Angry Patriotic Traitor
One day I was taking a train to Manhattan, and while doing what I usually do, which is observing others, I noticed something mildly interesting: A middle-aged Chinese lady in front of me was staring reverently at a cheap phone card. It was no different from any other cheap phone cards, except for the Chinese characters all over it. She looked at it as if it was the most adored thing in her life, and had someone taken it away from her at that moment, she would follow him through swamps and mountains to eventually bite his arm off, along with the preciousss. Alright, that was corny, I promise not to make trendy literature references again. Anyway, she looked like she was holding a piece of China itself in her hands, even though it was merely a piece of paper that gets thrown away once all minutes are used up.
I remember thinking to myself “What is your problem, lady? You are in the US of A. You’re out of that hellhole. You are lucky, so move on.” Then I realized that if a Chinese person said something to that effect about me and Russia (which is where I am from), I would first enquire if he knew Kung Fu, and if the answer was no I’d kick his ass. Even though I suck at fighting I’d do my best, because the honor of my home country is what’s at stake.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, people who decided to leave the country for good were labeled as a “traitors”, or “a disgrace to the nation”, and were consequently stripped of what little rights they had. Today there is no such thing, not officially anyway, so Russians are free to exercise self-loathing faithless treachery whenever they want. That is exactly what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years. Of course there are reasons for my departure from Russia. People don’t just wake up and get this idea in their heads that moving to USA will increase their quality of living by 0.1%. My reasons were much stronger.
Even people who don’t know much about what goes on outside of their own little town still know that Russia isn’t doing so well. Everything there has been going downhill for the last eight years, and with the help of our “beloved” president the country is progressively going back to totalitarianism. There is hardly any future for Russians, and our good old tradition to resort to drinking whenever something bad happens is now hard to maintain, due to ridiculously high prices on Vodka. Those bastards!
That is the secondary reason of course. The primary reason for me was the military draft. The most patriotic men of my country, with any reasonability at all, know that the Russian army is not the right place to be. Soldiers hardly get paid at all, and are treated like shit by both officers and the “old-timers”. It’s a breeding ground for moral decay, heavy drug usage, rape, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. No thanks. So now that there is a Russian law stating that being enrolled in college is no longer an excuse not to serve your country in the army for a year, my only options were:
a) leave the country,
b) disappear until I am 27 (that leaves me pretty much screwed for the rest of my life), or
c) find the right person in high places and bribe him. A lot. That would take more money than to build an exact replica of the Titanic, load it with 100 Playmates from the Playboy Mansion, go around the world, then come home, launch an exact replica of Challenger into the ship, let it all sink, and still feel good about yourself.
Yes, that much money.
So the solution seems fairly obvious, right? With some close relatives living in New York, and having “Jewish” written in my passport as a nationality, what could possibly stop me from entering the United States of America? After all, that’s what my parents and I ultimately decided. Well, no, it’s not that easy. Wherever there is push, there is also pull. Right now I suggest you take notes, my dear fellow Americans. If the following seems obvious to you – good, but I know for a fact there are people who won’t find it so obvious.
The “pull”, here, is the feeling that no matter how well you're off in your new place, you will still always feel that you really belong somewhere else for the rest of your life. This has little to do with the conventional understanding of patriotism, or god forbid, pride; it’s about an attachment to other people like you, which can never be fully restored away from one’s homeland. It’s not about friends and relatives either (that only includes about 10 people in my case, I got over that fast), but rather people whom I have never met. People who I share something more than just time and space with. A Russian guy who punches me in the face, out of the blue, is much dearer to me than a non-Russian guy who does the same thing. Why? Because something connects me and that Russian guy, even though we hate each other. THAT’S what I miss. Bumping into some hopeless drunk on a street after midnight, and feeling a trace of sympathy along with the general disgust. Now here, on “neutral territory”, I’ll probably be more sympathetic towards that asshole that would punch me in the face rather than that cheery Hindu guy I copied a Chemistry lab from today. Yes, that’s not a good thing, but I can’t help it. Similar things do attract people, and fuck that Greek homo Plato who said otherwise; “Opposites attract”. Funny that a homo would say that, isn’t it?
So anyway, as years go by, I would expect to feel closer to people here, and less attached to people over there, right? Yes, but some things just become permanent once you get past a certain stage, and that’s the problem with immigration for adults: there is no such thing as a complete “naturalization”. Even if you have been naturalized you are never complete. Ok, that pun wasn’t funny. Notice how this article got boring once I gave up on popular culture references?
Speaking of culture, that term is so overused in the English language that it makes me sick. What I have described above is not exactly what a sociology professor would mean by culture, so make no mistake. When Americans move to other places permanently (that really happens, believe it or not) what they miss first is the luxury, and then that mysterious notion of culture, which usually just refers to traditions such as bathroom line politics. So I guess that is the inverse of what I was talking about earlier. Your stereotypical American has less “real” cultural attachments to other stereotypical Americans than two people from other countries do. Yes, I’m relatively sure of that. I’m not saying there is no attachment at all though, just less. A Texan and a New Yorker held captives in a concentration camp among, let’s say, Australians will surely become best friends. (And if that were ever to actually happen, there will probably be a movie about it which I will never bother to see.)
So can I say Chinese or Pakistani people feel the same way? Yes, probably. What do I know about China or Pakistan though? Nothing, so it’s better for me to just shut up now.
See, that wasn’t so bad for a first guest article. Survey says… needs more puns. Dammit! Ok, here you go:
Q: What is “asshole” in Russian?
A: Jerkoff.
Better now? No? Well, fuck it.
Your comrade,
Cynical Degenerate,
Complete Lord and Master of Grammatical Errors and Disorganized Thoughts.
by
Cynical Degenerate
