Don't give up on Minkin

I just arrived in Moscow and got into a scandal from a ship. I mean the cry of Minkin’s soul with curses addressed to Shenderovich, his

.

Unfortunately, I am entertained by other people's scandals. The neighbors are drooling - it seems like a trifle, but still invigorates. I believe that the audience generally likes these farces - otherwise why would journalists, artists, politicians, and other city Zhirinovskys so actively try to publicly bite each other in all visible and invisible places?

But everyone has their own handwriting. Minkin’s trademark feature is “noble indignation.” They say that some of his MK colleagues especially love him for this high moralism. I understand them - I also love Minkin and for the same reason. I quote the end of an article by a classic of Russian thought:

“You read this abuse and involuntarily want to say to the satirist: “Do you know what the main problem of Russian democracy is? Not in Putin, and not in the security officers in general, and not in the nomenklatura. The main problem is that ambiguous people like you are beginning to be associated with democracy and its values ​​in the public consciousness.”

But alas, I cannot say this. These are the words of Sh (enderovich). This is a quote from his open letter, which he wrote to his former comrade-in-arms, boss and owner E. Kiselev. THEY ARE GOOD WHEN THEY SPOTLIGHT AT THE MIRROR.” (Emphasis added by me – L.R.)

So, Shenderovich nods at Kiselev and blames him (and “people like him”) for the troubles of Russian democracy. Minkin, with a bitter, sarcastic laugh, points his finger at Shenderovich - yes, HE IS THE SAME! THEY do a good job when THEY blame the mirror, states the moralist publicist, looking from the outside.

But Minkin did it too - excellent! For any sane reader understands that this entire passage applies in full, of course, to Minkin himself, who, as always, relishly (and as always talentedly) spits... well, naturally, in the mirror! Moreover, to forestall the reader’s question - of course, this all applies to me, to L.R., too! And I am an actor in the same final silent scene that Russian journalism has been playing out for 200 years in a row: “Who are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourself!”

Yes, sir, there are no vile “THEY” opposing the honest and pure “WE”. No - neither in Russian politics, nor in Russian journalism. In front of the fireplace, in an antique armchair, the conscience of Russia, fattened for slaughter, sits and with Doronin’s aspirations talks about the next moment of truth, how Russia is perishing again, how “THEY” are robbing “US” again. Yes, THEY robbed great – especially YOU!

“The earth does not stand without a righteous man.” The devil knows whether our land is worth it or “not worth it,” but there are NO righteous people (or even remotely “mowed under them”) in our media. NONE.

The most banal thing, self-evident? How to say! For example, the pathos of ALL politicians, ALL furious publicists, everyone, everyone, everyone chatting in the media comes down to one thing - HE stands in a white tailcoat and from the height of his Moral Authority, pours shit on him (he has nothing else in his tailcoat and under his tailcoat) – authorities/opposition, security officers/journalists, bribe-taking businessmen/bribe-taking officials, etc., etc. This is why Freudian slips are so common: “I know him as an Absolutely Decent/Dishonest Person.” You know! Yes, the trouble is that everyone knows YOU, they know that it’s not for you to give out moral assessments. And to whom? Open question…

But, it is clear that not all cats are gray the same. It is unlikely that a mentally normal person would put Sorokina next to Khinshtein, Pozner - with Prokhanov, Maksimovskaya - with Gordon. I repeat, in any case, of course, there are no saints in our workshop (and not many outside the workshop), but there is a measure for everything: for some, “twice two is five,” and for others, “twice two is soft-boiled boots.” And not only colleagues see this, even the idiot spectators (listeners) see this. Over 15 years of public somersaults, each of us has taken our completely stable place in the media space, where there are three coordinate axes: venality/unsaleability, frenzy/balancedness, “general obscenity/general neatness.”

If you move from the general to the specific, it immediately becomes boring.

Minkin spends a long time justifying why he mustered up the civil courage to spit at Shenderovich a week before the elections. “Write after the elections? But Govorukhin was pre-appointed as the winner (was it for nothing that he signed the shameful “letter of 50”)? After the elections, Sh. will be a loser; they don’t beat a lying person.” Alibi - to the studio! He distanced himself from Govorukhin, “I am not doing this for self-interest, but only by the will of my civic feeling.” Oh, my God, just like children - hiding under their mother’s skirt and thinking they won’t find them...

He spoke about Govorukhin’s “badass” once, and wrote a whole article about what a bastard Shenderovich is. Well, in whose favor did he dash off, on the eve of the elections, and not forgetting once again to demand a prize “for nobility and humanism in pouring slop” - after all, you know, he wants to knock down a standing person, and not hit a lying one then, the next day after the elections (when no one will need it for nothing)? In favor of Govorukhin. Let Govorukhin be “appointed” as the winner, but this appointment still needs to be “implemented.” In which Minkin, to the best of his ability, participates - also for me, Newton's binomial...

Listen, Minkin - you are against Shenderovich, you jealously want him not to become a deputy (just as you yourself did not become, although you tried your best many times), you are thereby helping, to the best of your talent, Govorukhin. Do you have every right that Sh. is your brother? But why, dear comrade, are you afraid to say SO DIRECTLY - yes, I am helping (at least objectively) Govorukhin? By the way. If a journalist helps a candidate for money, there is absolutely nothing shameful in that. Artists can sing during elections, but why can’t publicists sing along? Well, if, of course, you have a voice... And we earn extra money by scratching, sometimes even not without pleasure (I remember how I worked for Lebed’s presidential campaign in 1996).

