One of those bleary two a.m.’s I was flipping channels and came across a Wal-Mart commercial featuring a perky young girl advertising BritneySpearsWorld! with a display behind her that seemed to consist entirely of compact discs and revealing outfits. Next to it was SeanPuffyCombsWorld! and an array of white capes and guns. I thought to myself that popular music had somehow found a way to go below the lowest common denominator, something my third grade math training told me was impossible, but here we were.

I hit the remote to change channels and on CNN there was a reporter with a terrific haircut interviewing an ashen-grey, blood-splattered Russian soldier who couldn’t have been more than 19 years old. Between them stood a nervous-looking translator with a scraggly beard and a black beret. He looked like a beat poet from an old Steve Allen TV sketch. The soldier’s name was Nikolas and he was telling the reporter of his friend Sergei who had been killed by a Chechen sniper the day before.

“All that Sergei wanted,” the kid stammered as the translator tried to keep up, “was to go home to Leningrad. It was St. Petersburg when we were boys. I wish it was that still, I wish that we were still those boys.”

“Sergei had a cat there, grey with tiger stripes that all the time purred. His mother is caring for it. What will she do now, what will cat do now, with Sergei gone? I saw him die. I watched the bright red arterial blood pumping from the bullet wound. He loved Tolstoi. He loved War and Peace. I think he was only half right.”

I looked at the kid’s mouth on the TV screen and wondered which words in Russian translated as “bright red arterial blood.” Was the translator fucking with us or was this kid a battlefield poet?

Nikolas went on, “They tell me now it is year 2000, that it is new century, I know this is just the end of old century. I think for all dead soldiers there are no new centuries.” I flipped the channel back. In BritneySpearsWorld! the blonde girl was still blathering on about teen commerce. But in the back of the commercial, almost in shadow, was a pale, nearly translucent young soldier in bloody fatigues. He put down an AK-47. He picked up a CD.