen had dropped on his hand and he was experiencing severe pain.
About midnight his time, he SMS’d me that his hand was broken, that the pain was worse, and he would have to go to the hospital.
“Why didn’t you go to the hospital earlier?” I asked.
“Because I was in shock and it wasn’t hurting that bad,” he replied, adding that now the pain was so intense he couldn’t sleep.
“Can’t you go to the hospital now?” I asked.
“No, I have to wait till morning.”
When I woke up Friday morning, I asked how he was feeling.
“I didn’t go to the hospital,” he replied. “They put me on duty in the day room and told me if my hand still hurts Monday, they’ll take me to the hospital then.”
“The idiots,” I replied. “If your hand is broken, by Monday it will be too late and they’ll have to re-break it before they can set and splint it. A simple x-ray would tell whether it’s broken or not. These assholes are monsters!”
“They don’t want to waste a whole body on the dayroom, so they put me here.”
“They’re not even treating you like a human being,” I said. “You’re just a machine to them.”
Like all other Russians, a soldier is just another tool for the state to use up and throw away if necessary. The fuckers could ruin his hand for life and he has absolutely no recourse.
This is the vaunted Russian Army. Not only do they pay their soldiers a laughable “salary” of $ 10 a month that propels many of them into male prostitution, but they feed them inedible slop and refuse to take them to the hospital for treatment for possible broken bones. And Zhorik still has eight more months in this inhuman pit of predators.
I hope he survives.
The SMS text messages from him have grown increasingly affectionate in recent weeks. In one of them last week, he said he was “gulyating,” sitting on a bench.
“Alone, or with somebody?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m alone. I wish you were here with me.”
Later he said when he doesn’t hear from me, he misses me. I replied that “When I don’t hear from you, I miss you, too, and worry about you.”
“Dane,” he replied, “thank you for worrying about me so much.”
When we Americans want to know your emotional state, we typically ask, “how are you feeling?” The Russians ask, “How’s your mood?”
So last week he asked me how my mood was. “Good,” I replied. “I finally heard from Igor in Moldova; Denis is leaving; my students are good, etc. How’s yours?”
“Just super.”
“Why, exactly?” I asked, thinking maybe something special had happened.
“I don’t know. It’s just really good. And you make it better.”
Me?
“How, exactly?” I asked.
“Just because you’re you,” he replied.
But his insistence that he wants both Igor and me to come visit him at New Year’s, and not just me alone, leaves me a little skeptical and confused. Did he and Igor really achieve such close straight buddy bonding on Zhorik’s short visit in March (see photos, Chapts. 244, Zhorik interlude proves frustrating, 245, Zhorik exits; and so do human rights) that he doesn’t want to celebrate New Year’s without him?
Or does he just want Igor there because that would prevent any possibility of sex with me?
He asked me again last week what my thinking was vis-à-vis New Year’s. I again reiterated that I wanted to spend the time alone with him, and he insisted that he would Igor came with me.
So I told him maybe I would send Igor to visit him while I visited “sister” Ivan again in Spain, as I did last New Year’s (Chapt. 231, Galicia: Land of bagpipes and miracles).
“I have to think about it,” I told him.
And I do.
Russia will become more democratic after the Presidential election next March, speculated student Alexei, lawyer for a large Russian holding company and very savvy observer of political developments here.
We were discussing the State’s concentrated assault on another Russian oil company executive, former Rossneft CEO Mikhail Gutseriyev, because he didn’t jump fast enough when the Kremlin advised him to sell his oil company to the more Kremlin-friendly Vladimir Deripaska, whose personal assistant is one of my former English students.
In fact he wrote a letter on the company website complaining of “unprecedented hounding” from tax and law enforcement authorities. Not a good idea, he decided, and later recanted his complaints.
But he had already committed the unpardonable sin – publicly defying the Kremlin.
When I observed that it “sounds like another Khodorkovsky” in the making, Alexei disagreed. Gutseriyev’s real crime, he says, is being from the Caucuses, and Putin is afraid he may be more loyal to his dark-skinned fellow Ossetians than to Mother Russia. What Putin really wanted, Alexei speculated, was not to try him as a State criminal, as he did Khodorkovsky, but simply to get him out of the country and neutralize his possible influence on developments in the Caucuses.
Wisely, Gugseriyev immediately went into exile – reportedly to Britain -- and the warrant issued by a Moscow court for his arrest last week, says Alexei, was just to guarantee that he won’t come back. In the meantime, the State won’t seriously pursue him. He’ll take his millions – or billions – and go into comfortable exile without affecting the tense political tug of war between Russia and the Caucuses.
“I believe Putin will indeed step down” at the end of his current term, in accordance with the Constitution, Alexei concluded.
