An American Babushka in Moscow: The Obsidian King-When Moscow Went to the Dogs
I skim like a gull across the dark sea of sleep. I cannot settle. When I finally do, I dream that my teacher has come to visit me. I sit…
Mary Metzger
On Marches: Military, Murderous and Mighty
Marches are the supreme symbolic subsumation of the ego. Individuals do not march, only unified groups of people sharing a common mass identity march. Soldiers, who qua soldiers, have had…
Dear Comrade: A respectful response to Saral Sakar
A response to Saral Sakar’s “ From Marxist Socialism to Eco-Socialism — Turning Points of a Personal Journey Through a Theory of Socialism.” Dear Comrade, I want you to know…
Sheer Hypocrisy: How America and Americans meddled in Yeltsin’s Election: Addendum 3
I have been writing a series on how America and Americans interfered in Russian at all levels of Russian society to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. First…
Sheer Hypocrisy: How America and Americans Interfered in The Election of Boris Yeltsin – An Addendum
Communism in the Soviet Union did not, as anti-communist propaganda would have us believe, fail because it was inhumane, impracticalor unworkable. It failed because it was not allowed to grow…
Sheer Hypocricy: How America and Americans Interfered in the Election of Boris Yeltsin
PT 2 - The Gentlemen From Harvard Russia has been invaded, but it has never been conquered. When the Mongols invaded her Ivan responded first by becoming their agent and…
Sheer Hypocrisy: How America and Americans Interfered in the Election of Boris Yeltsin: a tale told in five parts. Pt. 1 – The Economists
There is a great wailing arising and much wringing of hands going on in the United States over the assertion that Russia interfered inour last electionto ensure that Donald Trump…
An American Babushka in Moscow: False News About Russia: A Longstanding Tradition
When I first came to Russia, the key political event of the moment was the “war” over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two independent provinces in Georgia. The response of the…
An American Babushka in Moscow: The Front Page of the Star Ledger
Although I usually spend at least an hour every day reading the news, it has been years since I have held a newspaper in my hands. But my son-in-law Emile,…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Babette as Sisyphus
I come awake to the rattle snake sound of the cicadas, nuanced, orchestrated, ebbing and flowing on the air; the buzz of lawnmowers, the swish of tires puckering up from…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Home Sweet Soviet Home
It is not the case that we can live long in places without them becoming part of us and we becoming part of them. I am not here talking about…
An American Babushka in Moscow: On Contradiction-the Dialectic of Putin and Trump
After Helsinki, where Putin and Trump exposed their personal relationship to the world, in a perfect exemplification of the dialectic, Trump returned to feel the wrath of his people, and…
An American Babushka in Moscow: You Can’t go Home Again
It should come as no surprise to me, but it does, that after decades of studying the thinking of the ancient Greeks, I have begun to think like them. In…
An American Babushka in Moscow: A Flicker of Fear
A flicker of fear passes through me this morning when I read the lead article in The Moscow Times titled "Foreigners in Russia are Panicking Over New Migration Rules"(https://themoscowtimes.com/news/foreigners-in-russia-are-panicking-over-new-migration-rules-62130). Panic…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Why Are You Here?
Sooner or later- sooner if they are rude and later if they are polite enough to wait until we have developed a relationship that would allow them to ask a…
An Immigrant’s Tale: The blood of the Tatars
They are the sources of the paced slivers of sound played across seasons, sounds I awaken to, sounds that inform my days, Their sounds, although varying in tone and intensity,…
An American Babushka in Moscow: An immigrant’s tale
If James Joyce's The Dubliners are stories about people who cannot escape their unhappiness, and Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools is about those who believe that they will find…
An American Babushka in Moscow: The Elimination of Labor and the State in the 22nd Century
An article by Neil Irwin in the New York Times posted on June 12, 2018, carries the provocative title: “If the Robots Come for Our Jobs, What Should the Government…
An American Babushka in Moscow: I Don’t Give A Rat’s Ass
You know things are bad when you confront the blurry image of Robert De Niro on the front page of Revolution Newspaper, that proud electronic banner of the Revolutionary Communist…
An American Babushka in Moscow: On the Boundless Pride of Skilled Labor and once again, on Anthony Bourdain, Chef
Without my glasses the trees outside the window are misconceived mosaics. No young breezes have come to play among them, nor has the west wind come to make them dance. …
An American Babushka in Moscow: Further notes on killing ourselves – In Memory of Anthony Bourdain
Yesterday I wrote about the fact that the suicide rate in America had gone up twenty five percent over the course of the last sixteen years, and then drew out…
An American Babushka in Moscow: You don’t have to kill us, we will do it ourselves
Those who cherish justice throw their bodies against the armies of injustice. Those who love freedom die fighting for it. Those who hate oppression are willing to rise up against…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Singularity and Social Space
Like Oedipus I was never able to escape my fate. In principle, if not in actuality, I was orphaned before I was born: a father dead from the war, a…
An American Babushka in Moscow: On falling in love with Moscow and its pastrami
I am from New York City, and what that means is that I know a good pastrami sandwich when I see, or more properly, taste one. For those of you…
An American Babushka in Moscow: The Tai Chi Babushki: How I was taught I wasn’t a Communist
It is late spring in Moscow, and the day is exquisite. I sit on my balcony and drink my coffee and watch a mischievous breeze run through the trees. It…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Superstition and Slaughter: the Wars of the Lords of Opium
There is something in the white trunked birches of Russia that dumbs my mind and irritates my flesh. Every May, their leaves, still small and weak from just being born…
The Psychopathology of Capitalism- Chapter 2, Part 2
While the specifics of human character structure vary across time and from place to place, there are certain human characteristics which seem to arise out of primordial human needs and/or…
A Miracle in the State of Pennsylvania
An American Babushka in Moscow: A Miracle in the State of Pennsylvania, U.S.A. – four socialists backed by the Democratic Socialists of America win primary seats. I am exhilarated today,…
The Psychopathology of Capitalism – Chapter 2, Pt. 1
As we have seen, theideontologicaldelusion of exclusionary oneness that forms the ideological superstructure of capitalist social relations forcedearly liberal democratic theorists to create an imaginaryindependent and antisocial individual who initially…
The Psychopathology of Capitalism
Chapter 1. Part 2 The psychopathology of capitalism is, as I have proposed above, rooted in the delusion that there exists anabstract, exclusionary “one” or “I”. This delusion negates the…
Countercurrency as Insurgency: Reflections on the old and new face of the “internet” in light of Gale and Null.
