Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 27
“Nope,” I said. “I spent it all.”
He looked skeptical, as well he might have. “Empty pockets, bitte,” he ordered. I had twenty-one marks left over.
“Well, I’m coming back tomorrow,” I said.
His expression changed for a moment to boyish amazement. “You are?” He resumed his governmental frown. “This once I will allow you to retain these currencies because you are coming back tomorrow,” he said and rolled his eyes.
I did come back and this time couldn’t find anything at all to spend money on. The only excitement available in East Berlin seemed to be opening the subway car doors and getting off the train before it came to a complete halt. But I couldn’t figure out how to pay the subway fare so I couldn’t even spend my money on this. I walked back toward Checkpoint Charlie with forty-six marks in my pocket. Then I did something my capitalist soul had never allowed me to do before in my life. I crumpled up money and threw it in a garbage can.
There was no question of throwing money away on my 1989 visit to East Berlin. The glimmering new Grand Hotel, standing on that very corner where the garbage can had been, accepted only hard currency. In return you got food you could swallow and Johnnie Walker Scotch at the bar (although something described as “cod liver in oil” still lurked on the restaurant menu).
There had been changes for the regular citizens of East Berlin as well. There were three or four times as many shops on the streets, some with pseudo-boutique names like “Medallion,” “Panda,” and “Joker.” The stuff for sale was awful enough, but there was more of it. Thus at least half the law of supply and demand was being obeyed—if something’s lousy, it’s always available. The first lineup of shoppers I saw turned out to be waiting for an antiques shop to open. The new Wartburg 353 models even had styling—not much styling and that borrowed from 1960s Saabs, but styling nonetheless.
However, the real change was the lack of fear, a palpable physical absence like letting go of your end of a piano. My note taking—which in 1986 would have sent passersby scuttling like roaches surprised in a kitchen—now went unremarked. American reporters were all over the place, of course. And in every hotel lobby and café you could hear East Germans griping loudly to the reporters while the reporters loudly explained to the East Germans how all this was feeling to the people of East Germany.
There were pictures everywhere of the new East German leader Egon Krenz, just as there’d been pictures everywhere of the old East German leader Erich Honecker. But these weren’t the lifted chin, stalwart forward looker vanguarding the masses photos. Egon—who resembles a demented nephew of Danny Thomas’s—was shown spreading hugs around, tousling toddler moptops, and doing the grip-and-grin at various humble functions. He was politicking, plain and simple. The Commies didn’t quite have it right yet: they take office and then they run for it. But they’re trying.
Personally I missed the old East Berlin. The only thing East Germany ever had going for it was a dramatic and sinister film noir atmosphere. When you passed through Checkpoint Charlie the movie footage seemed to switch to black and white. Steam rose from manhole covers. Newspapers blew down wet, empty streets. You’d turn your trench coat collar up, hum a few bars of “Lili Marleen,” and say to yourself, “This is me in East Berlin.”
That’s gone now and the place is revealed for what it’s really been all along, just a screwed-up poor country with a dictatorship. The dictatorship part is understandable, but how the Commies managed to make a poor country out of a nation full of Germans is a mystery. The huge demonstrations that had shaken East Germany for the past several months had one characteristic that distinguished them from all other huge demonstrations in history—they never began until after work. I went to one of these at Humboldt University. The students were demanding economics courses. It was hard to reconcile this with my own memories of student protest. We were demanding free dope for life.
The students were also protesting the opening of the Wall. Not that they were against it. But they were furious that the East German government might think this was all it had to do. One picket sign showed a caricature of East Berlin’s party boss Günter Schabowski naked with a banana stuck in every orifice and a balloon reading, “Free at last!” No one made any attempt to break up the rally. Soldiers and police were there, but they were applauding the speakers.
Even though the guard dogs and the machine-gun nests were gone, the east side of the Berlin Wall was still pristine, smooth whitewashed precast reinforced-concrete slabs a foot thick and ten feet high and separated from the rest of the city by thirty yards of police. On the west side, the Wall was in your face and covered with graffiti paint as thick as ravioli.
I went out Checkpoint Charlie—with nobody worrying over what I might do with my East German marks—and turned right on Zimmer Strasse, what Berliners call “Wall Street” because the Wall runs along the old curbstone, leaving only a sidewalk in front of the West Berlin buildings. There was a steely, rhythmic noise that, for a moment, I thought might be some new Kraftwerk-style Euro synthesizer music (Berliners are horribly up-to-date with that sort of thing). But it was the sound of hundreds of people going at the Wall with hammers, chisels, picks, sledges, screwdrivers, and even pocket knives. The chipping and flaking had progressed in a week until long, mouse-gnawed-looking ellipses were appearing between the slabs with daylight and occasional glimpses of East German border guards visible on the other side. I saw thirty schoolchildren on a class excursion with their teacher, all beating the Wall in unison with rocks, sticks, and anything that came to hand.
