In 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Boris Yeltsin perused the aisles of a Randall’s grocery store in Houston, Texas, and was amazed by the variety and abundance of food. But it was because of the frozen Jell-O pudding pops specifically that he fell out of love with Communism. This isn’t hyperbole. He apparently commented to his aides that if his fellow countrymen saw the resolutely affordable banquet of food at this very average American grocery store, “there would be a revolution.” He was sent away with a gift basket of grocery goods, and on his flight to Miami, was reportedly despondent and depressed at the disparity of consumer goods offered in their two respective countries. You’ve probably seen replayed reels of Russians standing in the long frigid lines winding viscously around corner blocks outside a grocery store in a Russian winter, just to get a state-issued loaf of bread, some grey insalubrious brick of fill, a horrible thud of tasteless lies. A grocery store was where you could buy a token of Communism’s obvious failures, and the American grocery experience pointed purely to an American exceptionalism that was tantamount to everything else. Russian grocery stores that are largely vacant of all color, with just a few frozen calorie-parcels tossed haphazardly around like they were forgotten, are testaments of our virtues and success. The juxtaposition of their hallmark malaise, that this enormous geographic empire of the Soviet Union and then Russia was essentially America’s equivalent of a disparate food pantry for the homeless, only solidified America’s cultural and political prowess. Nothing else mattered. We had frozen pudding pops.
Yeltsin was the mayor of Moscow at the time, and a member of Soviet Parliament, and he would later become the first president of post-Soviet Russia, where he would leave a lackluster legacy cursed with corruption charges and cronyism that would force his eventual resignation. As president, he was usually drunk. When he visited Clinton in 1994, he was seen running down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House in his underwear, hailing down a cab to order a pizza. He was always dancing, always stumbling awkwardly around, chugging beers, dancing rapturously on stage with polka dancers, drumming with spoons on the bald head of the president of Kyrgyzstan, flirting inappropriately with female politicians. He was the garish and surly buffoon of a country with a lot to prove, trying to introduce this ancient but nascent nation to the ways of the West. Partly catalyzed by his grocery store visit, when he lifted price controls, and shifted Russia’s command economy of total state ownership of all means of production, and towards the capitalist free market economy, the few and famous oligarchs came in and took control of the majority of the wealth. It was Yeltsin who orchestrated many of these cozy and corrupt deals of ownership of major industry sectors. It was a kind of sped up physics of the American economy today, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, simply by the natural laws of acquisition.
History has not been kind to Yeltsin. When he resigned on December 31st, 1999, in order to avoid criminal prosecution, and the KGB intelligence officer turned lieutenant colonel turned prime minister, Vladimir Putin, stepped in and took over, Putin almost immediately began to quell much of the national embarrassment that Yeltsin had bestowed so publicly on the country. He didn’t reform the monopolies that the oligarchs controlled, didn’t break them up and distribute the wealth more evenly; he made them work for him and benefit him, and imprisoned them or forced exile if they disobeyed. And yet still, during his first term, the Russian economy grew by an astounding seven percent per year. He beat back the Chechen separatists, invaded Georgia while serving as Prime Minister in the interim period of his presidential dominance. He vastly increased the value of Russia’s oil and gas reserves. And what all this meant, most importantly, was that there was now an abundance of food in the markets. There was frozen pudding pops.
As you know, Tucker Carlson recently visited Moscow to interview Putin. He was largely criticized in the interview’s aftermath, for not pressing Putin on any of pertaining issues a concerned American might want to hear about from the autocratic leader. A week after his interview with Putin, Carlson spoke with Egyptian journalist Emad El Din Adeeb at the World Government Summit in Dubai, who criticized Carlson for not talking about things that really mattered: “You didn’t talk about freedom of speech in Russia, you did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about the restrictions on the opposition in the coming elections.” Carlson largely scoffed at this analysis, declaring that “every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry.”
