Visions of American Plenty: The Soviet Citizen's Choices and Challenges

From the New York Times March 11, 1990

("A Soviet satirist, Mikhail Zhvanetsky, is a keen observer of life in his
country and the United States. Following are excerpts from an essay he
wrote for Literaturnaya Gazeta. ")

To understand what we are missing, to understand what human hands
can do, to understand what the earth gives us, our people should tape a
four-hour TV program in [an American] supermarket. We should stop
playing imagination games and look at just what they sell in an
American store. There's nothing special there - just everything.
Absolutely everything that we know, heard, read somewhere, saw in
pictures. That's half of it. And half is what we don't know, haven't seen
or heard. And we should see it, to get the healthy spirit of competition
going, so that we understand what the earth can provide, what water
can provide, what the winter can provide, and what the summer can
provide . . .

[In the United States,] you can do this, you can do that, but someone
is doing it all. Someone is working. Women come home with gray faces,
India ink flowing down their cheeks, their hands full of ink. Salesmen
run around with gray faces, and they aren't the least bit polite. Where
does everything in the stores come from? After all, someone produces
it. They pay, they pay a lot . . .

You have to work unbelievably hard; smoke comes out of every part of
your body. There is no time to read, no time to learn anything: "I don't
read books; I read the newspapers." "I don't go to the theater." They
talk about it with pride. "There's a guy over there; he reads books. You
can find everything out from him." "I don't know what the name of
this ocean is. There's a geographer; he knows." "There's a mathematician;
he knows." . . .

If we here, through many centuries of struggle, through deprivation and
disasters, earned the sacred right to do absolutely nothing for 100
rubles a month, over there, on the other hand, to stand in place, you have
to run. In order not to sink down, you have to work with your hands,
legs and head. He wasn't at tennis once; another time he wasn't at the
pool - and so the rumors begin. Already a rich client didn't go to him,
and he, trying to be cheerful and smile, has already dropped one step
lower, then lower, because, just like here, you go up only once . . .

The boredom is excruciating, like the food. Like the businesslike women,
the businesslike men, a Broadway show. Huge amounts of water flow,
fires burn and there is plenty of nudity, and people crawl around like
cats, . . . and over there they have everything, and they don't have
anything else, and everything is broken up into types. Some read books,
some make money, some are discovering new drugs, some are inventing
airplanes, some just know what buttons to push, what to turn off.
No one knows how anything is made. A few kids in Houston know; ask them.

You can buy pears. Or, after you pay, you can pick them for yourself, the
best, the freshest, in someone else's orchard. Or, after you pay, you can
pick wild strawberries, raspberries or vegetables. There is no one
standing between the idea and the realization. . . .

Everybody uses you a little bit, but that's business.

(one of my favorite pieces of writing ever)