Moscow.

It has taken me awhile to get to writing about Moscow. There is no particular reason for it; busy, as always. But rather than doing a flowing narrative, I am going to go over my trip through moments.

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Arrival, when the plane touches down. I’m excited, thrilled to finally be landing and relieved that this has actually happened. Looking through the window I see buildings go by with Russian script; the fact of where I am starts to sink in, and my heart races with excitement. I feel validated, as though all the abstract reasoning I had for coming here is finally vibrant and alive within me.

Thirty minutes later, in the cab. The man who was waiting for us, holding a sign with Amanda’s name on it, has kind eyes. He looks strikingly like Yuli Daniel, the dissent whose serious visage stares out at people from the wall of my bathroom sink. On the ride into Moscow, he talks about the architecture; this building was from the Stalin period, this other from Khrushchev. It is startling to hear someone speak of these rulers not as part of a pop history quiz nor in the loaded political vocabulary of the pundit, but simply as leaders of their own country in which they live. People who left their mark. Russia becomes real.

Fifteen hours later. It is two o’clock in the morning, and Amanda and I are out in the middle of Moscow. We slept for twelve hours upon arrival, and now we are starving. We spent at least an hour charting a Google map to the nearest 24 hour diner; it doesn’t seem that far away, and even has an American name, so perhaps just out of the sheer momentum of being here we go. The streets are all blanketed with snow, and they are almost completely empty. Everything is strange in its stillness, an odd way to be introduced to a city. The entire time I am figuring this is not the brightest idea, and yet am strangely calm. We are unable to find the street we are supposed to turn on, so we give up and walk back to the hotel. We end up ordering room service.

Around eight hours later. It’s snowing. Amanda and I can’t figure out how to get over to Red Square. We can see it, but a river of a street divides us, cars bellowing down the road without a cross walk in sight. Jay walking is completely out of the question. Finally, we find a place to cross. Wondering about in what looks like a major shopping district when it isn’t a cold, snowy morning, we’re about to get frustrated. Then suddenly Amanda cries out “Oh, shit!” and I turn to see the cathedral of St. Basil’s looming down at us. “Oh holy fuck,” comes my response, about half a second after Amanda’s. It is the first time either of us have been genuinely startled by a building.

That evening. I wake up at four in the morning. I can’t go back to sleep. I e-mail my parents, Daniel. I take a warm bath in the luxurious bathtub in our hotel room. I turn on the TV and watch some program on the Discovery Channel, which is British in audio but with Russian script for all the commercials. Odd. I do not know that this will be what I am doing almost every night here.

The next day. We are in the subway. We found the circle line and are now getting out at every stop, eager to see the famous Moscow metro. I’m staring up at the ceiling, looking at a huge mosaic of Lenin in Red Square. There is one of Stalin too, and a bust of Lenin at the end of the station. The bust sits next to what looks like rough scaffolding, plywood walls that seem to hide some sort of construction project. Lenin sits there as though he is tacked on, just another neglected part of the rubble. I do not think many Russians stop to look at him anymore. I think they have not even bothered to remove him.

That night. I am sleepless again, and frustrated about it. I take three baths. But I do learn some interesting things about the Amazon, and discover a charming BBC show where people try to make a certain amount of money by selling off old antiques.

The next afternoon. Amanda and I are in this strange marketplace that the flight attendant in Atlanta told us to come to. From a distance it looks like an imitation of Disneyland, with tall fairytale castles and whimsical buildings. Up close it is quite dilapidated, a wooden, themed marketplace stacked with peddlers. Amanda buys a babushka that starts with Obama and works its way down to Reagan; I get one with Lenin to Putin, and the woman selling them to us laughs when I quickly make my choice. The booths sell a lot of Soviet tourist trinkets, from flags to pins with the hammer and sickle. A nice man helps Amanda choose out one of the pins. The people are friendly and eager to please you with a purchase. All the Soviet Union seems to be to them is an opportunity to make some money.

The last day. Walking through Red Square, wedding receptions are all around us. Amanda and I see an old woman in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. She is hunched over, talking to her grandson and pointing towards Lenin. She must be telling him the story of the Revolution, and what Lenin did afterwards. She must be trying to instill in him the values she holds so dear, the values she sees slipping away every time a new mall replaces an old government building or her granddaughter asks for the trendiest new coat. It is perhaps the saddest and yet the most beautiful thing I see on our trip. I wonder about how Lenin failed her, how humanity failed her. I think about the limits on our dreams and what can happen when we can see nothing else. I think about the irony that the Bolsheviks thought they were bringing on the salvation of man. And yet I still think it’s beautiful that there is something in all of that in which she still believes.

An hour later. I’m wondering through the statue garden. I was determined to find this place, and the project will fill almost the whole day. The garden does not only have old, torn down statues of Soviet leaders, but dozens of other artistic projects. Perhaps the most striking is Jesus crucified on a missile. Not too difficult to put that one in context. Some of the statues are so haunting as to be difficult to look at; leave it to the Russians to produce the visual equivalent of existential angst. I go to see Stalin, whose nose is chopped off. Nearby there is a cage of stone heads, lanced behind barbed wire. They are supposed to represent his victims. Stalin’s victims. I am glad we came here last. This was the right place to come at the end.

