“I say, Shut up you egghead flap-gums. We’ve got the whole rest of history to sweat the small stuff. And those discredited peace creeps, they can zip their soup-coolers, too. They think Mikhail Gorbachev is a visionary? Yeah, he’s a visionary. Like Hirohito was after Nagasaki. We won. And let’s not let anybody forget it. We the people, the free and equal citizens of democracies, we the living exemplars of the Rights of Man tore a new asshole in International Communism.”
So Otterites, that’s my man PJ O’Rourke’s take on the Fall of the Berlin Wall, recounted to you Friday by the always eloquent Francis. O’Rourke’s take always reminds me of the joy of those years. For one of the few times in history, an enslaved people were about to be free. Soul crushing Bolshevism was on the retreat. The Orwellian boot of oppression was lifted off the face of the East Germans. It truly was meaningful for those of us in our young adulthood to know something that had always been there, as immutable as the sun and the sky, was failing, crashing, circling the big toilet bowl of history. Fear of the future was gone.
Unfortunately the joy didn’t last. Evil finds a way to resurface in a different guise. Maybe the apocalyptic fear was lifted off our backs, but power grabbing, violence and ignorance seemingly always return.
Someday though, victory will be complete. For a cynic I’m fairly optimistic that someday people will be free. The human spirit is hard to crush. It squishes out from under boots and slides from under hammers and sickles. Somehow. I think that’s the only part Orwell got wrong. East Berlin shows it can happen.
Here’s to East Berlin, Gorbachev, PJ and 1989. Good year. Meeting PJ is still at the top of my bucket list. Hopefully his liver is holding and he can have a snort with us someday soon.
