A DAY IN CZASLYUDIYA
"RICHARD III: Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die:
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day instead of him."
And I will stand the hazard of the die:
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day instead of him."
There is confusion on the faces of the youth. They do not understand how their lessons on their history, from kingdom to colonization to revolutionary, can somehow coincide with what they are confronted with out of the schoolhouse doors. There are colorfully done pages on their history books, exhalting the olive, blue, and red cloaks and flags of their partisans, their martyrs, their forefathers, and on the next page-- or on the block over-- there are slate-grey monuments, statues with severe expressions, smokestacks wedged in historical residential areas. A poster across the street announces how it all represents progress. Politicians declare on the boxy television sets from yesteryear "Life has become more joyful." At the end of their schooling, faced with a choice between menial labor and military service for social advancement-- higher education is nearly inaccessible for non-veterans-- it does not show on their faces.
There is acceptance on the faces of the mature. They have a longer memory than their offspring. Some of them remember their own parents, many of them veterans of a war that decimated their generation and gouging deep and still-visible wounds on the landscape. They remember themselves the confusion of the Commonwealth, the confusion and terror of the early Federal Republic, but they got over their confusion. They lost their farms. But rapid industrialization meant they had good jobs. Military service, by then mandatory, gave them benefits and the ensuing governments kept laying the benefits on. It was far from perfect-- the air was pisspoor, their benefits affording them only the smallest comforts, but they suffer what they must. They see what they have and remember the dirt floors of their family farmhouse-- they are content with their three bottles of Ozhdukh* a week and mostly functioning heating.
There is a disease readily apparent everywhere you look. Patriotism here is negative, rather than positive. The services describe enlistment as an honor and an opportunity, both to take in drifting young men and women and to repeatedly inform enlistees what all the sadistic suffering they endure is for. The young are overrepresented in sports, underrepresented in government. The retirement age does not seem to apply to bureaucrats and career politicians, who wear the medals of wars long since passed as if those pins stuck them to the council chairs they sat in. The poor hate the rich, the rich hate the government, the government hates change, and change they say hates the poor. Government programs provide for much, but they can only provide so much. The wonderful free market means people are paid more and they afford less. All the while, the largest factories and centers for productivity-- all deemed essential to national security-- are managed by the government. The economy is growing, but taxes and poverty remain the same old problem. The army takes in people of all classes, races, and creeds. They have no other choice. The machine needs to be fed.
There is a rot readily apparent under every foundation. The capital may be in a new city, nearly out in the countryside, but is it not telling the former capital is a husk of its former self? The grasslands are turning to deserts, they project, in the next fifty years; however, desertification is a pillar of the community and provides many jobs. The healthcare for the privileged is through the military, and 'paying taxes early' gets one even more privileged care. In the west, Raskovya and Minstravia operate as if they are separate countries. They are begrudgingly Czaslyudians, wearing their own uniforms and their own customs. The national government is all that is ever shown on the television sets and social media. Nobody questions the obtuse prices put on renovations to District administrative plazas.
An ideal Czaslyudian is pious, industrious, and honorable, like the knights (husar'skyy) of medieval legend. For this, the stereotype mostly holds up, except with the omission that it is said that there can be no more quarrelsome, individually unambitious, and pedantic a people to walk the face of the Earth than the Czaslyudian. It would be well to terminate the discussion on this point, however, it ought to be said a "Czaslyudian" is a myth. As any ever-contentious inhabitant of Czaslyudiya would tell you, under the veneer of the 'Czaslyudian' is a hodgepodge of cultures, some of heredity indigenous to the land, other heritage Czas inserts, and still others of Ralkovian make and their census-designated blends, set apart from the rest. Each believes themselves to be the inheritor of the land, which has led to too many significant brawls that found their origin over a chat during tea.
It must be said, however, that there are clear signs to who derives the most advantage from possession of the land, and the answer lies certainly not in the genetic stock of the inhabitants. The revolutionary cadre that won the country passed their torch to what was left of the country. They inherited cinders and a beaten people. But where individuals were sallow and quashed, aggregates arose. Those were the pork barons, the military, and the unions. Soon, great influential figures drove through the military and unions the first great Czaslyudian ideology-- it killed hundreds of thousands through starvation and unrest, blood paid in exchange for industrialization. The ideologues soon died off, martyrs to a obsolete cause, leaving only the aggregates-- blood, industry, ranchers, unions, and soldiers. Like a rising of the tide, recent history has shown there to be those at the margins, filled with inexplicable pompousness and pride, who wish to change this deadlock, and others who, tempered by years and the reality of managing such a land, wish to keep it the same. And so it was to any who remember, and to anyone with their eyes lifted from the ashen streets they walk, so it remains.
It is a new day in Czaslyudiya. A day worker breaks their fast before dawn with a meal of strictly regimented budget tea, soft cheese and cured ham before scouring the main industrial district throughway for their day's pay, from adding to the ever-expanding scaffolding throughout the city's aging concrete to working in sweltering-hot warehouses moving intermediate goods from shelf to train. A man in a stuffy and bland tweed suit his father wore takes their neobkhidnyy† as they settle into their windowless cubicle, ancient lights that will not be replaced anytime soon casting their last sunset over their memoranda and reports on affairs of state. A gang of Federal Militia, identified easily by their antiquated plain olive fatigues, sleepily exchange bullets for coins and coins for cigarettes beside an idling truck as old as any of them, enjoying their rural reprieve as they drift through their day of state service. Everyone, everywhere, seems as if they are sleepwalking.
