Notes from Cyberground by Mikhail Iossel

Author:Mikhail Iossel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: New Europe Books
Published: 2018-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

Mikhail Iossel

October 2017

October 2, 2017

In response to the Las Vegas mass shooting:

Picture an ordinary, nondescript, law-abiding sixty-four-year-old American man. He is reasonably healthy for his age, has some money in the bank, to the tune of several million dollars, maybe a few income properties, and he generally is friendly to everyone, holds a private pilot license, likes his guns (but what red-blooded American male doesn’t), lives with his girlfriend in a nice retirement community in a land of eternal sunshine, and enjoys periodic outings to nearby Las Vegas for a bit of gambling and some shows. If he may be increasingly terrified of his looming mortality, if he ever sits up in bed with a start in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat, his heart thumping away in the hollow of his chest, and moaning inwardly in a sudden excess of despair, saying to himself in a hoarse whisper, “Oh my God, what have I done with my life, what was the point of it all, how did it all pass so quickly, and now it’s too late for everything, oh God, I’ve wasted my life! Please, no! So unfair!”—he, understandably, doesn’t share those hypothetical moments of existential horror with anyone.

One day he goes and buys himself an extra bunch of souped-up semi-automatic weapons and enough lethal, bullet-armor-piercing ammo to sustain a siege of some small city by a mid-sized garrison of determined insurgents—he lives in a state with virtually no gun laws, so that doesn’t take him long at all to accomplish—and then, filled with cold steely rage camouflaged by his gregarious outward demeanor, all that cornucopia of murder paraphernalia stashed neatly in ten (yes, ten) oversize bags (“No, thanks, I don’t need any help with these, I’ll carry ’em myself”), he checks into a spacious suite on the thirty-second floor of one of Las Vegas’s largest and most famous hotels, whose windows offer a spectacular, unobstructed view of the open-air performance space where a massively popular annual music festival is about to commence come nightfall . . . and then he sits on the edge of one of the two ludicrously opulent and pointlessly gigantic beds in there, hands on knees, eyes half-lidded, and starts waiting.

October 3, 2017

This effectively is the official position of the Republican Party on the gun issue, in slight paraphrase: Living in constant fear of becoming a victim of a mass shooting is the price of freedom every American has to pay.

So very true! If you don’t run the risk of being shot up by a maniac with forty-three souped-up semiautomatic weapons and thousands of rounds of military-grade ammo, you don’t happen to live in a truly free country. Canada? No freer than Russia. Australia? Less free than Belarus. The UK, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan? Just a bunch of different-sized North Koreas.

I don’t know how these people can sleep at night.

(Republicans to America: “We sleep very nicely, thank you.”)

October 4, 2017

Trump is right: His secretary of state did not call him a “moron.

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