The real wonder weapon is the network.
On March 8th, the one day of the year, I wash the dishes, symbolically taking the burdens of daily life upon myself. Happy holiday, half of the sky. Then I turned on the stream: Moscow’s midnight is early morning in Beijing. What interests me isn’t Makariv or Mykolaiv but the wonder weapon. “Transfer a hundred thousand rupees,” I ordered into the void. The threads must lead the wrong way.
I wrote a whole paragraph about his single word: “Mistake.” Then I painted a picture: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in black-and-white keffiyehs. The Chairman took a red pencil and struck out everyone except Lenin: revolution as export, as a virus, as COVID. “Palace style, our everything.”
He washed dishes all night and hummed about an apple tree with fruit. I didn’t ask.
The Chairman left only Lenin on the painting and ordered activists retrained as “decolonizers”: campuses first, then the rest. He liked this analogy with a virus. And on Kremlin monitors the wonder stream was running, and one of the former comrades recognized a face on screen.