There is acceptance on the faces of the mature. They have a longer memory than their offspring. Some of them remember their own parents, many of them veterans of a war that decimated their generation and gouging deep and still-visible wounds on the landscape. They remember themselves the confusion of the Commonwealth, the confusion and terror of the early Federal Republic, but they got over their confusion. They lost their farms. But rapid industrialization meant they had good jobs. Military service, by then mandatory, gave them benefits and the ensuing governments kept laying the benefits on. It was far from perfect-- the air was pisspoor, their benefits affording them only the smallest comforts, but they suffer what they must. They see what they have and remember the dirt floors of their family farmhouse-- they are content with their three bottles of Ozhdukh* a week and mostly functioning heating.
There is a disease readily apparent everywhere you look. Patriotism here is negative, rather than positive. The services describe enlistment as an honor and an opportunity, both to take in drifting young men and women and to repeatedly inform enlistees what all the sadistic suffering they endure is for. The young are overrepresented in sports, underrepresented in government. The retirement age does not seem to apply to bureaucrats and career politicians, who wear the medals of wars long since passed as if those pins stuck them to the council chairs they sat in. The poor hate the rich, the rich hate the government, the government hates change, and change they say hates the poor. Government programs provide for much, but they can only provide so much. The wonderful free market means people are paid more and they afford less. All the while, the largest factories and centers for productivity-- all deemed essential to national security-- are managed by the government. The economy is growing, but taxes and poverty remain the same old problem. The army takes in people of all classes, races, and creeds. They have no other choice. The machine needs to be fed.
There is a rot readily apparent under every foundation. The capital may be in a new city, nearly out in the countryside, but is it not telling the former capital is a husk of its former self? The grasslands are turning to deserts, they project, in the next fifty years; however, desertification is a pillar of the community and provides many jobs. The healthcare for the privileged is through the military, and 'paying taxes early' gets one even more privileged care. In the west, Raskovya and Minstravia operate as if they are separate countries. They are begrudgingly Czaslyudians, wearing their own uniforms and their own customs. The national government is all that is ever shown on the television sets and social media. Nobody questions the obtuse prices put on renovations to District administrative plazas.
An ideal Czaslyudian is pious, industrious, and honorable, like the knights (husar'skyy) of medieval legend. For this, the stereotype mostly holds up, except with the omission that it is said that there can be no more quarrelsome, individually unambitious, and pedantic a people to walk the face of the Earth than the Czaslyudian. It would be well to terminate the discussion on this point, however, it ought to be said a "Czaslyudian" is a myth. As any ever-contentious inhabitant of Czaslyudiya would tell you, under the veneer of the 'Czaslyudian' is a hodgepodge of cultures, some of heredity indigenous to the land, other heritage Czas inserts, and still others of Ralkovian make and their census-designated blends, set apart from the rest. Each believes themselves to be the inheritor of the land, which has led to too many significant brawls that found their origin over a chat during tea.
It must be said, however, that there are clear signs to who derives the most advantage from possession of the land, and the answer lies certainly not in the genetic stock of the inhabitants. The revolutionary cadre that won the country passed their torch to what was left of the country. They inherited cinders and a beaten people. But where individuals were sallow and quashed, aggregates arose. Those were the pork barons, the military, and the unions. Soon, great influential figures drove through the military and unions the first great Czaslyudian ideology-- it killed hundreds of thousands through starvation and unrest, blood paid in exchange for industrialization. The ideologues soon died off, martyrs to a obsolete cause, leaving only the aggregates-- blood, industry, ranchers, unions, and soldiers. Like a rising of the tide, recent history has shown there to be those at the margins, filled with inexplicable pompousness and pride, who wish to change this deadlock, and others who, tempered by years and the reality of managing such a land, wish to keep it the same. And so it was to any who remember, and to anyone with their eyes lifted from the ashen streets they walk, so it remains.
It is a new day in Czaslyudiya. A day worker breaks their fast before dawn with a meal of strictly regimented budget tea, soft cheese and cured ham before scouring the main industrial district throughway for their day's pay, from adding to the ever-expanding scaffolding throughout the city's aging concrete to working in sweltering-hot warehouses moving intermediate goods from shelf to train. A man in a stuffy and bland tweed suit his father wore takes their neobkhidnyy† as they settle into their windowless cubicle, ancient lights that will not be replaced anytime soon casting their last sunset over their memoranda and reports on affairs of state. A gang of Federal Militia, identified easily by their antiquated plain olive fatigues, sleepily exchange bullets for coins and coins for cigarettes beside an idling truck as old as any of them, enjoying their rural reprieve as they drift through their day of state service. Everyone, everywhere, seems as if they are sleepwalking.
* - Ozhdukh. Czaslyudian national liquor, clear or slightly violet color. 30% ABV. Distilled from Brusnytsyn, Czaslyudian dewberry wine.
† - neobkhidnyy (Czaslyudian: 'necessary'). A preparation of coffee common in cities among the white collar professions, using 3 ounces of espresso and 3 ounces of typically Ozhdukh.