Friday Night

[varjohaltia]

I just had a pretty long and interesting conversation with Mia and Vince about mindset. About the mindset of fear today from terrorism. About the tendency to not speak about bad things the groups currently holding power have done (the victor writes the history). About the cold war.

I lived through the cold war. I know nothing of the height of it, but in middle and high school we read Tom Clancy and played games set around nuclear, chemical and biological warfare in our back yards. We knew way too much about ICBMs and nuclear weapons. I'd go as far as to say that most of my class in high school could've explained to you the difference between a fission and fusion bomb (A and H bomb). We had fallout shelters in school and in my home apartment buildings. School councelors dealt with kids having nightmares about nuclear war. Post-apocalyptic movies and books were not as much far-fetched fiction as they were a very possible reality. Dr. Strangelove and War Games were very poignant works dealing with the major fears of my youth.

The world was divided in two. The West versus Communism. We didn't have really much stake in he whole struggle, as long as we could stay in the West. We liked to eat hamburger and watch American TV, because Russian TV and movies were boring and sucked and their Sci-Fi books were just weird and way too literary. Alternatively, the whole free market and capitalist ideology export wasn't that big of a deal to the Americans, or at least that's what it seemed like. Terrorists were just an annoyance, popping up from any multitude of unhappiness; you had the anarchists, and far right, and neofascists, and far left, and separatists, and Palestinians, and Basques, and IRA, and they'd all blow up night clubs or VIPs and that's just how it was.

I feel old, and lonely.

Comments

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

I can see where Solaris would have bent anyone's perceptions of the Eastern Bloc's literary output.

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

Actually I rather liked Cyberiad, and some of Lem's other, more straightforward works. When he got literary it went past my ability to appreciate.

Have you seen the Russian movie version of Solaris? I watched it entirely using fast forward, and it was still incredibly boring :-)

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

I tried to watch it with some friends, to keep us all focused on the movie. Alas, to quote another dead, famous Russian, it was indeed the opiate of our mass.

[collie13.livejournal.com]

So if you'd reduced your combined mass, would you have ended up with less opiate? ;)

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

We'd still have all fallen asleep.

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

Rereading this reminded me of something I was thinking about myself. Have you noticed terrorists really aren't cool anymore? You remember The Jackal and Hans Gruber? Terrorists used to be portrayed as slick Eastern European guys with bitchin' wardrobes. Now they're painted as psychotic desert-dwelling yahoos with third-hand AKs.

I think I'd prefer it if we could trade in our Islamic extremists and get Destro back.