But he agrees with many others that Putin will be back for the 2012 election. “I think Russia will become more Democratic after he leaves office,” he continued.
“It will have to for him to be re-elected. No president of Russia is going to willingly give up his power when he doesn’t have to,” he predicted; “so for Putin to be elected by the people in 2012, Russia will have to become a more democratic country.”
Moscow's 173rd metro station, Trubnaya, located on the light green line and connecting with Tsvetnoi Boulvar station, was finally opened Aug. 30 just in time for Moscow's 860th birthday. Initially scheduled to open in the '90s, the station was under construction when I first came to Moscow nearly ten years ago, but was way-laid by the 1998 financial crisis.
Interesting theory. Let’s see if holds true.
The murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has been solved, declared Russia’s chief prosecutor Yuri Chaika last week, and guess what! It was masterminded by a Russian exile who simply wanted to embarrass the Kremlin.
And who could that be? Well, they didn’t spell it out, but the description fitted perfectly Boris Berezovsky, of course, who the Kremlin has already declared is the one who really killed Alexeander Litvinkenko for the same reason: Just to embarrass the poor, misunderstood Kremlin.
According to one Moscow Times columnist, even Putin loyalist journalists are snickering and shaking their heads over this one.
And the same chief prosecutor, roughly equivalent to our recently discredited Gonzales, huffed mightily over the recent decision of a Swiss court to lift a freeze on funds related to Khodorkovsky’s now bankrupt former Yukos oil company.
This photo by RQ administrator Basil shows some of the marble elegance and one of the fleet of brand new metro trains that will serve it. Moscow's 282.5 km of metro carries between eight and nine million Muscovites -- including the Red Queen -- on a typical work day.
In dropping their judicial cooperation with Russia over the case, the Swiss judges observed that the proceeding had all the earmarks of ousting “political rivals.”
Hmmph! snorted Charka.
“We consider this decision politically motivated! This is a move of disrespect toward our country and an attack on its sovereignty,” he protested.
The civilized world just won’t get it into its head that Russia wants respeck! How many times does Russia have to tell you: I am not a banana republic.
I was going to be a preacher man once upon a time, a man of the cloth, a cleric, a minister of the gospel. I even declared religion as my major at the Methodist college I enrolled in at age 19, with a minor in journalism. But the jolly carousing of my more worldly fraternity brothers soon convinced me of the error of my ways, and I sensibly changed my major to journalism.
But once in a while I still have the irrepressible urge to climb up into the pulpit and pound the Bible, or Koran or Torah or Kama Sutra or Gay Guide to World Cruising and wax eloquent on the wages of sin -- and not just in Moldova, the cost of which we’ve already explored in detail (Chapts. 260, Igor returns to play, but Zhorik keeps top spot, 261, Present from Sochi: Dick bigger than his brain).
No, I’m talking about real sin – the sin of deceit and hypocrisy and phony piety and self-righteous bigotry, the kind of sin practiced by the Pharisees, whom the Big C denounced so disdainfully. The kind of holier-than-thou bigot who climbs to the highest tower, thumps his chest, and proclaims to the world: “Thank God I am not like one of these, a sinner.”
And the higher the tower, it seems, the further the fall.
We’ve had two superb examples of these Pharisees over the last week or two. They pop up periodically, but while I’m in my preacher mood, I’ll just take advantage of these latest two choice specimens.
Larry Craig has been one of the most unctuous and self-righteous clowns of the current Senatorial menagerie. He has consistently and sanctimoniously pontificated on “family values” and railed against godless homosexuality and gay marriage.
So who gets snared in a police bust in an airport toilet for tapping the shoes of the guy in the next stall and slipping his palm underneath the partition to show that he was willing and ready to suck cock, fuck, get fucked, whatever? Of course! It’s old news now. His Senate resignation has already been announced.
And then there’s Ted Haggard, the Reverend Theodore Arthur Haggard, founder of the 14,000-member New Life Church and president of the influential National Assn. of Evangelicals, who repeatedly denounced homosexuality as a sin against God and was publicly campaigning for defeat of a Colorado same-sex marriage bill when the guy whom he’d allegedly been having sex with for the past three years saw one of his TV performances and outed him.
“For someone who is up there preaching that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and he’s going behind his wife’s back and seeing a gay man for sex – I felt like I owed it to the gay community to expose the hypocrisy,” his alleged sex partner told the media.
Let’s go back a little further, to the 1970s and ’80s, when Maryland Congressman Robert E. Bauman, president of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom and perennial outspoken opponent of the occasional feeble Congressional attempts at pro-gay legislation, got caught propositioning a 16-year-old boy.
