Decadence

It's pretty much a constant buzz in my head that the U.S. is headed right down the tubes. I mean, between reality TV, the White House, the state of popular music, and poor writing ability, you can almost hear the Visigoths massing.

Good news, though! Russia's even worse. Entrepreneur Sergei Knyazev runs a company which furnishes the oligarchs and their ilk with all manner of decline-and-fall type entertainment:

Knyazev says that bear-wrestling is right now an extremely trendy diversion. He found a retired bear-tamer, formerly from the Moscow Circus, along with his equally elderly bear... Now the venerable bear goes one-on-one and wrestles with Knyazev's clients. And the money rolls in.

Ministers and Duma members are eager to order from Knyazev the sort of role games in which they go out into the streets with the ordinary hoi polloi. Afterwards they can boast to their friends about how they "met the people".

One popular role-playing game nowadays is to go out and spend a day as a busker or a homeless beggar on the streets. When the day is done, the participants gather in a restaurant to celebrate, and the one who has collected the most in notes and coins is declared the winner.

"I have arranged survival tours on the Moscow Metro. The sort of people who take part in these are the ones who have spent the last ten years in the back seat of a stretched Mercedes. A trip in a crowded rush-hour Metro train provides them with a refreshing shock. They have enough difficulty squeezing themselves into the carriages, let alone fighting their way out again at the right stop."