An hour later. Amanda and I walk through Red Square for the last time. Gum, the largest mall in Moscow, is lit up behind us. Its light reflects in the shiny, polished stone of Lenin’s mausoleum. The irony seems almost purposeful. What a strange, silent and aching place.

The next morning. We say goodbye to the man from the taxi service. He is the same one who picked us up, and he brought us into the airport to show us how the gates work and where to watch for our flight status. Amanda gives him a nice tip, and his whole face softens into clay as he thanks us. His eyes seem to sink into his face, and I wish I had the courage to ask for a picture with him. It was such a beautiful face, and I never want to forget it. I will try always to keep it in my memory, placed alongside the dark eyes of Yuli Daniel.

And it all looked so good on paper.

The class I TA for just covered affirmative action, and as a result I had to listen to some of the students weigh in on the topic. One student found the admission policies of one school to give excessive weight to race; 20 points out of a possible 150 point system. Race, he said, is not something one can help; and therefore, it is wrong to admit anyone on anything other than “the merits.” He was also annoyed with giving points for poverty, since he failed to see how this relates to anything.

Another student responded that poverty and minority status have a high correlation, and so it is wrong to suppose that a merit based system is really colorblind considering the poor quality of schools in inner-city neighborhoods. But her opponent insisted that wealth, unlike race, is mutable, and so should not be taken into consideration (this would imply that he reversed his original reasoning about why race shouldn’t be considered, but they didn’t plan this out, clearly).  She asked how one gets a good job when you can’t go to college? He retorted that you work hard for a while and then you go. Much to my relief, this drew aghast laughs from about a third of the class.

But I do extend some sympathy towards his position, not because it is right, but because it is quite seductive. I only vaguely remember my views on affirmative action when I was an undergraduate, but considering my conservative political outlook at the time it probably ran something much like that. The injustices of the past are in the past; to take them into consideration and reward those for their skin color is to perpetuate the old injustice in a new direction, and if anything encourages racism and discourages merit. The idea is so simple, so pure; so how can it be wrong? Who could argue against a “merit based” system?

The problem with this is that it assumes a merit-based system has, or ever could exist. It never has, it never will. That is not to say that someone with nothing to show for his high school education can make it into a quality university – hard work and dedication usually do play a role in the outcomes of our endeavors. However, I wonder if the student against affirmative action ever stopped to ask himself how he managed to do well in high school. It probably had something to do with going to a good school, because he grew up in an affluent suburb. It probably had something to do with having parents who not only could provide him food, clothing, and education but whatever else he needed to keep himself ahead of the game. It probably had something to do, in short, with not growing up in a broken neighborhood filled with crime and steeped in a culture which offers no encouragement to bright students. And I then wonder if he figures he deserved all of this from the start, from the moment of his birth, if he earned his privileges and advantages. The obvious answer is that he did not. From the beginning of his life, everything about his circumstance gives the lie to the idea of a “merit based” world.

Some people would continue to insist, of course, that the lack of an equal starting line is just a part of the great American struggle; hey, the Asians overcome racism, so really you’re not fully American until you accept the status quo while simultaneously triumphing over it.  But the problem with the self-made man is that he is quite rare – more rare than our politicians and media machines would like you to think. If you think it happens all the time, that’s because those are the stories you hear about – you hear about the Colin Powells of the world and not, as it happens, the millions of others who don’t happen to have extraordinary talent or inspiration on hand. And that’s why I would characterize the conservative excuse of “pull yourself up by your own boot straps” as absurdly unrealistic. How it is that an essentially negative view of human nature couples with an insistence that we organize society around the exceptional few is beyond me. It is just plain inconsistent; and it does not offer any effective solution for dealing with reality, in the meantime, of humanity on both the aggregate and individual level.

But that’s all an aside. For the student in the class, it is all still perfectly clear. It’s all about merit, man. And if the supposed “merit based” system without any affirmative action just happens to be of benefit to the people with privilege built-in, then all the better. How convenient that philosophical purity backs up class and racial purity as well.

I want to go home.

From my paper for my minor project, designing a course on early modern Europe, in this case specifically on:

Philosophy and Governance in Western Europe: 1640-1800

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As a whole, the course finds no singular narrative convincing – while the history of early modern Europe is not, as Hegel would have it, a history of conflicting ideas ultimately producing progress, neither is it, as Marx would have it, merely a story of materialistic determination in which ideas only play the part of window dressing. Rather politics, government, economy and philosophy all mutually shape and compel each other towards new realities. Yet the course is at heart sympathetic to the goals of the Enlightenment, and insistent upon the fact that reason remains the primary tool with which Western society attempts to determine what it will become. Ultimately we will return to Habermas, on a perhaps sad note, asking not what we regret losing from pre-modern Europe, (as the discussion is often cast), but what we regret losing from early modern Europe. Today, our contemporary Western culture hosts a public sphere that is a sad and shallow reflection of the critical debate once inspired by the Enlightenment.[1]

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[1] Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Chapters 5-6