As the history of life shows, the original blobs banded together so they would individually benefit from being part of a larger group, but eventually the organisms became just organs, perfectly capable of being sacrificed if the larger entity deems fit to do so and powerless to stop it. Every year when little Nordic countries come out on top in the various global quality-of-life indices Americans retort that of course since they’re so small they don’t have as many problems, as if this were somehow an argument against their arrangement. Of course prosperity arises from world-wide economic connections, but about the only reason anyone seems to be able to think of for wanting to be in a leviathan of a political entity is to defend oneself from being devoured by an even bigger one, which doesn’t say much for the leviathan in principle. Besides, as the Swiss demonstrated, if you have enough gold buried away where only you can find it even the Nazis will respect your territorial integrity.

Not that I’m saying we should raise the banner of secession this year, since it’s well known how the U.S. government responds to the call for self-determination from breakaway regions within its borders, but Americans could at least stop ovulating for microphone pleasurers like John McCain who make it a point of pride to have done their best to turn the already-bad-enough two major political parties into one. He constantly brags about “reaching across the aisle” to the other party. Hey McCain, why don’t you keep your lecherous hands to yourself? Actually, he doesn’t “reach across the aisle,” he is the aisle, and all this reaching is an essential part of the Senate’s functioning in about the same way that the carpet on the Capitol floor is. I really don’t understand why such posturing is so popular, since the bipartisan are like the bisexual in that virtually everyone else is turned off by at least half the people they consort with. In any case, please don’t encourage him or others like him; he’s already basically the living incarnation of the AARP’s new advertising mascot, the purple donkephant, and I fear that all the inter-special intercourse that gave birth to it and its ilk is going to cause some sort of epidemic to cross the species barrier.

The atmosphere was already dangerously askew. Would I even see my friend at all for the next two days, or would he just peace off to his basement Hades with his willing Persephone, abandoning me to two days of the barren winter of really awkward conversations with strangers? Fortunately it didn’t turn out that way, since the two sisters turned out to be as smart and vivacious in a sort of acidic way as the girlfriend, and in fact in general their voices and mannerisms were so similar to each other and hers that, as with siblings is sometimes the case, talking to them basically felt like an extension of my relationship to her minus any shared experiences or knowledge.

A couple of hours later we went off to a rodeo, where the announcer claimed that the guy with the sparkly American flag shirt beating a horse with a whip until it bowed down to him, then got up on a little pedestal and chased its own tail around in a circle symbolized the perfect working of American democracy, which I suppose after all it did. Six years of continuous living in the eastern U.S., Paris and China almost convinced me that I’m a real Westerner, and maybe I am, since that whole spectacle had the alienating effect of two magnets with the same charge coming together.

The next day the weekend got completely T-boned by one of the sister’s boyfriends, who the others definitely didn’t approve of, showing up on short notice. He was supposed to arrive at mid-day but was late, so we left her to wait for him and set off to go swimming as the sky was thickening into rain clouds. Within an hour of arriving at the pool rain was pouring down, but we stayed, since the girls weren’t going to let such untoward events make them abandon the outing. So naturally when we got home they tried to make conversation with “the dude,” as they called him, but now, with two couples, one of which only semi-welcome, out of six people, the gravitational fields had become definitely unbalanced, with random areas of the house becoming off-limits at a moment’s notice, like the highways being repaired in the summer, and no one satisfied with each other’s respect for etiquette in this regard. It left me alone a lot with the similarly unpaired youngest sister, whose birthday celebration the whole thing was supposed to be after all. I wondered whether I should be making a move on her or something, for the sake of symmetry as much as anything else. The whole mood was threatening to go all Chekhov at any moment, tipping from anticipation into regret before the weekend was even over, confrontations slipping away or left hanging in the air just because they were too tiring.

