PRAVDA MEANS TRUTH

I have become a fan of the new Pravda (http://english.pravda.ru/) The newspaper that once trumpeted communism has morphed into a capitalistic opiate of the masses, with headlines such as “Dolphins Used to Look Like Humans and Lived in Atlantis”, “Russia Has High Rate of Crimes Committed by Maniacs”, “Nude Blond Visits Petrol Station, Creating Public Disturbance (with photos)”, “CIA Feared Alien Invasion More Than Soviet Attack”, and perhaps the most ironically headlined story of the year in the new Pravda, “The Demise of Logic, Sanity and Innocence, Part II”. Still, there is some old familiarity about new Pravda, such as the article “The Russian Revoluton: 90 Years On, An Analysis”. According to the author, “The peaceful transformation…of the USSR into the Commonwealth of Independent States, foreseen in Soviet law, was witness of the success of Lenin’s project…The Russian Revolution…is an example for the future, when the capitalistic-monetarist model, …implodes.” Wow. No wonder Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and felt he could trust him. Re-writing history to justify a war and cover up graft, greed and oppression; it must have been like looking into a mirror!
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But that’s an isolated spittoon of insanity in the universe of tobacco juice lunacy that is the new Pravda, where we can discover that, just like in Amerika, the Ruskys are fighting the cultural wars, and losing. The administrators for the Moscow Schools have sent a letter to all headmasters reminding them that Halloween celebrates “…a cult of death, gloating over death, the personification of evil spirits…” and is “…destructive for the psychological and moral health of schoolchildren”. And besides, Halloween might discourage the kids from reading Pravda stories, like, “No One Will Ever Know What Women Want in this World.” This is news? Pravda thinks it is.
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Or how about an article entitled, “Thirteen Terribly Weird Facts About Woman”, asserting such “facts” as, “A woman does not…scratch her noggin when she thinks…they don’t want to ruin their hairdo…After taking a bath, a woman grabs a towel and makes a turban on her head…The reasons for such a weird Oriental ritual are unknown…A woman does not get mad when her underwear gets stuck between her buttocks…Many woman worry about their looks when having sex…”, and my favorite, “Women are absolutely indifferent to their genitals…” Well, I knew a couple of woman who seemed very pissed off with their vaginas, but maybe I have misinterpreted something.
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Then there is the story about the three ton “Muscular bronze stallion with weird human genitalia…” sitting in front of the Yar Hotel, in Voronezh. The hotel’s director, Ms. Yana Chernyshova, helped choose the statue and says that the detail and artistic expression of the giant stud expresses the atmosphere of the hotel perfectly, which I guess means the hostel wants to attract giant bronze horse flies. I would describe the statue as a sort of neo-Stalinist view of a Catherine-The-Great pony ride version of My Friend Flicka on steroids and Viagra. Well, I may not know art but I know what scares me, and Yana says the artist’s production of this Animal Farm monster plow horse “…exceeded her expectations”. But doesn’t she think that the great bronze phallas appears a bit overtly…human? Yana says the sculpture is exactly what she wanted. And looking at the expression molded into those genitals, I can see why Putin-the-polonium-poisoner remains so popular in Russia. I’m telling you, that dick has his face all over it.

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But perhaps the most indicative headline in the new Pravda is “Russian woman gives birth to her son at age 79”. Once I was certain the mother was supposed to be 79 and not the son, (which would have made breast feeding easier since his teeth would have probably fallen out by then) I read that “Momma” Ula Margusheva was from one of those yogurt eating countries (Northern Caucasus) and is supposedly now 123 years old, meaning the headline should have read “Cossack woman GAVE birth at age 79”. However, in the newspapers business old news is not news. The article describes her as ‘feisty’, in other words the kind of ancient who probably even before the 1917 revolution, was already a well known pain in the ass.
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Ula’s tale is a typical Soviet love story. She was an old maid who worked on a collective farm and was unmarried until she was 30. After the nuptuals her new husband died within a couple of years. Probably she nagged him to death. Not one to dwell on tragedy Ula remarried just 30 years later, in her seventies. Said one of the locals, “She didn’t look 45,” which in Cossack would mean she was “smoking babe”. At a time when most women can barely remember menopause, Ula produced her first child, a baby boy she named Akhmed. Her second husband died at the age of 83, (probably from nagging, again) leaving Ula to raise little Akhmed alone on nothing but yogurt and complaints, a diet which gave him the energy to give her five grandsons and two great grandsons. But this breakneck pace of procreation drove Akhmed into an early grave. He died two years ago, at the tender age of 41; just a baby in Cossack years.
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Yes, Pravda is an entertaining rag, and I’m surprised that it’s not been bought up by News Corp, because it is clearly fashioning itself as the kind of paper only Rupert Murdoch could love, or at least somebody a great deal like Rupert Murdoch, like say Putin, or Bush. They are clearly three of a kind and men of our age. And clearly, Bush is the dummest of the three. And that's the Pravda.




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