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October 31, 2005
Melancholy Baby
I finished reading In Search of Melancholy Baby by Vassily Aksyonov about a week ago and it was quite interesting. Aksyonov was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in the early 80's for upsetting the commies through his writings like The Burn and eventually he settled down in Washington D.C. He continued to write and Melancholy Baby is his take on living in America.
For a book published in 1987 it is still fairly apt to today's current events and some passages read like they were written this year. For instance, Aksyenov writes about the seething and irrational hatred of neo-conservatives. Aksyenov actually knows what a neoconservative is and seems to respect them. Considering the following excerpt from a letter to the editor from last week's San Francisco Chronicle as a typical 2005 understanding of neoconservatives:
President Bush and his merry band of uber-religious neocons objected to the advancement of stem-cell research by arguing that it requires the "murder" of human embryos.
From everything I have read about the embryonic stem cell debate and neo-conservatives, it would seem that most "neocons" would support embryonic stem cell research. Most neocons are certainly not uberreligious. If anything, religion seems to be a rather small or even non-existent motivation for most neocons. On social issues (as opposed to foreign policy issues and sometimes economic issues) neocons tend to be fairly liberal. That is one of the factors that separates them other conservatives and hence why they are called neo-conservatives instead of regular conservatives, paleoconservatives, etc., but this much thinking gets in the way of the letter writer's bile and need to spew as many pejorative phrases as possible in her denunciation of Bushitler. "Neocon" has also become for many a term for any conservative they dislike.
Back to Aksyenov. Early in the book he talks about the hatred of America around the globe, which he could have written about just as easily today. Much of the hatred then was just as irrational as the hatred is today and is based more on American values and on envy than on any specific American actions. The other interesting part of the book was his reaction to interacting with various Americans. My favorite was the waitress in Texas who found out he had been kicked out of the Soviet Union for his writings and told him "Welcome to America!" The two other interesting interactions were with government officials. The first was a highway patrolman who after giving Aksyenov a ticket lost all interest in him. The fact that a policeman was not out to get him impressed him and he learned that is fairly typical of most police officers here. Unfortunately, one of the immigration officials he worked with on his refuge status did seem out to get him. She was not as welcoming as the other immigration people he had met with in the past and yelled at him about not deserving to be in this country when he pointed out that the other officers had looked up a particular form on the computer on previous occasions. As much as I dislike illegal immigration, I do think legal immigrants seeking citizenship should be treated with respect.
The other interesting reaction Aksyenov had was to American corporate customer service, which stunk in the 1980's as well. Aksyenov was used to paying minor bribes in the Soviet Union to get deliveries faster, but Americans are not so easily bribed. This led to him paying out less in bribes, but running up against the wall of customer service people who lack any incentive to make your experience a pleasant and quick one.
I have read several Russian authors before, mainly Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, and will put The Burn on my to read list since it is supposed to be Aksyenov's best novel. Right now I am about a third of the way through You Can't Say That by David Bernstein, which is a book about how civil rights laws are destroying first amendment rights.
Posted by Pete at October 31, 2005 05:41 PM
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