Issue #27/82, February 1 - 10, 2000  

By John Dolan

THE YEARBOOK’S OUT…

The Longman Companion to America, Russia and the Cold War 1941-1998 Longman (London/New York) 1999

--and we look great. The Longman Companion to America, Russia and the Cold War is a yearbook of an unappreciated epoch: the latter half of the twentieth century, the great High School era of history. It has all our pictures in it, watching from the crowd its primal scene, the decades-long playground confrontation between the two toughest guys in the school: the lethal grinning American, so polite to the teachers but so good at fighting dirty, and the dogged USSR, factory brat who can take a punch like Joe Frazier. You can see the rest of us in the crowd, cheering them on. We look pretty great in our acronyms and our ICBMs and our slogans--and unlike those damn West European loonies, we did OUR face-off without wiping out millions of our own. How many Americans did the Russians kill in the entire 40 years of the Cold War? Zilch. How many Russians did the Americans kill? Nada, baby--nada damn one. Oh, maybe there was the odd assassination here and there--what are we, a buncha Quakers? And sure, we slipped the odd surplus automatic rifle to our little friends in Afghanistan or Vietnam (we needed to sell the damn things anyway!) and they picked off a few luckless farmboys from Iowa or Volgograd--but damn it, we managed to stage a martial, conspiratorial, apocalyptic pageant 40 years long without wiping out whole generations of our kin. Look on with envy, O ye Germans and ye French and ye English! No Somme for us--a Zero-Somme game, maybe, but without twelve-digit casualty lists. Our casualties were Asian meat: there to spice the dish, not comprise it. Nobody turned Moscow into a pile of glowing glass. Nobody made Houston into the world’s biggest mutant-armadillo preserve (a shame, really). We turned our apocalypse into forty beautiful years of strutting and scheming and talkin’ tough...and with a few exceptions (see above: Farmboys, Iowa/Volgograd) we came out of it fat’n’sassy.

No one appreciates this tremendous achievement! For decades, the two Superpowers faced off without throwing a punch. Instead they circled each other, growling impressively, while their supporters in the crowd turned on each other in smaller and much more vicious combats, which, chronicled in this textbook, provide hours of viewing pleasure to the nostalgic graduate. The tableau was a beautiful one, at once comic and gory: the two big guys loud-talking each other while their midget proxies, often too dim and nearsighted to see the central fight clearly, did their part by stabbing their nearest neighbor with a Bic pen. The crowd of lesser breeds really got into it as the stipends from Moscow and DC came raining down on them. They did themselves proud! They rolled around on the playground biting and gouging and screaming out a hash of mistranslated slogans: "Democracy to your eyeballs, proletarian fascist insect!" "Bite the three olds to unleash Chiang’s running dog!"

No matter where you look in this yearbook there’s a narrative energy which will make us the envied ham actors of history. At every level, in every stagnant pond of a country from North Korea to Angola, some half-educated provincial who rescued a page or two of the Manifesto from the jaws of one of his goats was inventing himself as local messiah, while his second cousin was convincing the CIA to give him a billion dollars to save democracy via the Swiss banking system. The sheer roaring fecundity of it! The sheer fractal brilliance, movements spinning off into their counter-, post- and re-returns, from Vientiane to La Paz! Now that it’s over, you can savor all of them alike: Viva Nikitka! Khvala Nixonu!

Open at any page and you get a great story. The capsule bios, which make up an entire section of the book, make such great reading you feel proud just to have been an extra in a production with such stars. Opening at random, I get pp. 216-217, which provide 100-word bios of Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kadar, Janos; Kennedy, John F.; Khomeini, Ayatollah J. [OK, I made up that middle initial...but how come only American presidents get a middle initial? What if Janos’s mother gave him a middle name which had been in her family for generations? Shall the Kadars be deemed less worthy than the Johnsons, nay even the Kennedys?]; Khruschev, Nikita S.; and Kim Il Sung.

Now those are stars. James Dean--I spit me of James Dean! Pluy! Marilyn Monroe--bah! Put her in a locked room with Kim Il Sung and see which one ends up on top! (In fact, I’d like to watch that one if you don’t mind. Kim had the most feared interrogators this side of Countess Bathory. Maybe we could bore a little peephole in that locked room. For history’s sake. Got a video camera on you?) Who could invent a character as amazing as Kim Il Sung, Great Leader, Light of the People? The founder of an hereditary Stalinist dynasty, author of the most strikingly simple regimen ever recommended by any health authority: "Work eight hours, study Kim Il Sung thought eight hours, sleep eight hours!" A wonderfully healthy regimen, as has been statistically proved; all those who failed to follow it--particularly that second clause about studying Kim Il Sung thought--became noticeably less healthy in a very short period of time.

Just to have lived in a time which threw up monsters as epic as Kim! Stevens said sadly from the bland suburbs of Connecticut,

It is equal to living in a tragic land

To live in a tragic time.

But as the rest of the poem ("Dry Loaf") showed, he didn’t really believe it, didn’t believe he was entitled to membership in the horrors of the thirties and forties. And perhaps he was right, because those horrors took the lives of their members. All of them. Our great stylized brawl was far kinder: it allowed all of us to watch, wear the uniform and cheer for our side without giving up all.

And now, thanks to books like the Longman Companion, we can take a long sweet masturbatory look back. The book is divided into ten sections. Some are a bit dull, useful only to its ostensible audience, first-year Poli Sci students--I mean the sections titled "Major Treaties" and "Conferences." Treaties and conferences are boring, except when they provide air cover for sneak attacks and assassinations. But most of the ten sections are pure pleasure. There’s a whole section titled simply "Maps." I love maps. All right-thinking people do, particularly maps which show the borders shifting from year to year. Just watching the Polish borders in these Cold-War sequential maps is fun. In fact, if you flip the pages fast enough, you get a sort of animated cartoon of the borders shifting like kelp in a high tide. It’s really cool, because you can invent your own soundtrack of screaming peasants and advancing and retreating tanks and big explosions. Hours of fun for the whole family.

The book is a British product, and full of the barely-restrained back-seat-driving impulses which animate the British upper-middle class now that they’ve had to give the wheel to their American cousins. It reflects the biases of that class, and of the eighties in general. (Reagan, Bush and Gorbachev are shown on the cover, Gorby looking a little bit like a man who just traded the kolhoz for a draft choice to be named later.)

But all in all, the book is better for being a British production: the British have a few great virtues, two of which--concision and bluntness--make them far better suited to producing a book of this sort than my fellow mealymouthed, aim-to-please, nad-yazikom-myod Americans.

And to think we won. Well, it makes a kind of high-school playground sense, I guess: the bell rang, the crowd dispersed, Johnny America went off to College... The Russian kid? I think they bought that factory...closed it down. That white-collar/blue-collar difference starts to make a lot of difference after high school.