He’s not wrong, of course. Historically, brutality has proven itself to be a catalyzing force for victory. But by saying it in his trademark supercilious way, a sort of contemptuous sneer that’s violently opposed to the humanity of others, he’s brushing it off as an unavoidable practice by those in charge. He may have killed Navalny, but have you seen their grocery stores? It’s the same misanthropic smugness that Bill Maher boasts whenever talking about Israel: yeah, perhaps the IDF has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian children, but Israel allows same-sex marriage. So fuck you!
Carlson’s father married an heir to Swanson Enterprises, the food monolith specializing in TV dinners—the quintessential parcel of American ingenuity, frozen prison cafeteria food, as dull and void of nutrition as those old Soviet groceries. So he knows a thing or two.
But it was Carlson’s impish candor at a grocery store in Moscow that was the most idiotic and entertaining. In it, he was supposedly trying to illuminate the American audience of the very normal and pedestrian experience of shopping for groceries in a country most Americans largely know nothing about, if not outright fear. Most Americans still base their stereotypes of the Russian people on Bond villains, or deride them as these slack-jawed brutes who prefer a good brawl before breakfast. But Carlson was intent on dispelling our former prejudices and going to the one place we can all relate to. After all, between our respective cultures, the most important place to gauge Russia’s material abundance and its standards of cultural and social success, is in the grocery experience.
Carlson is a kind of cartoon figure resurrected to life. It’s difficult to draw comparisons to a specific cartoon, a specific metaphor to better articulate him as a man because there are so many of them. It’s difficult because of his nebulous nature—he’s so intensely villainous, so jaded and hateful in his attitude of others. But then at the same time he’s so pitiful. He is a man who will always be a boy, like one of Wendy’s lost boys in the original Peter Pan, a frumpy idiot you would almost find endearing because of how pathetic he is, if he didn’t talk so broadly about politics. His schoolboy mop haircut, tailored sloppily like an affable dunce; or perhaps that famous look of his is more like that of an inquisitive golden retriever just staring at you from across the room as you hump the sordid air. He gave up the bowtie years ago, after Jon Stewart violently mocked him for it, but he will never truly rid himself of it—it’s a permanent totem, a hideous birthmark you can get surgically removed but will always be a part of you, a stirring electricity in your core. He is a personified meme, his stupid look of confusion permanently furrowed in the sealed caverns of his forehead.
Now, Jon Stewart and many others have already satirized Carlson for this grocery store segment, for being awed by the commonplace shopping cart mechanism of inserting a coin to release the cart and being returned the coin when you return the cart. Most grocery stores in Europe operate this way, as some in the States do. There’s incentive to bring the cart back, Carlson declared excitedly, instead of taking it back to your homeless encampment. The US is one sprawling ghetto, according to Carlson, a frontier to be feared, haunted by woke blue-haired freaks and their activist politicians.
Back in 2017, Vice News did a segment of the fentanyl crisis that seemed nascent and almost peripheral as compared to the scale it’s reached today. It showed a young homeless man in Canada returning shopping carts for people to get the coin back himself, quickly gathering enough money to buy more of the illicit drug, pushing around this cage on wheels in exchange for another fix. An empty shopping cart is an overt symbol of a disenfranchised youth, a future vacant of all its former beauty, where it’s now better to just push these convertible animal cages that were meant to wheel around the processed excesses of capitalism’s greatest achievement. Keep your pudding, we want real drugs.
It’s the shopping cart that delivers your goods, this carriage of invisible possibility, where even the poor and destitute can pretend to be pushing around an abundant crop of packaged food. It’s reminiscent of the lost boys in Hook, when they all sit down together for their fist banquet-style dinner with the returned Peter Pan, filling their bellies with food that doesn’t really exist, scooping big wet handfuls into their mouth, miming themselves chomping into the greasy luxury of giant turkey legs, and then starting a food fight of make-believe harmless florescent pudding. As a boy, I was hypnotized by that scene, and I would imagine the colorful dessert infinity that was waiting there in the invisible glamor right in front of our noses. This multicolored banquet that made us marvel. And then reality hit, and you had to sit down and eat your mother’s routine Tuesday beige casserole, a reminder that you live in this despondent boring realm stifled by all the things you take for granted, something only Yeltsin could describe the parallels of this pain.
