Location: US Officialdom in Moscow
Having filed too late to have our absentee ballots mailed to us, my wife and I finally scrambled to the US embassy on Novinsky Boulevard for a last-minute vote. It took some effort to get my sense of civic duty revved up, since my vote would go to New York—the state that rarely if ever posts margins narrow enough for the absentee ballots to be counted. Luckily, I had the all-enveloping Russian cynicism to keep me going: I do, after all, live in a culture where millions are convinced that their ballots are going to end up lining a hamster cage, and even take a kind of pride in “seeing through” the supposed ruse; as a result, Putinism is a largely self-fulfilling prophecy. I figured I can’t fall into the same trap. So off to vote I went.
The American Citizens’ Services wing of the embassy had all the mirthlessness of a DMV, without any of the bustle. Only one out of three windows had a clerk behind it, and there was only one voter in the room besides me. A bald, surly Russian guard made me turn off and hand over my phone (but not before I snapped a shot of him and the empty room beyond). “You’re, what, here to vote or something?” he asked, arching his eyebrows and letting out a derisive snort. I decided to call him on it. “Why are you smirking?” I asked. “I mean nothing but total respect,” he said even more facetiously. When I asked him his name, just for the hell of it, he flipped his name tag so I wouldn’t see it. “I’m in security services. I don’t have to tell you anything,” he said.
Having completely ruined my mood, somewhat artificially buoyant to begin with, I went up to the window and got my ballot from another, marginally more polite, Russian employee. Truth be told, I had been kind of hoping the place would be staffed with smiley Midwesterners barely suppressing conspiratorial we’re-in-this-together winks. Instead, the only Americans in the room were Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton, whose state-issued official portraits hung arranged in a tight triangle on one of the walls. I filled out the form, glancing periodically at the portraits, sealed it in a blank envelope, sealed that envelope in another envelope, addressed it to the New York County Board of Elections (a few buildings up Varick Street from my last place of work, New York Magazine), and handed it to the clerk. His look was conspiratorial, all right. It said the moment you turn away this ballot is going into a shredder.
Luckily, the next stop was a party at the Spaso House, the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. The Spaso House is a mansion off Arbat Street; it has served as the premises for Satan’s ball in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Every once in a while it fills up with lesser imps, like Russian journalists and expat NGO brass, who come to devour the kitchen’s faithful reproductions of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and to get photographed next to Michael McFaul, the garrulous, Montana-born, Obama-appointed ambassador. Tonight, the theme was the election, obviously. Cardboard cutouts of Obama and Romney stood against a backdrop of red, white and blue balloons; on a giant TV screen, Wolf Blitzer was treading water until the first polls closed; a mock voting booth allowed the guests to cast mock ballots. Ah, that’s better. I finally got my dose of unironic American dorkiness, which was precisely what I had hungered for the whole day. For the record, Obama won the mock Spaso House vote, too. It was a landslide: 134 to 27.
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Source: roadsandkingdoms.com
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