“…Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losing hand…”
That was, of course, from Bob Dylan’s immortal song Things Have Changed. Things have indeed changed in the last twenty years, but I still do care! Those before were surely better times--- for the world and for America. Everything was simple then, and made sense. Us and them; America and Russia, the two superpowers, with the rest of the world taking sides. Freedom and democracy American style were mostly the luxury of the rich, while the proud poor preferred their own type of democracy, usually authoritarian, but striving for the more effective totalitarian, and opted to stick with the Russians not so much out of love for the Russians, as out of their nationalist distrust of what they realistically saw as America’s neo-colonialist ambitions.
We had an unpleasant name for those days: cold war. Nobody seemed to like it, but then nobody seemed to have thought out an alternative. Paradoxically, it was during the cold war that America’s enemies had more furtive love for her in their hearts than even the best of her friends. They also had one common dream--- one might even call it their “American Dream,” but it was a different kind of dream than the Americans have had, for America was their dream. The poor often dream of being rich, and America was the Neverland of their dreams; and nobody, except America herself, could take that dream away. America could, though, by failing to measure up, but in those days, when everything was simple, when the Soviet Union was seen as the other superpower by the Americans themselves, and thus, the most important component of a benign relationship: mutual respect, was always there, never diminished, but only accentuated by the mutual name-calling, which was, of course, part of the “noble enemy” ritual,--- it was hard for America not to measure up.
…It is easy to love from afar. One’s own dirt feels like the dirtiest of all dirts, while other people’s dirt can’t be seen behind the glitter of the faraway glamour, or, should I say, it is deliberately overlooked, so as not to spoil the beauty of the fairytale? That’s how the world loved America, and there was nothing wrong with that kind of love. One cannot deny another the privilege of fantasy!
With the disintegration of the USSR, in the early 1990’s, America’s perception of the respectable adversary had suddenly given way to an indecent gloating and a crotch-grabbing frenzy. America lost respect not just for Russia, but for the whole world.
And, as a result, the world’s American dream dried up too. In the place of a beautiful dream, there was only the ugly reality of a bullying brute, insolently staring everyone in the face and demanding submission.
At first, the exhilaration of winning the Cold War was like an extra glass of whiskey for America: great for the moment, but portending ill for the next morning. And, alas, the next morning has now finally arrived.
No longer can America make the mistake about a new “love” of a “New Europe,” not too long ago taken for granted! There is no love there, as most national polls taken there had been shouting into deaf ears. As good news, though, we may cite a drastic reduction in the ranks of those obsequious self-serving conmen, whose syrupy flattery and You-are the-Man! nonsense, used to make Washington politicians proud. Many of those have by now realized that there is little milk left in that trans-Atlantic udder, and moved on to new milking habits. And there are fewer and fewer declarations of love these days, just as the price of the American milk keeps going down...
But there used to be a love and a warmth behind the contentious rhetoric of the past… America blew it big time in those early nineteen-nineties, and thereafter! Today, by the admission of none other than one of the staunchest apologists of the New American Century Doctor Daniel Pipes, the American world has shrunk to “us, Israel, and Taiwan,” and even this “new reality” is most suspect!
“…People are crazy and times are strange…” Some deal America made, “winning” the cold war!
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