Capitalism (Democracy), Fast, then Slow Onset Of

After the dust cleared, just as we were becoming aware of the world if not the incredible historical landslides taking place around us, the capital rolled in. The capital that kept us happy and rationally exuberant and rich and occupied with informercials and OJ and the tech boom, the capital (not indomitable) that people all over the world craved (not everyone). The capital and perhaps maybe the political bodies that come with it, like the lady who welcomed some of our ancestors in to begin with, the ones who knew that a new entrance and a new name and all the perpetual newness meant at least the freedom to get the stuff to make the stuff, or the lady who sits across from the Capitol, blinded and carrying a light and balanced load. Or perhaps the capital would flow in accompanied by just the skeletons of those bodies, like the ghastly horseback visitors of fairy tale hamlets that slip in at night, quietly leaving everything and nothing the same. Not just the bodies of oligarchs’ enemies, but the nameless bodies of wars waged partly in the name of a freedom that could not possibly exist yet, and partly in the name of the capital that could make, at the very least, the long travails, the long continuing wait, worthwhile. Worth something. The first months after the Soviet Union had passed on seemed the most exuberant and exciting politically, the most lawless, but the most exciting in Russia since the earlier revolutions. The succeeding months, it turns out, saw the exuberance and lawlessness continue across the bustling cities and unending swath of natural resources, but only for certain individuals. Everyone tried to get in the fold, including even some treasury department hacks and a couple of Harvard economists. Things changed and then they kept changing, so that the whole country fell into an unsteady but subtle rhythm of evolution between not two wildly different economic philosophies but a host of different corruptions, frauds, half-truths, prides and desperations. The display of wealth remains gaudy and intense because eager, while displays of non-wealth lie everywhere, and a growing middle class ekes out some ambivalent, new-fangled survival between the rosy culture of dedushka’s withered utopia and the newly-dyed Chinese or Malaysian or maybe Italian threads of the young marketplace, perhaps as glossy as before but delivered from the dictates of national songs to the candied, hypnotic din of ringtones. Where this colorful, painful, disorienting tension leads remains to be seen, beyond the parodic “Moscow Millionaire Fair” and the pathetic suffering of so many, perhaps in a future that might actually (as opposed to hypothetically, and emptied of mere ideology) have to do with a revolution—or a re-evolution—of the people for the people and by the people. But that is not a slogan on the dollar bill.