Ain't nothing to celebrate, folks, move along

Submitted by Kaustik (United States), Nov 11, 2009 at 11:12

The vast majority of my liberal friends discovered their inner hawk only after the peace dividend started to ooze out of the corpse of the Cold War. In 1989 the enemy was still us and the backpacks with Canadian flags were still de rigueur for the wanderlusting college students getting away from their square parents on their parents' dime. And the Wall was a way of protecting the tender greenhouse of Deustche Sozialismus from the vile corrupting touch of the West.

Obam, then a hip 28-year old, does not strike me as someone who spent the day the Wall died in raucous celebration. I am sure that he saw the choice between plutocrats in Bonn and the torturecrats in Stasi as a false one, whereas the golden mean lay somewhere in the Green Party.

I write as someone who celebrated the news of Brezhnev's death in 1982 by executing a hundred yard dash that culminated in a nice vertical-leap high five with a reactionary buddy. Which may well be the kind of reaction seen on the streets of Berlin that day or in Baghdad when the statues were getting pulled down and before the head cases started to explode in crowded marketplaces.

So, I can't claim to be surprised by Obama's benign neglect of a minor anniversary in the backwater of the world when the real action is pandering to the Arab Street. I just wish all the people who didn't want the Wall to come down in 1989 would own up to it and stop trying to sneak into the victory parade.

Cheers from Kaustik at kissmybackend.com

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