Charles Guelperin

Why does this Santeria seem to me like the self-serving mumbo-jumbo of deluded people?

The setting of the botanica shop on Santa Monica Boulevard looks like grade Z set design. Channeling the 500-year-old warrior-king from the Congo -- if I wrote a story with this I'd be laughed and dismissed. Nevertheless Santeria holds meaning for the lost people who seek it out.

The lost people: they are lost because they are without self-knowledge.

Empty of a past they seek to find one, be it by actively adopting one of their own creation or by passively receiving it from some master. Poland, Albania and a dozen seemingly unrelated countries are filled with people who have a living, personal memory of a vanished way of life. They share first-hand knowledge of the failed utopia of the "workers paradise" or some other answer-all. Former truths now debunked, they have nothing to believe in.

I recall thumbing through a picture book of Afghanistan and pausing on a photo of a group of villagers. Angry, defiant, they taunted "The Americans," a wholly abstract people to these illiterate hillbillies. Surely, none of them had ever traveled more than 100 miles from where they were born. It would be dangerous to body and spirit. The elderly Afghans are lost in the new world of 21st century realities.

I know nothing about Olga other than what the article says: she is a young Russian Jew and a student. College is a time when new adults examine their beliefs, decide what is important for them. What was it like to be a Jew in the dying Soviet Union? Your religion is suppressed, official state dogma is plainly at odds with the decaying reality around you and all personal initiative is obliterated in the soul-crushing, environmentally devastated rust heap of a former super-power.

Jews were outcasts in the old Soviet Union; it was no better for the rest of the population. The lost people of Russia now seek meaning in UFOs or wine, women and song or maybe ultra-nationalism, the vain hope of return to when Russia was great.

If there are no beliefs or those beliefs are no longer viable, as in the former communist world, then people like Olga are lost, turning to charlatans like Charles Guelperin for answers.