Flashes of Panic

I just had a mortgage spam with the subject line taken from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. (Specifically, the subject line was Re: The bookkeeper Vassily Stepanovich.)

It was jarring, at first, to contrast great literature with scuzzy spammers. But then I checked that the character was really who I thought he was: one of those “little people,” the apparatchiki who have been part of Russian society since long before the Soviets, burrowed in to the giant bureaucracy of a giant country, little tsars of their own tiny fiefs with their souls shrunk small from disuse.

And I thought, yeah, a spammer could see themselves there. He comes in for a bad day in the wake of the book’s events, which is comforting. One hopes the spammers will similarly get theirs one day.

Now Playing: Godless from Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia by The Dandy Warhols