October 24, 2004

We remember the fall.....of The Wall

The very interesting new blog Patum Piperium thinks Mr Kerry is stuck in the past, not just stuck before 9/11, but before 1991. Before the fall of the Soviet Union...

...I remember listening on the radio a year later. There was a report about a university in the former Soviet Union where students had just been told that literature would no longer be taught to them through the barbaric, distorting prism of Marxist-Leninist "theory". I remember the shout that went up from those students. It hit me like a blow, even through a car radio. It was deep and resonant and triumphant and heart-stopping. It sounded as if it expressed the pent-up longing of an entire people which, of course, it did.

I remember that Mr. Kerry and his friends told us none of that would ever happen. That if we tried we'd just rock the boat and end up in a nuclear holocaust. (Besides, who knew? Perhaps we were just as bad as the Soviets!) And now they're trying to tell us all that all over again. Except that this time our enemy is even more dangerous.

Don't despair. If Kerry starts getting to you in the next two weeks, just open a modern atlas and try to find Leningrad on a Russian map.

There's a sort of person, we see them often here in SF, who was not thrilled by the fall of Comunism. And the same people were mostly not thrilled by the fall of Saddam Hussein.

I could forgive them if they were, like, you know, Communists...or Ba'athists....But they aren't. They just think it's sort of tacky for all those ordinary little people to take matters in their own hands, without it being arranged by large international institutions. And anyway, it might help Bush!!! (Senior or Junior) Ugh!

Those Soviet students make me think of the many pieces I've quoted that were written by Iraqis. Writing about the astonishing joys of freedom. Bliss of things we take for granted, like a soldier now having comfortable boots. Try this one or this one. Lotsa people aren't thrilled by these. Don't want to know about it. I think their hearts are cold and dead.

Posted by John Weidner at October 24, 2004 9:29 PM
Weblog by John Weidner