And then Carlson turned to the camera and concluded: “And coming to a Russian grocery store, ‘the heart of evil,’ and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That’s how I feel anyways. Radicalized.”
In a speech given by Theodor Adorno in December of 1956, that was then republished by the great leftwing magazine, Damage, in December of 2021, titled “The Fulfilled Utopia,” Adorno speaks at great lengths of the meaning and origins of American culture, as compared to European culture, most dominantly seen in our grocery stores: “On the one hand, culture can, in fact, refer to the human being’s coping with nature in the sense of its mastery; that is, domination of both the external nature that opposes us as well as domination of the natural forces in the human being itself—in a word: the control of civilization over human urges and the unconscious. One could characterize such a notion of culture as one whose substance is essentially the molding of reality.”
The abundance and excesses of food varieties is a sort of illusion, where we get to wander the aisles with a seductive leisure and select any of the broad varieties our appetites are coerced by. You are visually assaulted with thousands of smarmy branded products, packaged like happy meals, with cartoon mascots and rhyming slogans to inveigle and capture your attention, with subliminal tricks to highjack your unconscious and make you pick some brightly colored artificial foodstuff that exists almost certainly as an exploitation of labor and resources, a cheeseproduct that is ninety-five percent air, and five percent food preservative and orange coloring and some addictive blend of additives to make miniature dams of dopamine spill into the gleeful receptors of your pleasure center. This, whether we realize it or not, is the epicenter of where all the rest of our culture derives from. If we do not have food, then forget all other political analysis, forget critiquing the virtues and fallibilities of the State, forget the arts, forget philosophy, forget the opera.
When comparing the respective cultures of Europe and the United States, Adorno states that American culture is largely “a country of the bourgeois revolution.” We are a momentary and illustrious dream, a make-believe achievement that can’t sustain itself.
“For [the] abundance of goods that one encounters in America exhibits a feature that is difficult to describe to someone not acquainted with it, but which one should nevertheless neither deny nor make light of. This aspect is reminiscent of the land of milk and honey. You just have to walk through one of the so-called American supermarkets, one of the huge stores that are especially characteristic of the new large cities and centers of the West, and you will have the—however deceptive and superficial—feeling: the time of privation is over, it is the boundless and complete satisfaction of material needs as such.” He goes on.
“But the way in which every American child can devour an ice cream cone and thereby at any moment find a fulfillment of childhood bliss…is truly a part of the fulfilled utopia. It is reminiscent of the peacefulness and dearth of fear and threat that one associates with the millennium.” Here, Adorno observes that the utopian fulfillment that was unique to the US in 1956, in all its material excesses and abundance—that you could walk through a grocery store the way Yeltsin did, and be simultaneously amazed and melancholic that this abundance wasn’t globally ubiquitous—was in fact an exchange for our ignorance. There is a politeness and decency in regular simpleminded Americans, as Adorno later observed, an underlying reassurance that their basic needs were met. He wondered that while your average American gas station attendant or grocery store cashier might not even know how to pronounce the names of Bach or Beethoven, they were resolutely happy, their vital needs were taken care of.
Perhaps American grocery stores will one day look like the barren Soviet ones before Yeltsin. Perhaps the artificially created famine in Gaza will turn itself around in a hundred years. Perhaps Russia will feed the world with its cheap bread, and Tucker Carlson will feel vindicated. Perhaps the equivalent of 150 billion meals worth of food that Americans waste each year won’t matter, because it’s all a momentary fantasy, a utopian fulfillment that will consume itself in the end. Or perhaps there will be enough pudding for everyone, and the moment of childhood bliss will last forever. Perhaps.
Love a good grocery store