FIGHT FASCISM, FIGHT BOREDOM!
–
Letter to a Swiss Monthly
The years since Gorbachev’s perestroika in Russia have shown – to
those not only “with eyes to see”, but to many of those with eyes at all – many
revealing moments in the transition from the Soviet system to Dollar Russia. Recently I,
while waiting for a typically late Russian woman, observed two confronting symbols of the
transition...
Some decade ago...the first, “unprofessional” TV commercials
(rather than state propaganda) in post-Soviet Russia...the first billboard near Pushkin
Square in Moscow advertising Mars candy bars (in English!) in the early
1990’s...the awkward, scattered laughter and murmuring in the Moscow Conservatory when a
commercial sponsor to a concert was announced (this still sometimes occurs in
2001)...the first young teenager entering the subway car, pretending to be nonchalant,
while knowing full well that he was one of the first to wear the then-new (soon common)
American-style baseball cap backwards (~spring 2001)...
Transitions...changes...from one social culture to another.
Now almost all of the inane (and sometimes intelligent) TV programs and
shows (talk shows, game shows, serials, comedies, etc.) that exist in “the West”, or
“Westernized” world, are to be seen daily in Russia by the millions across twelve time
zones! I am not sure if they, here in Russia, have copied (with their own, unique
“Russian” angle and mentality, of course) all of the good, bad, intelligent and
vulgar TV programs one can see in the USA (and other parts of the world), but it is now
fully clear that they eventually will!
Russians daily walk by “old”, Communist monuments, symbols,
statues, wall-reliefs...of Lenin, Marx, Engels, the Hammer and Sickle, etc, like unnoticed
wall-decorations. (Most of the movable red propaganda slogans were removed long ago!) They
notice them much less often than visiting “Westerners”.
A recent advertising campaign in Moscow for a brand of popular Western
cigarettes has the lead slogan (in Russian): “Fight Boredom”: “Pall Mall has
determined that boredom is hazardous to your health”, therefore one should battle
boredom by smoking Pall Mall cigarettes (which, incidentally, “the Russian Ministry of
Health has determined is bad for your health”). This is perhaps the first time in all of
Russia’s history, that “boredom” has been used to advertise. (I guess it addresses
the ennui of the masses.)
Here is one instance where the “high”, bodily life of the consumer
culture (once an impossible word combination in Russia) of the “West” replaces the
ideals of the USSR. The ideals of communism – defeated and discarded on the “ash-heap
of history” – stand, rather stood, in contrast to the 18th century ideals of
the (European and American) Enlightenment: democracy, equality, freedom, the rights to
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The consumer “ideals” –
“trans-national”? (subnational?) – apply most often not to the mind and social
aspirations of mass individual and/or collective man and women (e.g.“Workers and
Peasants of the World Unite”?), but to their bodies: consume, enjoy. (“Consumers of
the World Unite”?!)
The “ideals” of consumerism are in this instance to my mind in a
way even lower than those of communism: fight boredom by smoking these (cancerous)
cigarettes. (Someone should write a cultural history of “boredom” in Old Holy-,
Soviet-, and Dollar Russia – indeed a history and philosophy of “boredom” in the
world’s cultures and classes!)
Pall Mall cigarettes ads here in Russia are generally “primitive”
– like old Communist slogans – even to those one could not call “intellectual”; so
that the current advertising campaign is hardly surprising in its character. But in one
metro (subway train) station in Moscow one can see a clear example of the contrasting
ideals of man and society – “communism” vs. “consumerism” – confronting each
other. Of course, the Soviet ideals are dead and gone (they were actually “dead” long
before they were “gone”), and the symbols remain often just due to a lack of
sufficient $$$ to remove them! But on the walls of this Soviet-era subway station is to be
seen a colorful red and gold mural praising the Soviet Army in its united campaign
battling against the fascists during “the Great Patriotic War” (World War II). But now
the Soviet symbols of war with the fascists face, in mock battle – as it were,
the... “fight boredom” ad campaign of the new social order in the Russia of the
consumer society.
Russians really rarely notice the Soviet symbols around them anymore.
Routine daily life does not often demand reflection on the changes in which most are still
often passive, forced participants, just trying to survive. As false and illusory as the
Communist, Soviet ideals were in reality, or came to be...the ad campaign of Pall Mall
cigarettes seems though even lower as a human ideal – even if it is a more real,
practical gift from the West than oligarchic, corrupted politics and “(un)free market
economics” – though surely as false and unreal.
By Stephen Lapeyrouse
www.AmericanReflections.net
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