We’re off to the home stretch of 2014 because in America, the Holiday Season gets kicked off with Halloween followed by Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Interspersed in between are the other so-called good movies. The Summer sucked, I’m hoping the Winter run will be better and I think it is on deck: The Hobbit 3, Hero 6, Dumb and Dumber To, hmm, all numbered titles?
I’m also hoping I will get the chance to catch up on all the stories I’ve let sit and fester, namely concerts, brushes with greatness, movies and book reviews. I actually read about a half dozen this year!
This month’s header is a remembrance of two Novembers separated by a decade yet they had a common thread.
Despite the Iranian hostage crisis kicking off a earlier, Pink Floyd released its long-awaited successor to Dark Side of the Moon, a more personal, pseudo-biographical double album. The Wall doesn’t have much to do with politics or the Cold War, to me it’s about an internal struggle over familial issues, a failing relationship and the wall the “narrator” has put around himself. It’s the last attempt at a mainstream Rock Opera until Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime. I scored the most recent re-master in the last couple years; after turning off the radio, it’s nice to get acquainted with what became Pink Floyd’s last truly good album. There are a few pretentious, heavy-handed numbers yet the singles have aged well, namely “Comfortably Number,” “Young Lust,” and “Run Like Hell.” I remembered how much my inept six-grade teacher Ms. Tolan hated “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” or the we-don’t-need-no-education song.
The bigger, more earth-shattering anniversary is right on the heels of America’s pointless mid-term elections; the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. Get ready for Reagan flacks like the clueless Peggy “Riefenstahl” Noonan and Grover Norquist to bloviate about how the doddering old B-moive star singlehandedly achieved this impossible feat. Nevermind how many times he nearly brought nuclear war upon the planet. Nevermind the efforts of seven previous US presidents, Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policies, Brezhnev’s stagnation, internal dissent through Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and the American taxpayers. They’ll probably include Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II though; one was just an English dictator and the other a useless figurehead turning a blind eye to other internal problems.
Contrary to the lies Republicans, Teabaggers, Randroids at Reason and the Conservative ilk in America, Liberals were never fans of the Berlin Wall and the forces behind it. The cursed thing was built to stop/slow the brain drain East Germany was experiencing in the Sixties. It wasn’t completely effective which should be an adequate warning to the morons demanding one between the US and Mexico. The virtual wall to keep West African travel out is another fear-mongering idiot cry by a cynical and/or ignorant opposition.
Even in 1989, I learned that the Soviet collapse was not a matter of “if” but a “when.” During my first senior semester, I was finally enrolled in the upper-division Philosophy course I wanted to take…Marx and Marxism. From day one, Dr. Smith told everyone how the class would focus on Karl Marx the philosopher and his era. No coverage on his legacy, aka his distantly removed disciples Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, etc. I figured I had an advantage here because I tended to have good grades in History. Anyway, Dr. Smith was well aware of the news happening outside academia and he said the events weren’t too surprising to him, he stated the Warsaw Pact nations had been (financially) broke around the mid-Seventies. They needed an injection of capital. Probably what Gorbachev was pursuing through the new policy of “openness.”
Personally I found the wall-smashing in Berlin worrisome. The Soviets had been “invited” before when Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland stepped out of line. Then more dominoes began to fall in other nations. Some transitioned peacefully like Germany, Romania didn’t go well. How patient were these millions of Eastern Europeans going to be? The West’s prosperity wasn’t an overnight success. It was pretty common for a formerly oppressed group to eventually turn against itself when it doesn’t get the desired result. The Soviets were brutal yet they were predictable and they had a better handle on where their nuclear arsenal was kept.
I’m glad it worked out for the former satellites. Russia and the ex-republics are a mixed bag. This whole mess in Ukraine demonstrates how we continue to pay for the mistrust ratcheted up by St. Reagan.