I talked to a man in his sixties who was going along the Wall with a rucksack and a geologist’s hammer. He’d escaped from the East in 1980. He’d been in prison over there for his political opinions. He gestured at the layers of spray-painting, the hundreds of symbols, slogans, and messages ranging from John Lennon quotes to “Fuck the IRA.” “I want one piece of every color,” he said.
A twenty-year-old West German named Heiko Lemke was attacking the Wall with a set of professional stonemason’s tools. In two days he’d made a hole big enough to pass a house cat through, even though the police had twice confiscated his cold chisels—the West German police. During a one-minute breather Lemke said he was an engineering student, a supporter of the Christian Democratic Party, didn’t want history to repeat itself, and was going to come back to the Wall on the weekend with some serious equipment.
Two American teenagers, Neville Finnis and Daniel Sheire, from Berlin’s English-language JFK High School were attempting to rip the top off one section of the Wall with their bare hands. The Wall is capped with six-foot-long two-hundred-pound half-pipes cast in ferro concrete. These need to be lifted nearly a foot in the air before their edges clear the cement slab and they can be heaved to the ground. Neville and Daniel straddled the wall, in postures that would bring dollar signs to the eyes of any hernia surgeon, and lifted. When that didn’t work, two more JFK students got up on the Wall and lifted Neville and Daniel while Neville and Daniel lifted the half-pipe. “Go for it! Go for it!” they yelled at each other. It was an American, rather than a scientific or methodical, approach. The half-pipe landed with a great thump. The political message was clear to all the JFK students. “Yeah!” shouted one. “Let’s sell it!”
The East German border guards didn’t interfere. Instead they came up to openings in the Wall and made V-signs and posed for photographs. One of them even stuck his hand through and asked would somebody please give him a piece of the concrete to keep as a souvenir.
The hand of that border guard—that disembodied, palm-up, begging hand … I looked at that and I began to cry.
I really didn’t understand before that moment, I didn’t realize until just then—we won. The Free World won the Cold War. The fight against life-hating, soul-denying, slavish communism—which has shaped the world’s politics this whole wretched century—was over.
The tears of victory ran down my face—and the snot of victory did too because it was a pretty cold day. I was blubbering like a lottery winner.
All the people who had been sent to gulags, who’d been crushed in the streets of Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw; the soldiers who’d died in Korea, and my friends and classmates who had been killed in Vietnam—it meant something now. All the treasure that we in America had poured into guns, planes, Star Wars, and all the terrifying A-bombs we’d had to build and keep—it wasn’t for nothing.
And I didn’t get it until just then, when I saw that border guard’s hand. And I think there are a lot of people who haven’t gotten it yet. Our own President Bush seems to regard the events in Eastern Europe as some kind of odd dance craze or something. When I got back to the United States, I was looking through the magazines and newspapers and it seemed that all I saw were editorial writers pulling long faces about “Whither a United Germany” and “Whence America’s Adjustments to the New Realities in Europe.” Is that the kind of noise people were making in Times Square on V-E Day?
I say, shut up you egghead flapgums. 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 living exemplars of the Rights of Man tore a new asshole in International Communism. Their wall is breached. Their gut string is busted. The rot of their dead body politic fills the nostrils of the earth with a glorious stink. We cleaned the clock of Marxism. We mopped the floor with them. We ran the Reds through the wringer and hung them out to dry. The privileges of liberty and the sanctity of the individual went out and whipped butt.
And the best thing about our victory is the way we did it—not just with ICBMs and Green Berets and aid to the Contras. Those things were important, but in the end we beat them with Levi’s 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps, and secret police has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian sneakers. They may have had the soldiers and the warheads and the fine-sounding ideology that suckered the college students and nitwit Third Worlders, but we had all the fun. Now they’re lunch, and we’re number one on the planet.
It made me want to do a little sack dance right there in the Cold War’s end zone. We’re the best! We’re the greatest! The only undefeated socioeconomic system in the league! I wanted to get up on the Wall and really rub it in: “Taste the ash heap of history, you Bolshie nosewipes!” But there was nobody left to jeer at. Everybody from East Berlin was in West Berlin watching Madonna music videos.