But I am irritated by the absurd frenzy of this moral judgment, which MINKIN HIMSELF arranges for Shenderovich. M., with all ten fingers, furiously rummages through the eyes of his brother Sh., pulling out twig after twig, like a pickpocket pulling piece after piece of paper out of his brother’s pocket... and all the pieces of paper are cheap. Watching this “flight of the bumblebee” is quite depressing.

Well, for example: “The brave satirist himself describes how he humbly waits for his boss to tell him who to joke about.” That’s right: Sh. had bosses (if you want to scold him, write “masters”), they paid him “acutely,” and they paid him, one must think, quite well. And I had the same boss - V.A. Gusinsky. And he paid and ordered. So after all, M. HIMSELF was “connected” with Gusinsky, which he even publicly admitted, of course, explaining everything by holy and selfless “student friendship.” However, who knows all his friends? For example, Maxim Sokolov publicly and quite transparently hinted at Minkin’s friendship with completely different “citizen bosses.” Again, this is an everyday matter (especially in modern times). But why rush into an attack like that... with such and such rear? Or is it precisely with such rears that they climb?..

Minkin tells what a coward Shenderovich is: “Of course, if you have an existential fantasy, you don’t need to fly to Chechnya. They can kill you there. ...During the first Chechen war, I flew there too.” Well, Minkin flew, but Shenderovich did not fly. So what? If Minkin had also been elected in the University District, this comparison would have made at least some sense (although they are not recruited for paratroopers, but only for the State Duma), but so what is this for?

In fact, it seems to me that the type of talent between Minkin and Shenderovich is approximately the same - acrid and acetic. “Civil bile” - well, this is a popular thing and loved by the reader. When I was young, I myself was guilty of excessive bile secretion, but then it went away. But for M. and Sh. it doesn’t go away - well, they have such a healthy (or, conversely, unhealthy) mental digestion. This is not a feat, not a vice, this is a feature of the mentality often characteristic of journalists. With the same irrepressible (and not always... smart) passion with which Sh. rushes at the “culprit of all misfortunes” Putin, M. rushed for years at Chubais-Gaidar-Nemtsov, made a feasible contribution to the fight between Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces and the mutual destruction of these two parties. However, the leaders of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces did much more than M. in this holy cause - you can’t screw yourself, no one can screw you...

Only business - nothing personal. However, according to Stanislavsky’s system, it is sometimes impossible to engage in the journalistic business if you do not “get used to the character”, if you do not begin to quite sincerely hate (at least for the “period of the performance”) your heroes. To paraphrase the classic, “you must hate your heroes, otherwise you will get into terrible trouble.” So, it is quite possible that Leontyev sincerely hates Americans for some reason, Shenderovich - Putin, Minkin - Chubais, Prokhanov - Jews, and poor Pushkov even whoever they order (however he didn’t get confused - well, memory!)... Such hatred warms itself, too, and it infects the audience. The only trouble is that for the pleasure of “sacredly hating” someone you often have to pay with delusions of grandeur/persecution; you begin not only to love your “beloved self” (every fool can do this), but also publicly pray for your “saintly self” ", self-conscience-Russia, etc.

All these diseases are not individual. Bolshevism did not pop up like a boil out of nowhere. Throughout the 19th century, Russian publicists “played like demoniacs,” living as if they were at the front: “friends,” “enemies,” “traitors,” “traitors,” and other crazy stuff. They called each other either “agents of the III Division” or “seditious people”, they dug through other people’s articles with their noses - “trace, Mukhtar, trace...”. Well, they got crazy until 1905, then until 1917. The same holy traditions - intolerance, “the pen is like a bayonet,” furious denunciation/incitement - then passed from the “Chekhovian” (that is, hated by Chekhov) to the Stalinist intelligentsia. Well, here it was simpler - Radek, Koltsov, Zaslavsky, and then Zhukov, Sturua, Zorin, the same Prokhanov, barked clearly at the command “front”. This is how Soviet (partly anti-Soviet) journalism was born.

The traditions of the Russian-Soviet intelligentsia are alive! And today everything is the same - “friends”/“enemies”, denunciations, ideological revelations... There was such a patriot, a certain M. Yuryev, so he was literally dragged away by his coolness, pretending that it was he who rediscovered the public fashion for using the label “ enemies." Leontyev, Gordon, Pushkov also see “enemies” in reality. Action is equal to reaction - on the other side of the “barricades” Andrei Piontkovsky (and he is a talented person!), the same Shenderovich (and here one cannot deny talents) are conducting an “irreconcilable party struggle” in the same spirit. Well, Minkin, with a hot pen, burns out enemies around himself, whom he himself (or not always himself?) defines for himself. The difference between M. and Sh., from my point of view, is that the “party” Sh. is still freer (more honest?) in choosing objects for pathetic anger than the “non-party” M.

The circle-seminary frenzy 150 years ago was tragic, the ink of the Dobrolyubovs mixed with the blood of Alexander the Second/Zhelyabov. Soviet frenzy was at first downright gangster, and in the last 20 years of Soviet power - senile. What can we say about today's frenzy? Military-civil pathos in a purely peaceful and corrupt society looks rather funny... However, meanness is often funny too - see, as they say, above.

Political sarcasm and SELF-irony are incompatible. A normal person is free to laugh at his own stupidity and pathos; a soldier is obliged to spend his “ammunition of jokes” only on the enemy. Therefore, a pathetic (and... unselfish) publicist, unless, of course, you share his pathos and are not shaking from the same (or opposite) anger as him, looks, from the outside, quite... strange. But “giving up” on a living person, in my opinion, is a great sin. I don’t rate him as M either - he’s still talented... And reading his next “notes of the Messiah”, I remember Lermontov: “You should be more modest, with such misfortune even at your age.”