I never though I’d end up having some positive things to say about the heads of the Russian government, one of the most corrupt and abusive in the world, but ever since Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, the last few weeks have been full of surprises. Russia recently rejected calls by the US to impose starvation sanctions on Iran, arguing that they are “counterproductive” and that the Western world should rely more on diplomacy.

Bravo to Medvedev and Putin for recognizing the insanity of American bullying in the Persian Gulf. Russia has much more to fear from Iranian nukes than the US does, yet it is pursuing a much more prudent and dovish path of engagement. They are not fooled by US and Israeli propaganda about the supposed “existential threat” Iran faces and the hysteric paranoia about an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Listening to the US media’s coverage, Iran is always just days away from nuking Jerusalem and New York City for fifty years now.

Obama’s calls for new sanctions on Iran and his Secretary of State’s hawkish rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of 2002-2003, when the Bush Junta was warning us about Iraqi WMDs, mushroom clouds, and that evil “Hitler,” Saddam Hussein. We all know how that campaign ended: the bombing and sacking of Baghdad that resembled the Mongols bloody siege in 1258, a million dead Iraqis, $3 trillion down the drain, and the strengthening of both Al Qaeda and Iran.

Moscow’s refusal to follow Washington’s lead is not only beneficial to peace, global security, and access to Iranian oil, it also signifies a growing power challenging American hegemony over the globe. The US does have 100,000 troops near Russian borders in Afghanistan, but US presence and influence in Eastern Europe is diminishing.

This should be a wake-up call to the Obama administration that empire is ultimately an unsustainable path. First of all, we simply can’t afford it. The federal budget deficit for 2009 is $1.42 trillion, more than the combined debt of the first 200 years of our Republic. At least 70% of our yearly budget is directly fed to the Pentagon monster in the name of “defense,” and naturally, Obama plans to increase this military spending by 8% next year. Yes, Obama is a socialist; a military socialist, the worst kind of all, robbing Americans of their wealth in order to expand his empire.

While Russia seeks diplomacy and engagement with Iran, the US is seeking bunker-buster bombs at lightning speed, which would presumably be cowardly dropped from 30,000 feet on innocent Persians. The US has been in a perpetual state of war since 1945, eagerly finding new enemies to bomb or bribe (or both). War is the biggest political racket of them all, and with the US military terrorizing Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan at the same time, another war would be quite the distraction from these quagmires. It’s the only logical explanation on why General McKiller wants 80,000 more troops in Afghanistan and the Pentagon wants middle-school ROTC: more cannon fodder.

One thing our elected officials easily forget is that perhaps the surest occurrence in history is the fall of an empire; not if, but when. The American Empire is sustained by the power of the dollar as a global reserve currency, 1,000 military bases in over 100 countries, and cruise-missile equipped carriers in every ocean. But the world is beginning to reject the US government’s fiat currency and trigger-happy foreign policy.

But peace is difficult; it takes prudent statesmen stressing diplomacy, engagement, trade, and the moral rejection of military force. Unfortunately, the temptation for war is too much to resist for the Imperial City in DC, no matter who is in charge.

_

For more of Robert’s work, please visit his Libertarian Examiner blog.

Anton squinted a bit as the jazz ensemble was tuning up.

“Hmm,” he murmured. “They are not black. This will not be good.”

A little more than a year before, it was I who was sitting in a jazz dive on the other side of the world in a rough part of town. Traveling to Russia for the first time with only a faint grasp of the history, wild delusions about the culture and not a lick of the language, the distance between San Francisco and St. Petersburg shrank just a bit that night in that club. With a head dizzy from bombardment by Cyrillic script and liver shocked stupid from Russian stills, knowing that it still don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing was a welcome bit of home for a stranger in a strange land.

It made Russia nothing like the movies.

With just a little more than a month to spare, the crew from Piter had in turn come to America. The pair that had made the trip were Anton and Denis. I had argued the definition of Black Metal with Anton’s girl in Kronstadt and took in Peter the Great’s remarkable retreat Peterhof with Denis. After a wild swing of Southern California, they came up to visit San Francisco to see the sights and catch up with me for a drink. They insisted on jazz, no longer the reliable strength of the city. A local standards ensemble at a spot deep in the Mission was all the newspaperman could deliver and from the first tune it went as I had expected.

Anton’s assessment had a distinctly Russian timbre; an honesty that most Americans mistake for rudeness. “This is not as strong as in St. Petersburg, I think. We have white people playing jazz there as well.”

