Chairman How's Glorious Army
Significantly Lowering the Bar Since 2008.

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.

– Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, 1970

This post is respectfully dedicated to Alexsandr Solzhenistyn, Bela Liptak, Alexander Dubcek, and Lech Walesa.

One of the nice things about holding emeritus status here at the site is that I’m not bound by the constraints of writing solely about the Crunch. I can come in from time to time, talk about whatever I feel like talking about, and not have any responsibilities to speak of. All things considered, it’s a pretty nice gig. So, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to talk about something important. You may have noticed that this place went dark yesterday as part of the mass blackout to protest SOPA. Now, I’m not involved in the daily operations around here anymore — I essentially “sold” my interest in this place to your current party hostess, the amazingly lovely and incomparable Alex. However, she asked me my opinion on going black, which was both flattering and an honor. I said I was all for it, provided I could pull my emeritus card and talk about the reasoning behind it. That was met with an unexpectedly enthusiastic YES!, so here we are.

Now, I don’t remember exactly how to do this, so I would ask all of you O.G. readers to forgive me if this isn’t up to whatever standard of quality you used to expect from me. You know, if you ever harbored any expectations at all. Also, don’t take this to be some kind of return for me — I no longer go to games due to a mixture of life changes and a general disinterest and disappointment in Crunch hockey that was festering the last couple of years. These days, I’d be more inclined to talk about the glorious Tottenham Hotspur, which would in turn spark Reb’s Chelsea-centered rebuttal, and end with us both hurling horrendously obscene insults around about Arsenal and their douchebag fans. And let’s be honest, none of you want that. Instead, let’s talk about something that’s bigger than all of us by going down memory lane, shall we?

Russia is a funny place. It’s parasitic in the most complimentary sense — once you experience it firsthand, it takes root in you and never really leaves you. It left an indelible impression on me, from scouring the shelves at Wegmans for fresh cherry juice (REAL cherry juice, not that flavored horseshit…fuck you, Ocean Spray) to four-shot vodka toasts to still doing The Moscow Shuffle when walking on icy pavement. It is these innocuous, minor adjustments to my daily life that I miss the most about Moscow; in this sense, I’ve come to fully understand George Kennan’s personal obsession with the place.

A brief aside — John Gaddis’s masterful Kennan biography, which took him almost thirty years to complete, is a phenomenal read about one of the most pivotal men in American history. If you have a month to read it, I wholeheartedly recommend it. Anyway, back to our story…

I’d like to talk about a specific day I had in Moscow. Like most days, I left my apartment on Val Serpukhovsky before sunrise, and made the walk to catch the Metro at Tulskaya station in the pre-dawn darkness and what seemed to be a permanent bitter cold (How cold? There was a stretch where it did not get above -15 for approximately 3 1/2 weeks)  After jockeying for position in a subway car with no room to even raise my arms and a gauntlet run through the masses at the Chekovskaya-Pushkinskaya-Tverskaya station and its ENORMOUS bust of Pushkin in the corridor right after the escalator up to the Pushkinskaya platform, I would grab a second train on the Krasnopresnenskaya line to the Barrikadnaya station, for a three walk block to the Embassy, by which time the sun had risen, but the world was still bitterly, unfathomably cold and permanently frozen.

This particular day, I grabbed a quick breakfast with Irina, a girl that worked in the Embassy video store (calling it “the video store” is a bit of a misnomer, since they rented videos, sold postage stamps, took passport photos, handled dry cleaning, and arranged internet service for me at my apartment) Irina grew up in Moscow during the economic crises and political uncertainty during the late 80s and early 90s. Like many Russians her age, Irina was very interested in current events and politics, but was hesitant to talk about it in public. For whatever reason, that morning seemed to be the exception to the rule, because she said something I haven’t forgotten: “I don’t like to talk about the government because I’m afraid of who could be listening.” On one level, I understood what she meant, since, between the KGB planting an extraordinary amount of listening devices in the first four floors of the Embassy during its construction in the 1980s (I was told in my security briefings that there was a device approximately every 18 inches in any direction) and knowing that all phone calls into and out of my apartment were recorded, there was a sense of an omnipresent authoritarianism that hung over all of us. On another level, though, I never really reconciled Irina’s reality with my own. This kind of shit still happened? In 2011? Fuck that.