At least Bauman admitted he was gay and later wrote a book calling for great public understanding and acceptance. Craig’s “I am not gay and have never been gay” will go down in history with the same uproarious derision as Nixon’s pouty declaration that he was not a crook.
Craig was just answering the wrong question. “Gay,” after all, has never been adequately defined. Is it what you say, what you think, what you do, or what you dream about doing? So if they’d asked Craig, “do you like to have sex with other men,” he might have said yes; “but I’m still not gay.”
When I sent the Internet article on Haggard to my straight friend BB in Seattle, he posited in reply:
“Why are so many of the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay types secretly gay? Think of the Pope and all those sashaying Cardinals etc. etc. Could self hatred really be at the core?...On the other hand, maybe the answer is that to shake down the rubes these guys are just using old fashioned queer fear as a fund raising tactic? That they like a little strange once in a while, well, that's what repentance is for.”
No, I don’t think so. As probably do you, I have my own theory:
My theory is that it’s pure and simple camouflage, self-protection. Show me a hysterical homophobe and I’ll show you a scared shitless, deep-closeted fag who thinks if he screams “I hate queers” loud enough and long enough, nobody will suspect.
One of the reasons I think this is because that is what I used to do.
When I was discovering sex in the 1940s and ’50s, to be homosexual automatically defined you either as a criminal or a psychopath. The American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations continued to define homosexuality as a mental illness up into the ’70s. And as a young newspaper reporter, I saw enough police raids, public denunciations, and jail terms to know I didn’t want anybody to think I was one of “them,” even though I’d begun to suspect it myself.
I had to hunker down as deep as I possibly could. I couldn’t afford for anybody to ask, “is he?” Because unlike Craig, I had enough basic honesty that I couldn’t have lied about it. So I had to keep the question from being asked.
And I did this by getting married, being a devout church goer, Sunday School teacher, youth counselor, popular newspaper reporter and media personality, and a paragon of virtue.
Everything was fine until my irrepressible repression came creeping out one steamy hot night in Florida. Like Bauman, I got caught with a 16-year-old. Like Bauman and Craig and Haggard, I lost my job and crept out of town in disgrace to create a new life with the real me.
Fortunately, things have changed a little over the last 40 years. Homosexuality is no longer defined as a mental illness, and cops no longer raid suspected gathering places for ho-mo-sex-u-als.
But unfortunately, they haven’t changed enough. The very social criteria of acceptable behavior that the Craigs and Haggards publicly subscribe to and help perpetuate assure that the barriers to recognizing homosexuality as an accepted way of life will continue, and that people – including themselves – who prefer romance with their own sex dare not live the sexual life they were born to lead.
For survival’s sake, they are compelled to hide behind a secret life. Otherwise, they would lose their friends, their reputation, their social standing, their jobs, and their families.
Instead of working in their positions of influence to create acceptance and change that would eliminate the need for repression and hypocrisy, the Craigs and Haggards take the easy route: They hide deep in their closet, continuously reinforcing their walls of deception by publicly excoriating and denouncing faggots as loud and often as possible. Nobody will ever suspect. That is, until they can’t keep their sad hidden selves hidden any longer, and they come breaking out in bathroom stalls and police stings.
This will continue until the hypocrites – including and especially the majority of the right-wing evangelicals -- confront themselves and begin living the religion that the Big C really taught: Love and forgiveness and acceptance of those who aren’t just like you.
Until this happens, we will continue to be a society of deep closeted homophobes.
Real straights don’t care who other people sleep with. Only the wistful, sad, hidden homosexual who yearns for requited love with another man and is deeply and furiously angry because society won’t let him have it, cares whether other guys sleep with other guys; because that’s what they’d like to be doing but can’t because of the societal convention they’ve locked themselves into and vowed for the sake of respectability to perpetuate.
So they exacerbate the problem by mumbling the old shibboleth, “homosexuality is a choice.” Yeah, maybe I like other men too, but I made the choice to be straight. “I am not gay. I have never been gay.” Right.
Instead of trying to break the convention, they prefer to punish those who are getting away with living the lives they wish they could lead. In Craig’s curious words, they are “naughty boys” who must be punished.
Well, that’s what I think!
What do you think?
Let it all hang out on the Red Queen Forum. What’s your take on the Craigs, Baumans, and Haggards of this world?
See also related pages:
Chapt. #265 - Even without Putin, Russian “democracy” wouldn’t be
Chapt. #263 - The KGB IS the State
Chapt. #260 - Igor returns to play, but Zhorik keeps top spot
Chapt. #256 - Independence Day: Why is there tyranny?
Chapt. #245 - Zhorik exits; and so do human rights
Chapt. #244 - Zhorik interlude proves frustrating
