"Viktor Pelevin. Generation P (fragment, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Generation P
By Viktor Pelevin
(fragment)


GENERATION P

Once upon a time, there really was a merry young generation in Russia,
the one that smiled to the summer, to the sun and to the sea - and chose
Pepsi. It's too difficult to understand now why exactly it happened. Maybe
not only because of an excellent taste of this beverage, and not only
because of caffeine which makes the kids to demand more and more doses of
it, putting them firmly into the cocaine track from early childhood.
Probably it even was not an ordinary bribe - I'd like to believe that the
Party bureaucrat who was responsible for the contract signing, just really
and suddenly loved this dark sparkling liquid in every fibre of his being
that had lost all its faith in communism.
Most likely, the reason was that the ideologists of the USSR believed
that there is only one truth. That's why the Generation P didn't really
have any choice and the kids of the Soviet 70s chose Pepsi exactly like
their parents chose Brezhnev.
Whatever it was, these children looked at the clear cloudless horizon for
hours, lying on the seashore in summer, drinking warm Pepsi-Cola packed in
glass bottles in the city of Novorossijsk and dreaming about the times
when the distant forbidden world from across the sea will come into their
lives. Ten years have passed and this world began its arrival - carefully
and with a polite smile firstly, then more and more boldly. One of its
business cards was the Pepsi commercial clip - the one that became the
turning point of entire world's culture development, as many researchers
have pointed out. Two monkeys were compared in it. One of them drank the
"regular" Cola, and as a result, was able to make some primitive
operations with sticks and cubes. The other one drank Pepsi-Cola. Woofing
cheerfully, it departed in the direction of the sea in the Jeep, hugged by
the beauties that obviously didn't give a damn about the women's equality:
when you have to deal with monkeys too much, it's better not to even think
about such things, as both equality and inequality will be equally hard
for your soul.
If to think a bit more, even then it was already possible to understand
that it's not Pepsi-Cola that was important but the money with which it
directly was tied. The first thing that led to this conclusion, was the
classic Freudian association determined by the product's color; the second
thing was a logical conclusion: consuming Pepsi allows buying expensive
cars. But we're not going to analyze this clip in depth here (even if it
could be the very thing that could explain why the generation of 60s
stubbornly calls Generation P "the shitsuckers"). The only thing important
to us is that what became the final symbol of Generation P was the monkey
in the Jeep.
It hurt a little to learn exactly how the guys from advertising agencies
on Madison Avenue imagine their audience, so called "target group", but it
was hard not to be awed by their deep knowledge of life. It was this clip