My calendar for that particular day had me attending a meeting at Google’s Moscow offices with a cadre of my Embassy colleagues. We were there to meet with a woman named Marina, to discuss Google’s concerns over internet regulation and censorship in Russia. According to Marina, Google was deeply distressed over the Duma’s recently passed legislation that allowed individual Russian ISPs to be directly liable for its customers and their online activities. As she explained it to us, if User X ran a blog that was critical of, say, the Medvedev/Putin government, not only could User X could face criminal repercussions, but his ISP could suffer heavy fines for hosting the offending content. Needless to say, the prevailing worry was where the Russian authorities would draw the line — would it stop at anti-Putin, anti-Medvedev websites? Would it extend to sites that post music and videos deemed unacceptable by an arbitrary authority? Would it extend to personal emails that, in theory, are private communications? Google felt a responsibility to protect all of us, in a way, by standing up to the Russian government and saying “this is wrong.” I remember walking out of that meeting with two thoughts:

1. My next phone would run on Android, in solidarity with Google’s efforts to protect all of our rights.
2. This kind of shit still happened? In 2011? Fuck that.

I had dinner that night with my friend Aleks, who worked in the Embassy’s consular office. I liked Aleks, as we were the same age and agreed that ours was the last generation that truly understood the Cold War, as we are the last generation that grew up in it. She understood it in a far different way than me, as she grew up in Poland during the 1980s, and remembered the Jaruzelski government’s attempt to break the Solidarity movement. Like so many people I met in Russia, Aleks had a personal connection to events that I could only read about, and could understand them in a way that I never could. The historian side of me was incredibly jealous, but the human side of me was equally sympathetic. When you think about it, isn’t that the true legacy of the Cold War? Stories like hers, stories of hardship, disappointment, and lives robbed of their ability to be lived? And for what? A bipolar pissing contest between the superpowers? The whole thing was a goddamned disgrace.

I think that’s probably the most memorable day of my time in Moscow. None of those conversations were particularly deterministic in terms of my day-to-day life — they didn’t take food out of my mouth, money out of my pocket, or landed me in jail — but they reminded me of why it’s important to keep a world-view that extended beyond U.S. borders. This shit still happens. This shit is still important. It’s never really left me, and if I’m honest with myself, I hope it never does.

So, why am I here, rehashing memories that only mean something to me? Well, you may have noticed that this site went dark to protest SOPA/PIPA. Now that we’re back, it’s time for some real talk. Don’t believe for a minute that SOPA is meant to stop you from downloading an album or the newest episode of True Blood, because that’s bullshit. What SOPA truly is, at its disgusting, nauseating root, is a visible reminder that Corporate America pulls the strings of our government to serve its own ends. Don’t ever let anybody tell you any differently. SOPA is a brazen attempt by the RIAA and MPAA to maintain whatever grasp it has left on the entertainment industry, despite its refusal to adapt its business model to the new digital reality. Other industries have evolved with the times — these cabals have instead opted to take the low road and buy Congressmen to do their dirty work for them.

Under SOPA, this site would be fundamentally altered. Video clips of Crunch goals and fights, in addition to the musical selections I used to give you, would be potentially actionable offenses. WordPress could be forced to shut us down. And for what? An In Flames video? A clip of Kyle Palmieri undressing two defensemen before roofing a lethal wrister past a goalie? Does that seem right to you? Does that seem congruent with the principles and fundamentals that this country allegedly rest upon?

Where does it end? When will we say enough is enough, and push back against Corporate America’s oligarchy? When will we refuse to accept the fiefdom run by the banks, the oil companies, and, apparently, the entertainment industry? When will we realize that the Arab Spring should serve as both a call to action and a template for getting our own house in order? When will we realize that, hey, maybe the Occupy movement has a legitimate gripe? When will we realize that all of these things are absolutely and irrefutably linked? These things mean something.

Fuck SOPA. Fuck the disgraceful legislators that proposed it. Don’t stand idly by. Do something — voice your displeasure. Call your Congressman. Get educated about why SOPA is a bad, scary, dangerous idea. Take it to the fucking streets if it comes to that. Otherwise, those stories I told you somewhere up the screen will have a hell of a lot more resonance for each and every one of you.

I would like to take a moment to publicly thank Alex and Mick for letting me pop back in to talk about this. It means a lot to me to know that I still have something of a home at this place, and that they both gave me an opportunity to get all of this off my chest. I don’t mean to speak for them or anyone else, but on some level, I would like to think that they don’t disagree with what I’ve said here. They’re good friends, and I sincerely appreciate them allowing me a chance to make a return visit. Even with the distance between myself and Crunch hockey these days, a part of me will always be tied to this site, and that’s something I don’t ever want to lose. I may be an absentee, shitty father, but you know what? It’s still my baby, in a weird way. Now, that being said, let’s kick this motherfucker old school, and go out like we used to do: