spin spin sugar

I'm on a massive techno kick right now; I dumped a whole bunch of Orbital and Crystal Method and Juno Reactor into a playlist, and I've been quietly rocking out to myself at my desk at work. The music is perfect for work right now, since it has strong driving beats (for energy) but not a lot of distracting lyrics. Watching 'The Saint' set me off on my current techno trip; I'm sure it will go away when I watch a different movie or become interested in something else, but right now all I want to do is a) listen to techno music, b) watch 'The Matrix' or 'The Bourne Identity', and c) go back to East Berlin and dance in an abandoned factory complex until the sun comes up. As an acceptable alternative, I would take the overheated euphoric party during the Crystal Method set at Coachella last year...but I somehow think that I'm not going to get my wish.

In related news, I just discovered that the song that plays during the credits of 'The Bourne Identity' is off of Moby's CD '18'--which is really annoying to me, because I actually own the CD and haven't listened to it in years, and never bothered to rip it onto my laptop. So the choice comes down to paying a dollar to buy a copy of a song I already own from the iTunes Music Store, or spending the next six months thinking glumly about a song I could be enjoying constantly. Six minutes is probably a closer estimate to the amount of time I will spend mourning my loss--but if anyone could send a copy of Moby's 'Extreme Ways' to my gmail account, I would love you forever. Or at least for awhile.

Nothing happened today, which is why this post is long on thoughts about techno and short on thoughts about India. I went to work, did some work, came home, ate dinner, and then read the first third of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink'. That does not imply that I got home early; I didn't get home until ~7:45, but I'm a fast reader. I'm reserving judgment of the book until I read it all...but that's horribly ironic, since the whole point of the book is that your subconscious can usually make accurate interpretations of situations in a very short period of time. My subconscious says that most of what he's saying is horribly obvious; but, he's also a columnist for 'The New Yorker' and is writing for a popular, rather than strictly scientific, crowd. His book 'The Tipping Point' was really helpful for my honors thesis, but there just aren't that many books out there about network theory because it's such a relatively new field, and his book ended up being central to my claim that Bonhoeffer was important because he served to connect members of the German resistance, not because he was a leader or a particularly influential person. 'Blink', however, deals more with the subconscious and how we make decisions--interesting stuff, but I think my subconscious already knew a lot about how people read each other and why decisions are often inexplicable, so I'm finding it rather elementary. Still, I'm going to stick it out, if only because I'm curious to see what conclusions he'll draw from the copious amounts of anecdotes he's using.

I'd also like to take a moment to engage in a little bit of that great American pastime: Soviet-bashing. The celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe were on May 8, and as I'm sure you're all aware, the biggest gathering took place in Moscow. I'm sure there was something horribly ironic about seeing a bunch of leaders of NATO countries watching a Soviet-style parade in Red Square, especially given that the army units were dressed partially in WWII-era uniforms and carried Soviet flags. However, humor aside, I'm deeply worried about the state of Russia (and the State of Russia), and I don't like where things are headed. Unlike most of the Eastern Bloc states, where democratic roots were planted in brief spurts over several hundred years and can still be remembered by people who were alive during the brief and fragile interwar period, Russia doesn't exactly have a good history of government by the people and for the people. Between the Vikings, Mongols, Tartars, Swedes, French, and Germans, as well as the tsars and the Bolsheviks, the Russians have always been (at best) downtrodden and (at worst) completely screwed. Yes, they have an impressive and amazing history; but it is made more impressive and amazing because of the obstacles standing in their path, not because they have had a great record of human tolerance and growth. While the rest of Europe has spent sixty years trying to outgrow the rampant nationalism that led to two world wars, Russia seems to be embracing nationalistic tendencies again in an effort to shore up her low self esteem. Hmm, can we name any other countries that faced hyperinflation, poverty, complete disintegration of government services, and a tendency bred over hundreds of years to accept and yearn for a strong authoritarian government as long as said government kept food on the table? While the Middle East is understandably a top world priority right now, Russia has hundreds of millions of people, scads of nuclear weapons, potentially large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and a historic propensity for sacrificing her own people in the name of the leader. While I do not agree with all of the foreign policy decisions made by the current Administration, I hope that Condoleezza has been keeping up on her knowledge of Russia...I think we're going to need some serious diplomacy in that area of the world.

Anyway, back to the bashing--I hate the Soviets with a passion, but I don't think the Allies had much of a choice; however, they completely sold out all the Poles and Czechs who had spent so much time forming plans for governments after the war, and condemned an entire swath of Central and Eastern Europe to another fifty years of foreign domination in exchange for freedom in the West. Did they have any other choice? Probably not--Britain was on the verge of starvation, the entire infrastructure of Europe was completely destroyed, and the Allies (and especially America) would have their hands full with the still-engaged Pacific front for months after victory was declared in Europe. The West *might* have been able to beat Stalin if it escalated into full-fledged war; but they couldn't have done it without opening multiple fronts, and Stalin was crazy enough that he would have thrown every single man, woman and child in front of the war machine if necessary.

Okay, so there wasn't much of a point to that, other than to say that while I applaud the immense sacrifice made by the average Soviet citizens during World War II, I think that Russia is deluding itself by thinking only of itself as a victor nation without discussing its own horrendous past. Yes, 20 million Russians died in WWII, as many as all other nations put together. But after the war was over, how many Americans and Brits were killed by their own armies because they had seen that Berlin, even at its nadir, wasn't as bad as some Soviet cities? The Soviets were just *awful*--most of the soldiers who occupied Germany had to be 'reconditioned' or sent to gulags just because they'd been tainted by contact with the Nazis and/or capitalism. When the Soviets and the Nazis jointly occupied Poland in 1939, it's basically a toss-up to determine which side was more oppressive. So Russia, congratulations on winning the war--but maybe you'd be doing a little better with this democracy experiment if you started owning up to your past and working to ensure that it doesn't happen again.