pondering walls, like everyone else on this 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall. already last night on the news, they were discussing it and the significance of the event, which marked, at least symbolically, the end of the cold war. sabin was watching and her response was, "berlin wall, blah, blah, blah," which is interesting. because it's clear that she has no reference for it (being 8 and all). she can't imagine what all of the fuss is about just because some people knocked down a stupid old graffiti-covered wall. she knows nothing of NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact, nor the Iron Curtain, nor the Soviet Union. (strange that those things are so deeply etched in my mental topography that i can't bring myself not to capitalize them.)
when i think about the fall of the berlin wall, it takes me back to college. i had personalized plates on my car that read CCCP (believe it or not, the state of iowa allowed that), i was studying russian, i was an avid fan of gorbachev and i despised ronald reagan with a passion (the only thing that cooled that was the 8 years of dubya, who made reagan seem quite harmless in retrospect). i don't believe for a single second that ronald reagan was a visionary that foresaw the downfall of soviet-style communism. he was just a guy who could deliver a good speech and happened to be in the right place at the right time to get the credit. and those who really deserve the credit were the people on the ground who pushed their way through that wall and in all honesty, the wall coming down was just the culmination of a long, slow demise of the soviet empire (which took another two years to formally dissolve).
but do i remember it per se? in all honesty, i really don't. i remember more the aftermath. i remember russian history departments in universities all over the world scrambling to find a new narrative. i recall those pierce brosnan incarnations of the james bond franchise that struggled to find a new narrative without the cold war as backdrop. i remember studying in russia in the early 90s with an east german guy who was a bit of a character and had a big fat laptop named hannah as his pride and joy. i remember that the other germans i studied with found him very strange because he was from the east. it was obvious that the divided germany had set itself deeply on the personal topographies of its people and that it would take more than the symbolism of knocking down of a wall to change that.
strangely, i'm left with a nostalgic longing for the dichotomies of cold war rhetoric - the whole notion of good and evil was so straightforward then. plus, i think we've struggled since with only one superpower in the world. i don't think it's been good for us. any of us, not just americans. in one symbolic gesture - breaking down that wall - an entire ideology and way of life crumbled - on both sides of the iron curtain. and we've had trouble picking up the pieces. it took another broad symbolic gesture in the form of september 11 to give us a new narrative, but i'm not sure the narrative of terrorism is a worthy replacement for the cold war. i don't really believe today's possessors of nuclear weapons have the same cool heads that the leaders of the soviet union and the cold war united states had. where is mutually assured destruction when you need it?
and speaking of destruction, i find myself thinking of other walls that have fallen. wall street for one, last year at about this time. but it's back up where it was now, isn't it? and the financial wizards are collecting their taxpayer-funded bonuses once again. and nothing has really changed.
maybe the last time there was real change was when the berlin wall fell. it had such fantastic symbolic value. and so we watch it again and again this week. and we read the stories. and we remember simpler times full of grander gestures. and i try not to let in the sneaking suspicion that what we are witnessing now in a kind of slow motion accident-type sequence, is the demise of the american empire...