Russians are the most difficult people on the planet to impress. That much I learned when after close calls and crazy sights I would turn to the comrade next to me and in every case he would just shrug and say with a half-smile, “It is uh… no big deal.” Bears on leashes, square kilometers of mosaic and dead deformed babies in bottles barely bent the needle on these people’s amazement meters. In front of wonders of art and architecture, they would never gasp and never exclaim, offering only modest hints at their pleasure or dissatisfaction. Russians are the most unshakable sort I’ve found anywhere.

It made me feel a little guilty about their visit. For all the once-in-a-lifetime batshit unbelievables I saw and did in their everyday, I knew before they arrived I wouldn’t be able to reciprocate. Denis did register a bit of surprise at the large portions of food and small portions of beer – with ratios exactly St. Petersburg’s opposite. Anton did pick up on my pet peeve of Californian business with its long attention to design and charts fulfilled with short attention to actual work. They observed that the McDonald’s was “Ukrainian quality” with its lack of cheese and that all the houses were small and the size of our coins make absolutely no sense.

They collected a good bag of stories to bring home, but nothing near the treasure chest I spread when the roles were reversed. Never did I hear about a tinge of awe or a widening of their life’s lens for having come here. It didn’t seem as though they learned more about themselves or their homes, their people or their world.

When I went to their home, I confirmed exactly dick of what I had in my head about that country and its people. When they came to mine, I fear, they only confirmed what all the Russian young assume is the American Way.

“We were prepared completely, I think,” Denis said. “It is just like the movies.”

Right about now, Condoleezza Rice is fighting a fuckstart case of jet lag. Tasked unenviably with a trip to besieged Georgia, Rice carried this week the tepid response of the Bush administration to Russia in response to the latter’s invasion of the former. Warning that US/Russia relations were facing a falling out, Russia appeared to show little concern, announcing that South Ossetia and Abkhazia was theirs to keep. Complimentary to the weak rhetoric, America’s material aid to Georgia has consisted of a grand total of two C-17s carrying a few boxes of bandaids and cornflakes. Within this context and a rushed flight across the globe, one wonders how Rice will be able to keep a straight face while asking another big country to stop destroying a little one.

A telling comparison is diffing the notes from Bush the First’s fervor in condemning Iraq over the invasion of Kuwait against his son’s stern, but notably uninspired, condemnation of Russia. With an entire world’s memory fresh with the details of both, some have expressed surprise that the United States seems so loathe to intervene on an ally’s behalf. For many of us hardened cynics, though, surprise is hard to muster. After all, George W. Bush declaring when is and is not an appropriate time to wage war is like Jenna Jameson saying what is and is not appropriate to fuck.

In contests of will, victory often belongs to he who holds the high ground. As true on battlefields as it is in boardrooms, maintaining a superior position to the opponent often yields superior leverage. So when assessing the scope of Secretary Rice’s diplomatic mission in the Caucasus, knowing the amount of leverage means knowing the likelihood of success.

In matters of conflict, the last thirty years have seen the United States tumble steadily from the moral high ground. During the tenure of our current commander-in-chief in particular, we’ve suffered through the diplomatic consequences of losing this moral high ground. What we’re seeing with the response of the Bush administration in the Russia / Georgia conflict is the impotency of inferior moral authority. Actual people with actual Russian passports were getting killed by Georgian troops in a military crackdown in South Ossetia. With Russian “citizens” dying, Russia took the pieces of Georgia it wanted along with the moral high ground. Compared to the false pretenses of the US occupation of Iraq, Russia’s grievances appear enormous.

The only force in the world that has the economic and political clout to counter Russian ambition in Georgia is the United States. Is it at all astonishing that once our credibility in these matters was gone that they seized what they wanted at the first available opportunity?

The Guardian is running a story about legislation currently being drawn up in Russia to outlaw being emo.  The Duma held a hearing entitled “Government Strategy in the Sphere of Spritual and Ethical Education.”  The effort specifically was intended to amend the current strong regulations against skinheads to include kids sporting “black hair with fringes that cover half the face.”  Judging by the current laws against skinheads, should the bill pass emos would be banned from schools and government buildings as well as face heavy censorship of emo websites.  The sponsors of the bill are aiming for passage by the end of the year.

One could easily herald the Russian legislature for this forward thinking bill.  “At last,” a reasonable person would declare.  “One government is ready to do something to rid us of the terrible plight of emo.”  The bill itself is favored undoubtedly by many in the country.  It makes perfect sense in the context of modern metropolitan Russia.  Having some first hand knowledge of their revulsion of emo, the staggered march of Western pop culture around the globe makes this legislation arrive exactly at the point in Russia when the Fall Out Boy record got played one time too effing many.

