I thought of them as...gone

It's really neat when someone remembers what I wrote long ago. Ethan Hahn writes: Hearing that seven Soviet bloc countries today raised their flags at NATO headquarters reminded me of your wonderful post from when these countries were first invited to join.  I dug thru your old blogspot archives to find the link:

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia ... time was, I thought of them as, well, gone. Names from the past only. But they're still there! Made new. Marvelous. We might visit them someday. While Lenin and Marx and Mao and Stalin and Castro and PolPot are on the big ash-heap...

It still seems utterly marvelous. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania...