More and more often I get the same feeling. Here I am at a food shop, and the shelves seem to be bursting with goods, sparkling with their packaging but once you start to look intently at those goods you start to get second thoughts about the country of origin, or production date, or the way the product looks, or the quality of processing. There are tons of food but in fact there’s nothing to eat! And it’s like this in all spheres. I urgently need to get something to read while travelling, I run up to the stand with its newspapers, magazines and little books. The eyes are attacked by tasteless cheap coloring, wild combinations of colors, but there’s a lot of goods here, a lot. Each cover has traces of a mighty attempt to lure me as a consumer to purchase the product. The newspapers rush to assure me that I will find sensational details of the lives of people I know nothing about (who the hell is Anna Semenovich?!) All the untalented bodily movements of the least talented of the mortals, Roman Abramovich and his sickening Dasha, are given as though they are the most grandiose historical events. Fashion magazines promise to give me the best advice which I have no need for whatsoever, because no sane woman would wear the stuff that they’re showing off at the podiums. The authors of those little books, each of them, are referred to as “kings” and “queens” of some genre. But all of that is jingling, clanking, shining emptiness. It’s impossible to choose anything truly entertaining to read with such a selection. I’m zapping through the channels after finding myself at home by the TV. There’s a lot of channels, too many, I think. I wonder, why are they there? The broadcasting grid is held together by criminal TV shows, courtroom dramas and other versions of a submergence into the world of murder and deceit. I have heard it with my own ears – and not once, too – in the programming that is broadcast at 7 or 8 p.m., when the children are still in front of the telly, texts like “sperm, discovered inside the cadaver…” Aggression – sometimes open and sometimes in the form of horrendous humor – is everyday reality for Russian TV. After the news programs and terrible political commentators have a field day pounding that viper of a country, America, after 11 p.m. the mean A-grade student has total revenge by occupying the screen with third-rate films that the provident producers bought at a hundred bucks a bag, and that’s happening all night long. You have to push the button for a long time before you find anything useful or amusing. Our news isn’t really news. A person who spoke good English shared his amazement with me: in the report covering the American reaction on the Russo-Georgian war, the Russian translation had little to do with what the Americans were saying. But you could already tell what happens to domestic information when on slippery ground. In short, there’s nothing to watch! And that’s almost daily – in the summer I was just as frantically searching through the radio frequencies, and not a single station could I stand for more than five minutes. Stupid, meaningless, sham abundance! You have to look for a really necessary, useful item through it for an exhaustingly long time. Try, for instance, to buy a good pair of scissors, to purchase a normal travelling bag – not one all covered in gold and feathers, to find a competent program about any kind of art, to listen to news that aren’t distorted by some sort of bias; what am I talking about, even to drink a cup of tasty coffee at a normal price to quality ratio… Perhaps you’ll manage this. But – after spending a lot of time and using other people’s advice. The aggressive phantom of sham abundance that corrupts the very idea of quality is eating away at all spheres of life. Literally like hares during the flood, we have crowded on some little islands and we watch the catastrophe that is rising from all sides with fatal grief. On August 27, right on what used to be Film Day, they switched Radio Kultura off all over Russia, including St. Petersburg. Really, why would we need such a radio station? We’ve got Radio Vanya, Russky Shanson, Lesopoval, Keks FM and Humor FM. Now that’s what is going to thunder through the new malls and new skyscrapers that grow out of the old town like poisonous mushrooms. And the consumers of radio Kultura are potential enemies of the new life. Because they, after listening to old performances of the Moscow Art Theater or the Alexandrinsky Theater, after rinsing their ears in real music, how could they be grateful consumers of today’s dead flesh of “Imperial” theaters or let what is now referred to as music inside their bodies? After all, why would the commanders of this new life encourage their enemies? And work for the unity of Russia’s cultural space – their advantage would be when it’s as divided as it could be, when its parts aren’t connected? Because, as you remember, “a kingdom divided will not stand.” Let them crawl about in their little corners, stiffening in the provincial stagnation of information. Because broadcasting is communication, it’s a road, so there has to be fewer roads both in real life and on the air. Because culture isn’t just some annoying unprofitable appendage of “Russia-on-the-pipeline-for-the-bosses,” it’s a fully fledged enemy, it breeds literate, educated people with cultural memory who are searching, comparing, thinking, arguing, having their own opinions. They can easily give an expert opinion on new architecture, new filmmaking and other rubbish. Actually, culture is a very simple thing, it’s when a man wants to be better. But this improved man will cut down today’s system of life if he’s permitted to propagate himself. So the very soil under their feet has to be removed, the space that produces such individuals has to be made as small as possible. That’s logical, but that’s limitless stupidity. The educated people will get angry after losing the salutary cultural “narcosis” which even during the Soviet reign wasn’t touched because the authorities then had at least some mind of their own. The dangerous sound that had once made a lot of trouble in this country is growing inside the souls. The kingdom of stupid abundance has to secure some solid soil islands for the cultural hares where they could peacefully live and breed, if only for the sake of self-preservation. Otherwise the hares, as it has happened several times in our history, will momentarily throw off their obedient hare’s skin. And they will show their teeth – not hare’s teeth by any means!