But the next day came at last, with a long early-morning horse-back ride north of town. The countryside was extraordinary: a wide valley under a rich blue sky, surrounded by a mixture of rounded and jagged mountains covered with the delectable white parchment bark of aspen trees which, all being connected underground into one super-organism, had a beautiful but disturbingly homogeneous appearance and, unlike most of the evergreen trees around, hadn’t been killed off by the current plague of pine beetles. So the forest appears to be going the same way as the rest of America at the moment, since under assault the ones that herd together in a clump are surviving. I sometimes think people are like aspen trees: an invisible subterranean mass of connections that only poke above-ground into the definite forms in which we see and hear them at the moments we run into them, and thrust up in other, similar forms at different moments. Maybe the price of being a perpetual traveler is never to be around long enough to get a reckoning of the totality, like I’m just channel-surfing other people’s lives.

The caveman brain of humans still tends to think of a fight as the sort of tiff or scrum where you have a chance of protecting yourself. It’s hard to accept emotionally the frightening asymmetry of the modern age, where any battle involving firearms means, as far as the human body is concerned, all offense and no defense. Still, maybe our helplessness to protect ourselves from our own inventions has paradoxically made the world a safer place in the end, has given pause to all those wishing to do each other in but fearful of suffering the same in retaliation, just like in a more extreme sense world peace has flourished in the shade of the mushroom cloud. In any case, that’s not the source of the satisfaction you experience when blasting away with a .22 on the side of a mountain. But even though like Zeus we were standing aloft raining down hot-blooded justice on random rocks and trees, he showed us the inferiority of our arsenal to his by promptly raining us out. If only every army commencing hostilities in some fetid drainage ditch like Belgium could be so easily dissuaded.

On the other hand, Moscow does possess a real greatness, and with its hills and forests and monasteries, in some ways has more character than St. Petersburg’s dictatorially imposed obeisance to the flat, straight-lined, symmetrical ideals of conflict-free harmoniousness, like the Ritalin-enforced peace of an elementary school. It is also more alive: more money, more people and, despite the stereotype of “Russian” Moscow in contrast to “Western” St. Petersburg, Moscow is now a much more international center than St. Petersburg, which is basically just a fancy-looking provincial city.

But this liveliness seems more than a little unhealthy. The money and prices in Moscow are more than inflated. We stayed at the Marriott, which granted is probably not exactly typical, where rooms are $1000 a night, a omelette and coffee for breakfast goes for $65, and wireless access is $15 an hour. That would be one thing in New York or London, but in Russia that $1000 is equal to a sixth of average yearly income. I can’t help thinking that the bubble that is modern Moscow is a bit like taking a Viagra and getting an erection lasting for more than six hours: you might be amazed that such intensity of pleasure could last for so long, but in the end you’re still going to have seek medical attention or risk permanent damage.

p.s. The Moscow Marriott, like any good American hotel, claims saving water as the reason for which they only change your sheets if you request it, which is kind of funny, not just for trying to play the environmental awareness card in Russia, but because the water pressure in the shower, glorious as it was, makes me doubt somewhat the depth of their devotion to the cause of water conservation. Bathing with that thing is like aiming a hurricane at yourself. I’ll be dreaming about that while cautiously dribbling cold water over myself when showering for the next two weeks due to the fact that they turn off the hot water in apartments in St. Petersburg in the summer, allegedly to make repairs.

Of course for me the light is blocked out, living as I do in the permanent nighttime of a lightless gypsy cavern, hedged in by sparkly purple curtains, giant teddy bears with full red promiscuous lips and willow-like nets of beads hanging from candles and chandeliers all somehow carrying on the spirit, even if in cheap and degraded form, of the rococo motifs all over the walls and ceiling of the 18th century building. Since the ever-bumbling institute where I’m studying, which is fittingly named after Aleksandr Nevsky, who, defeating the Teutonic Knights in the 1300’s, struck an early blow for Russian culture against the Teutonic characteristics of efficiency and competence, I suppose I will have a few more days of my own underground life, though as a matter of fact I am the opposite of the Underground Man. He claimed to only be speaking to himself but was actually read around the world, whereas I think I’m addressing the whole world but am really only speaking to myself.

