Back To Bulgakov Fog

Rufus Gifford, writing the latest Obama For America email, had me fooled for a moment with his subject line, writing to ask my opinion about why I wouldn't want to have dinner with the president (paranoia about the Secret Service blowing my head off as a spastic enemy of the state in well meaning accident, perhaps?), and why I haven't donated, and the answer to that has been here in my journal account all along, although why I continue to receive party line apparatchik missives is another interesting question, when I am wearied of American politics all together, but it helps to keep my eye on the progressives despite the fact that the right offers me no solutions. Some of you probably think I sound like a mild cripple fascist, and maybe I am to some degree, at this point in my life, the poison of an urban backwater in my veins, but for me, it is not, and never was, about ideological purity.

Through my eyes, the political system under which this country operates is broken, whether it is exemplified by the Bush Administration's aggressive tactics against my vulnerability, or Obama's end term easing of that pressure without removing it, or helping me to find a way out of it. Liberty Resources, and my dated inside knowledge of centers, their unnecessary redundancy, my near total lack of family support on top of this, and public housing, is just a microcosm of the destruction of American mobility, if it indeed ever really existed without the engines of our major wars and unspoken racial/caste systems, an apt two paragraph prelude to say I may never quite understand Mikhail Bulgakov's intentions in The Master and Margarita, at least, not beyond its obvious anti-totalitarian aspects, because I do not believe that lack of faith necessarily implies state model sympathy. Indeed, Rushdie uses schizophrenia to attack Islamic fundamentalism in The Satanic Verses the way Bulgakov uses it in inverse fashion to ridicule Stalinism, and I'm on Rushdie's side, against Mohammed.

Bulgakov is dynamic, and his work has a superb comic timing, but I am still in the first third of the book, perplexed, and may need several readings over time, even to understand and accept in his work what I am inclined to reject about Christian superlative hopes in the Blood of the Lamb. I worried a few more pages over my cappellini and fish, still mentally throwing up my hands at the fucking Russian literary greats . With the possible exception of my limited exposure to Tatyana Tolstaya's soft magical realism, the grand-niece of the other great wingnut Tolstoy, they all drive me crazy.