There is news, there is old news, and there is history. Gale and Null’s article is old news on the verge of becoming history. Moreover, it is full of unsubstantiated…
An American Babushka in Moscow: May Day in the Former Soviet Union
When I first came to Russia I was thrilled by any artifact of the Soviet Union, by every Red Star I saw atop a building, by every hammer and sickle…
Blockchain Technology: From the Chaos of Capitalism a New(Revolutionary) World Order Emerges
While there are many approaches to it, there is only one truth: that the world is One and thus that all is internally related. The genius of Einstein is that…
An American Babushka in Moscow: The five people you will meet when you first get to Moscow
Back in the day, ten years ago when I first set foot in Moscow, when the Moscow Metro was the home of the Minotaur from which I felt myself lucky…
The Psychopathology of Capitalism – Chapter 1. Part 2
Chapter 1. Part 2 The psychopathology of capitalism is, as I have proposed above, rooted in the delusion that there exists anabstract, exclusionary “one” or “I”. This delusion negates the…
Putin’s Greatest Battle Is Against The “Gods of Technology” Themselves
I don’t know how or why I ever got an invitation to come and teach in Moscow. I was hesitant to come: after all I was teaching at two small…
The Psychopathology of Capitalism: Chapter 1 – part 1
The psychopathology of capitalism arises from the delusionthat there exists an exclusionary “one” rather than an inclusionary One. This delusion is both a product of the historical development of capitalism…
An American Babushka in Moscow: The Brave Hearts of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Edward Snowden
Perhaps the first signs of his bravery were the fights he fought against bigger, tougher boys in the courtyard of the St. Petersburg building where he grew up. He fought…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Reflections on the logic of the permanent war economy
Monogamy and growing old produce the same results. Sleeping with the same person over and over again takes the razor sharp blade of passion and dulls it flat. So too,…
If Asifa Were The First, The Last or The Only One I Could Weep
If Asifa were the first, the last or the only girl child to be tortured, raped, murdered, discarded like garbage, perhaps the callous that has formed around my life would…
Homeless
Into the night he releases his wordless poem, rhythmic and perfectly metered; then pauses to consider it before a new trope of sound rises with the steam from his mouth.…
The Dialectic of Autism
The term dialectic as it is used here is a way of looking at the world that corresponds to the actual structure of the world itself without regard to whether…
The Great Skripal Poison Mystery: What Jane Marpel Said
The West points its finger at Russia, Russia points its finger at the West. As for us, we do not really know who did it or why. We know nothing…
An American Babushka in Moscow: An enigmatic sky and the stillness and silence of Moscow
Of course, one never knows the degree to which what one sees is distorted by “subjectivness”; the extent to which one projects oneself upon the screen of existence. But it…
Disembodiment As Alienation
Alienation as Disembodiment: considerations on Edward Curtin’s Disembodied Americans and the Crucifixion of the World. I am not writing to criticize Curtin’s piece because to my mind there is nothing…
An American Babushka in Russia: The Putin Youth
I find two things that catch my eye this morning. One is an article in the Moscow Times, a liberal English language newspaper written for Moscow expats, the other,…
An American Babushka in Moscow: On Toilet Paper And Ketchup
Life in Russia, for the average person, is lived “close to the bone.” Closer and closer to the bone as the economy suffers under the relentless attacks of the capitalist…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Sun, Warmth and American Football in Perovski Park
Three things have occurred simultaneously to bring joy to the hearts of the Babushki of Perovo on this Sunday morning: the sun is shining brilliantly, the fierce cold of the…
An American Babushka in Moscow: Putin, Hemingway and Paranoia as True Perception
Frontline has done a series on Vladimir Putin, called The Putin Files. They are available on Youtube and are well worth the watch. In them, a variety of “experts on…
Vladimir Putin, The Man And The Leader
Heraclitus, the brilliant Presocratic philosopher, is remembered for having said “You cannot step into the same river twice,” to which one of his contemporaries responded, “you cannot even step into…
The Pigeons of Zhulebino
Those first days in Moscow, they were the enemy: their gray down gathering in corners like the frail remains of long dead cicadas. their dropping scarring the glass, melding with…
An American Babushka in Moscow: It Is All About The Elections Now
It is all about the Russian election now: the world press, the Russian press is filled with articles about the upcoming elections. Of course, the position of the West, which…
An American Babuska In Moscow: Remembering The Red Star, Health Care In The Former Soviet Union
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel drove home the point that one thing does not replace another, just like that, plain and…
An American Babuska In Moscow: Reflections On The Myth of the Failure of the Soviet Union, and On Happiness, Housing and Stability
I read with some interest a piece on CNN today https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/14/europe/russia-us-election-compare-intl/index.html, which compared the “happiness” of people living in Russia and America in regards to factors such as wages,…
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