Which is why even if the elections have been genuine and honest I would still say, as I will say, that the woman in whose apartment I am now living turns out to be one of the last Russian democrats. On my first memorable evening in St. Petersburg, while she was showing me around, she smoothly segued in about two sentences from showing me how the TV worked, to commenting that it was all garbage anyway because Russia has no free press, to declaring that Russia is a fascist dictatorship. She also said that she marches in the pro-democracy protests and at least claims to be a friend of Garry Kasparov, although perhaps just spiritually or in the sense of political affiliation. Maybe she can see which direction the wind is blowing, since she somewhat looks like and has decorated her apartment like a fortune-teller. But as Bob Dylan would say, in Russia today it doesn’t take a weatherman. Or maybe it’s some form of rebellion against her mother, who sits in the living room watching TV all hours of the day and night while proclaiming that it is all an expression of corrupt, decadent Western culture that is going to cause World War III.

In any case, my host has made me see that there is something admirable in a place like this in such a cause like democracy that might be worth fighting and even dying for, but I find it almost impossible to connect the concept as it exists and in what it signifies for her with the numbskull popularity contests that go by the name of elections in America. I suppose it’s like in apartments, where someone’s roof is always someone else’s floor. I might well take to the streets on the American system’s behalf if it came to a clear contest with something like the Russian, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to waste my time trying to choose between the vying marketing strategies in which candidates constantly cloak themselves and which serve to conceal any pertinent truths that people might delude themselves into believing that they’ve learned about them. In this respect our elections are inferior even to the Pepsi challenge. Especially since I probably stand less chance to influence the political system by casting the decisive vote in a presidential election than, as a grad. student in literature, by personally coming to power in a military coup. But in any case, even as Russian democracy is dying with little mourning, or at least being shorn of any of the good graces that might make it respectable, this strange woman with the heart of a flood wall has my full attention.

Of course money can’t buy everything. But with even less, in fact with the mere effortless fact of being born you can apparently gain the infinite self-satisfaction with which an obese old woman this very morning at the table next to us in a café while we were sitting down interrogated us, with absolutely no preface and before my lowering body had even reached the chair: “You’re not from New York, are you?” To which I wanted to reply: “No, which is what guarantees that I’ve traveled more than two blocks from home in my life.” But then again, if you antagonize old women the world is never on your side.

The city is such a thunderous furnace of barely contained chaos, it’s no wonder it’s been so hot the last couple of days that it almost seems like the weather gods’ contribution to the atmosphere for the Puerto Rican National Day parade. I was envious of the guy covered only in flour and a loincloth that we saw in Williamsburg one night who came staggering out of a bar where the band which he seemed to be associated with was playing and started performing some sort of cataleptic dance on the sidewalk. Then again, for me to pull off all my clothes like that would have required some sort of justification as performance art, which seems to throw a burka-like veil of respectability over all forms of public nudity. As my friend said, “Even though they may not have any particular merit, I’m sort of glad that things like that happen here.” Which probably sums up the American public’s attitude towards its arts scene, and maybe to New York as a whole, as well as anything can.

“Maybe that’s why the buildings are all so ugly, like they’re not ultimately here for our benefit. After all, the fences of a cattle pen don’t need to be pretty either.”

“What makes them allow themselves to be herded in so docilely? Maybe the cattle already inside denigrate the open range as ’sprawl.’”

“We’re really below the level of cattle though, since we’re choosing to pack ourselves in. Speaking of which, how are we going to afford living here? I heard the city has a rent control policy to keep prices down, but that none of the apartments in the city are cheap enough to qualify.”

“I suppose we could always share a bed to save money.”

“Yeah, nice one. So to save valuable tongue space shall we just make out all the time too?”