However well intentioned, this law is fundamentally wrong.  What the Russian legislature is failing to consider is the effect that likening emo culture to criminal neo-Nazi elements will have.  During my entire stay in Russia I saw Nazis only one time, who were competing for protest space in front of a mall on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect.  In the wide swath of that city that I explored, I only once encountered any skinheads and only then in a pathetic, comical setting.

Emo in Russia, on the other hand, is a very public phenomenon. On the bus, in the metro, at McDonalds; these fuckers are everywhere.   Any public place is filthy with them.  They are always eating their Chicken McNuggets, always crying where everyone can see.  I don’t know when the last was that Dashboard Confessional came to play Piter, but if her streets are any indication the scalpers must have made enough to live on for the rest of the year.  Their ubiquity is what draws the ire of the legislators and of the public.

If emos were placed in the same category of skinheads, they would virtually disappear from the public eye.  This result may seem to meet the government’s goal, but if we cannot see the emos, how will we be able to beat the shit out them?  Without them congregating conveniently in public places, the effort to locate and pummel these emos will unfairly burden concerned citizens nationwide.  The results will be the same as the neo-Nazis they tried to eradicate ten years earlier; the symptoms would fade but the disease would still remain.

Outlawing emo will not eliminate emo, it will only make it harder to find.  Sadly, emo is not something we can destroy through politics.  It must run the natural course of any annoying fad.

But in the meantime if we can’t get rid of emos, we should at least keep them easy to find, and consequently, easier to kick in the face.

“I was born very far from where I was supposed to be, so I’m on my way home.” -- Bob Dylan

I was surrounded by dentists and drag queens on the corner of 4th and Howard, each wary of the presence of the other. Waiting for the crosswalk light to turn white, the fellow next to me fixed his six inch pumps and asked me, “Do you know where the Love Parade is?”

“Sorry man,” I replied. “Love is one of those things some of us weren’t meant to find.”

—

Getting the reflective distance necessary to evaluate such an adventure takes a few days. Jet lag gives your brain tunnelvision; it is functioning almost like it should, except the peripheral thoughts that keep us all company are a shambling goo. The “thank yous” to waitresses get back to English from Russian. The signal attenuator for English language goes from 11 back to 0. Morning tea turns to coffee, BBC World is replaced by San Francisco Chronicle, and cold stares at my hair shift to warm amused smiles. I catch up on the new release in movies (3:10 to Yuma), music (Foo Fighters, New Found Glory), and video games (Team Fortress 2). I’m returning to the life I left and the jackets aren’t quite fitting the same. The transition isn’t easy, but inevitable.

Near instantly, my gastrointestinal system goes into high fructose induced shock. The first four days in Russia I had a similar problem as my body expelled all the artificial flavors and preservatives had ingrained a certain level of expectation in the system that keeps the human machine running. The introduction of real sugar in the Coca-Cola, real meat in the salami, and real rye in the bread was enough for my body to tell all the yellow number 5 and MSG to kindly get the fuck out. The first four days the shit couldn’t get out fast enough. It was like I was eating real food for the first time and the whole of my abdomen was extremely fucking confused.

Returning to the ways of old has the gut traffic jammed up like Monday morning on Highway 101. As I pick up the Metamucil from the corner drug store, the woman behind the counter chuckles. She can laugh all she wants -- in three days I know which restroom I’m going to visit.

On the flight to St. Petersburg I watched No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary of Bob Dylan. A fitting overture to this Russian opera, Dylan describes his principal motivation for this place called “home.” Having come close but never quite, I can sympathize. Already the swath I’ve cut through this planet’s bountiful harvest is longer than most. And in every corner of this earth I have the privilege of seeing I see in the eyes and in the hearts of humans an earnest sense of belonging. The very real sparkle in the eye of one identifying oneself as home.

Some of these folks found it immediately. Some have found it after travels longer than mind. Education pulling oneself from agrarian Nigeria to the capital of Russian cosmopolita. National duty sending one from the outer reaches of Siberia to Cold War listening posts on the South Pole. The business of video games getting a self-proclaimed East Coast punk stuck in Warsaw.

Travelers all, the best we can hope for is a clear road and good company a fair part of the way. These friends we make and these hearts we break along the way serve as the guideposts to finding our way home. Little angels whose angles are best when perpendicular to our own, giving us the strong turns on the path that effect the real change we wish to live.

I don’t know if I am any closer to home after visiting St. Petersburg.
But I do know the way back if it is there.

Flickr:

Do svidaniya I

Do svidaniya II