Berlin Wall Fall – 20 years on

The wall came down and there was joy upon the land and across the world. Freedom for some from the grip of Soviet communism, and freedom for all from the specter of thermonuclear war. I had lived all my life under that threat, and, in the non-plutonium after glow of Good News, I rushed to East Europe to travel and eventually live and work.

Most of the meaningless utterances that have attended this anniversary are taken up with fatuous discussion of who was more responsible for the collapse of the wall Gorbachev or Reagan [who would win in a fight Plastic Man or the Brown Bubble?]. Few have mentioned the saddest legacy of the fall – the almost instantly nuked peace dividend. Somehow there was meant to be one, and there were some token base closings, but really, how long did it last?

Imagine if, instead of shouldering our way into three hot wars since then we had reinvested that peace dividend. Imagine if, instead of paying all that extra money to the oil companies because of “instability in the region,” we had instituted a—horrors!-- $.50 per gallon national tax on gasoline. Imagine…

If there’s one thing that historic moment taught me, and that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment as we grasp like blind mole rats for some pathetic excuse for national health care, it is this: Preserving freedom in America has come to mean preserving the freedom of our corporate bodies—the national military industrial complex’s freedom to expand its budget and the private health care system’s freedom to gouge the citizens of this nation. Teabaggers and Support Our Troop-ists have been artfully convinced to fight for the rights of Aetna, Lockheed and Merck.

Twenty years ago, as I watched modern history rekindle from my perch in the newly free east Europe [Prague to be specific], I made my peace [somewhat] with the last time history had raised her bloody head in that part of world. I tracked down the remnants of Eastern European Jewry in general and kicked over the traces of my family’s past in particular. At the time, as I watched Fascism and anti-Semitism perk up and stretch their deformed limbs as if arising from under a pile of pig shit after a forty year slumber, there was one thing I took away from that historic moment that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment: like it or not, most peoples get the government they deserve.