"... we don't need no Forest Service let the mother-f__ker burn!"
-- the 2010 Russian update, with apologies to Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.
How best to describe the past few days around Moscow, the smokey, smoggy, disaster area you might have read about in the paper? It has been like standing closely downwind of a campfire, but you can't get far enough away. Your throat and nose burn, your eyes are on fire (if you wear contacts, just forget it.) Andrew E. Kramer in the NYT failed to complete the picture when he tried to describe it: "Moscow was choked with smoke, which seemed more like a smelly fog, thick enough to leave an aftertaste and a sensation of cement dust in the mouth," he wrote. "Residents wandered in the milky haze, many wearing surgical masks and dazed looks." Close, but no mention of the permanent headaches, or your hands and feet going numb, or the urge to take three hour naps in the afternoon. Or the rat the size of a full-grown cat I found lying dead in the kids' sandbox outside our apartment Friday.
Any American assignment editor by now would have had enough. There are only so many disaster stories you can run about heroic firefighters, top government official expressing concern and scolding low-level officials, and health authorities offering tips like wear a wetted gauze mask and drink green tea. Eventually -- certainly before two weeks have passed -- they'll want to know who to blame. No surprise, few media outlets here have bothered to think in such scandalously Western terms (with the notable and heroic exceptions of The Moscow Times, Ekho Moskvy, and Vedomosti).
Of course, some have tried to move the process along. Two immortal pillars of the Russian Soul are xenophobic conspiracy theories and crackpot pseudoscience. And that's where the U.S. High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program comes in, the scientific outpost in the far reaches of Alaska has been a magnet for conspiracy theories. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made note of it, speculating that it may have caused the earthquake in Haiti. Some clever Russian intellectuals have wondered if this might indeed be some kind of ionospheric weapon aimed straight at Eurasia, presumable to keep Russia on her knees. The rabble-rousing tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted Georgiy Vasilyev, a physics professor at Moscow State University, as saying that the U.S. military has spent so much money on this for it not to be some kind of weapon. "The American explanation that this station was built for the study of the aurora effect is not very believable," he said earlier this month. "Moreover, (the United States) has spent almost 20 years and 250 million dollars on equipment for the study of such a very complex natural phenomenon!" Oy, studying a complex natural phenomenon, instead of just jumping to conclusions. Again, this from a physics professor at Moscow State University.
The principle of Occam's Razor hasn't been a big part of the thinking around here. So don't consider the fact that in 2006, the Duma abolished the Forest Service and left forest fire prevention to an ill-defined mix of local authorities and entities that "hold the rights" to the forests. They're obviously doing a bang-up job. If you've ever bothered to wonder what deregulating yourself into a Hobbesian state of nature looks like, well, it looks pretty f__king smokey.
The story of the Great Smokeout of 2010 has yet to be written, but I've noticed that many western media outlets seem to suggest that the degree of popular dissatisfaction at how an ossified, corrupt, and inept government could let things get this bad might lead to some kind of tipping point. That everyone will look up from LiveJournal and exclaim, "My God, Kasparov was right all along!" To put it simply, not a chance.
