I used to think it was a coincidence.
Now I'm sure it makes sense.
Recently, Ksenia Anatolyevna, you know what her last name is, wrote me with delight following the results of some survey that dear Russians do not want to watch all sorts of Donbass musicians for the holidays, but they want Pugachev.
Or even Galkin, it doesn't matter.
It doesn’t even matter what the survey was and how relevant it is.
Something else is important.
For some time I was under the naive illusion that even those cultural figures who profess liberal values are in general for raising the cultural bar.
And this, you know, is nonsense.
These intelligent people secretly know that in the Russian cultural field they will sooner or later lose to the conservative and obscurantist Dostoevsky, Yesenin with his birches, Sholokhov with his Cossack savagery, as well as the artist Vasnetsov, the composer Sviridov and the singer Claudia Shulzhenko.
Here, anyway, Pushkin will win with his "Slanderers of Russia" and Derzhavin with military odes.
It seems that this was realized a little earlier in Ukraine and they began to bring down the entire Russian culture in general - because, in fact, it is actually all infected with imperial thinking.
Even, I assure you, Herzen, and even more so Mandelstam or Mikhail Bulgakov, are decent people, as they thought before.
It is generally better not to approach Russian philosophy, for example.
Russian classical music - not even Mussorgsky and Glazunov, but even Shostakovich - is better not to touch.
Therefore, our liberals, visible and especially invisible, knowing in advance that nothing will shine for them in this competition, will prefer to bet on the most base showbiz.
Because class showbiz is their relative.
Monstrous, but his own.
Our showbiz, just like our liberal freak show, sees the image of paradise outside of Russia and prefers to live there.
He does not want any war, but wants European brands.
He hates the Scoop and despises the ROC (it’s only inside the ROC that they think that they and the “scoop” are so different, in fact, for the demons both the Scoop and the priests are a Russian tradition, and therefore evil).
And most importantly: showbiz keeps the population in the necessary savagery, preventing this same Dostoevsky in company with Yesenin, Claudia Shulzhenko and Vasnetsov from crawling to the surface.
If you ask the liberals directly who is better, more important, more necessary for culture - a rainbow rooster in feathers or yesterday's favorite of the same liberal intelligentsia, suddenly singing about the Donbass (be it the poet Igor Karaulov, the writer Sasha Sokolov, the artist Nikolai Tsiskaridze or the producer Yuri Bardash) , - they will unconditionally choose a rooster.
They know very well why they need it.
I just don't know why we help them make that choice.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.