News of the Restless

So. I guess you must have heard of a certain “journalist” from the US of Amnesia, who recently decided to show all his countrymen how their “leftist” (really, just very lukewarmly liberal) values have ensured the “fall of Western Civilization”, whatever THAT may be. And that to illustrate his point, he went all the way to Russia, to fawn over Pooty-Poot, lick his boots to a high shine, and just generally humiliate himself by demonstrating how little he knows about the world and how it works.

Anyhow, Russian YouTubers have been having a lot of fun at said “journalist’s” expense, and here’s one of them, doing just that:

Right off the bat, I can see (with my admittedly limited ability to read Russian) that the shopping mall our Bowtie Boy visits is called “Gagarin’s”. Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet-era cosmonaut, the first person ever to orbit the Earth, and also a very committed communist. It’s therefore highly ironic that his name (and a stylized logo glorifying his pioneering space flight) are being used to adorn an oligarch-owned castle of capitalism.

So, Floppy Forelock goes through this goofy-ass mall on his trip to the supermarket, oohing and ahhing over the escalators like he’s never been on one. Maybe he really hasn’t? We learn that he has no idea that coin-lock shopping carts are a thing. (They are, just about everywhere there are supermarkets. Here in Canada, they cost a loonie to unlock, which translates to roughly the ten rubles their Russian cousins take. I often find them loonieless and unlocked, however, and like to leave them that way for the next customer whenever I do.)

And thanks to our narrator, we also learn something Tucky’s not telling us: it isn’t even Russian-owned. It’s a French chain, Auchan (russified, here, to “Ashan”), which may explain why they have all that good-smelling bread that Tuckyducks jizzes his pants over while backhandedly dissing the “low-carb lifestyle”. Yes, Russia has bread, and not just the French kind. It’s a big friggin’ country, and rich in farmland, although the locals seem to be not quite as good at working it as their neighbors in Ukraine, the famous “breadbasket of Europe”. (Which may explain why they want to annex all that sweet, sweet, well-cultivated Ukrainian soil.)

(And all that lovely Crimean wine, too.)

If the insufferable silver-spoon scion really wonders why his ten-ruble shopping cart full of Russian groceries cost so little, it’s because he picked up much of it in the No Name section of the store. Which, apparently, still has its prices (and probably also its quality) stuck in the same dull end of the Soviet era that Tucky took the trouble to slam at the outset. The one thing you can say about the Auchan chain and its Russian subsidiary is hey, at least they haven’t discovered the Galen Weston trick of charging extortionate prices for store-brand goods, and then having the Orwellian audacity to pass it off as a bargain!

So, how DID all those foreign brands supposedly pulling out of Russia somehow still end up just as much for sale in Russia as ever? Well, for that, we can blame good ol’ globalized capitalism. Turns out, there are plenty of foreign companies who will still do business with Russia. And neighboring lands, such as the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, who have trade agreements with Russia still, are more than happy to act as middlemen and bring in whatever is wanted.

And the few western brands that did actually pull out of Russia? Well, Russian oligarchs, in their infinite ingenuity, just bought up their former assets, rebranded them to look vaguely familiar, and sold lesser-quality shit out of them, pretending it was just as good as what was being replaced, AND more “patriotic”, to boot. Which was good for more than a few cynical sneers on the part of the peasants — who, as in the days of the Czars, weren’t really fooled, but at least knew how to pretend to be, in order to save their necks from the imperial boot.

Fucker doesn’t seem to understand how basic pricing works, and how the cost of goods is scaled to what the average Russian can actually afford. In that, he’s just like all the capitalists over here (and remember, he comes from the same damn class as all of them) — he hasn’t got a clue what the average North American worker makes. Or how hard it is for them to make ends meet when they have bosses ripping them off on the one hand, stealing wages to pay for those record-high profits and CEO bonuses, and landlords ripping them off on the other, forcing them to pay the mortgages that said landlords can’t pay off themselves with good honest work. AND, on top of it all, we also have our grocery corporations, who each own pretty much their entire supply chain (hence, those store-brand products), and then have the audacity to claim pandemic-related “supply chain issues” are the reason their “low, low prices” are suddenly all jacked through the roof, and why their “price freezes” are just a dirty PR stunt.

I think Fucker knows damn well what’s up, and just isn’t saying because he’s not being paid to say that. It’s not as if he lacks for education, and it’s certainly not as if he lacks for internet access, newswires, or a big fat roster of experts in every field who could tell him whatever he and his audience might want to know. He’s very well-connected for such a stupid little man (and yes, I cackled when I saw Pooty-poot clown on him for failing to make it into the CIA, on account of his intellect being too low even for that legendarily dim-witted gang of spooks). Even he is not so dense as to be unaware of what’s really going to butter all that great-smelling bread he bought at Auchan/Ashan, or wherever he sends his servants to shop for him when he’s not performing regular suburban guyhood for the cameras.

Tucker Fucking Carlson is being paid to spread racism and fascism in the name of capitalism. That’s why he brings up “filth” (read: IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES) in his little soliloquy in that supermarket. He’s being paid to blame immigrants from Latin America, and refugees from Syria and Palestine (but he won’t mention Ukraine, because they’re white) for “taking” all the jobs that capitalism isn’t giving his skinfolk (let’s ignore the fact that the immigrants and refugees are taking the ones that nobody else wants) or bringing in exotic diseases (as though affluent white global travelers couldn’t spread COVID as fast as the poorest non-whites just looking for a home that won’t get bombed out from over top of them.) He’s a capitalist scion himself, being paid by richer capitalists to keep his peasant viewers in the dark about what’s really going on while they continue to rob us all quite literally blind.

And that’s why I’m joining the Russians in their good belly-laugh at his expense. It might not put the best-quality food on the collective table, but it should take some of the bitterness out of it, for at least a little while.