Return of the Death of Communism
Nicaragua, February 1990
On the morning of the twenty-sixth, the day after Violeta Chamorro’s victory over Danny Ortega, I walked into the Inter-Continental hotel in Managua and Bianca Jagger was sitting alone in the lobby. Bianca had been ubiquitous during the election campaign. There was Bianca looking smart in an unconstructed linen jacket and yellow socks to match, Bianca looking serious with press pass and camera, Bianca looking thoughtful listening to Jimmy Carter, Bianca looking concerned conferring with Senator Christopher Dodd, Bianca looking committed in simple tennis shoes and neatly mussed hair, Bianca looking important wearing sunglasses after dark. But this morning Bianca looked … her age. Here we had a not very bright, fortyish, discarded rock-star wife, trapped in the lonely hell of the formerly cute—one bummed-out showbiz lefty.
I was feeling great myself, ready to turn somersaults over the Ortega defeat, full of good cheer and pleased with all the world. But then the forlorn, sagging little shape of Bianca caught my eye and, all of a sudden, I FELT EVEN BETTER.
I hadn’t come to Nicaragua prepared for such bliss. Like most readers of papers and watchers of newscasts, I thought the Sandinistas were supposed to win this one. I’m a member of the working press; you’d think I’d know better than to listen to journalists. But there’s a little bit of the pigeon in every good confidence man. I even believed the February 21 ABC–Washington Post poll that had Ortega leading Chamorro by sixteen percentage points. That is—I blush to admit this—I accepted the results of an opinion poll taken in a country where it was illegal to hold certain opinions. You can imagine the poll-taking process: “Hello, Mr. Peasant, I’m an inquisitive and frightening stranger. God knows who I work for. Would you care to ostensibly support the dictatorship which controls every facet of your existence, or shall we put you down as in favor of the UNO opposition and just tear up your ration card right here and now?”
Furthermore, when I arrived in Nicaragua I found an Ortega political machine that was positively Bushian in its relentless drumming on the issue-free upbeat. Danny’s smiling (I presume they used a photo retoucher) face and Danny’s heartthrob-of-the-poli-sci-department mustache were everywhere to be seen. As was Danny—pestering babies, attempting dance steps, wearing Ed Begley Jr. the-dog-was-sick-on-the-carpet shirts, and tossing free baseballs into crowds of squealing totalitarianism fans. The Sandinistas’ black and red, Doberman-mouth party colors were painted anyplace paint could stick. Sandinista songs played from every radio. The Danny for president slogan todo sera mejor (meaning “everything will be better” and not, as I momentarily thought, “major dried toads”) was as perfect an all-purpose campaign promise as I have ever heard. There were Sandinista music videos with singing and dancing that could send Paula Abdul back to wagging pom-poms for the LA Lakers. And there were Sandinista ad campaigns tailored to every segment of the electorate. A billboard for city youth (the voting age is sixteen in Nicaragua) showed a moonstruck couple in Ortega T-shirts walking hand in hand toward a voting booth beneath the headline “When you do it for the first time, do it for love.” Banners for the countryside showed a fierce portrait of Ortega with the motto Daniel Es Mi Gallo, “Daniel Is My Fighting Cock.” (These can now be profitably recycled by the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise outlets soon to open in Nicaragua.)
I confess I believed the Sandys had all the corners nailed down, and I spent the last couple of days before the election committing that original sin of journalism, “writing the lead on the way to the ballpark.” What was I going to say about a loathsome Sandinista victory? I supposed I’d have to natter on about the unfair advantages of using state resources for party ends, about how Sandinista control of the transit system prevented UNO supporters from attending rallies, how Sandinista domination of the army forced soldiers to vote for Ortega, and how Sandinista bureaucracy kept $3.3 million of U.S. campaign aid from getting to UNO while Danny spent three million donated by overseas pinks and millions and millions more from the Nicaraguan treasury, etc.
But this seemed like weak-tea, crybaby stuff. No, I thought, I’ll have to go shoveling in the manure pile of political science, trying to uncover the appeal that Marxism and other infantile worldviews still hold for people. One nice thing about being a conservative, at least I wouldn’t feel betrayed by the masses. Democracy is only one of human liberty’s safeguards and not always the most effective one. Back in the U.S. we’ve got a House of Representatives full of bed-wetting liberals to prove it.
The Dog Is Dead but the Tail Still Wags
That was what I planned to call this article. (It’s still a good title—I’ll save it for a description of GOP performance in this year’s midterm congressional elections.)
Thus I was in a grim frame of mind when I went to the press conference - of America’s ex-presidents, Jimmy Carter. The press conference was at the Sandinistas’ imposing media complex, one of the few buildings in Managua that won’t fall down if you piss against the side of it. This propaganda palace was built with money donated by patsy Swedes, named after their bumped-off prime minister, Olof Palme, and hence called, by the small contingent of conservatives present, the “Good Socialist Press Center.”
Carter was the head of one of the three principal international election-monitoring groups that were fluttering around Nicaragua pronouncing everything they saw fair and equitable. There was the UN (“the turkeys”), the OAS (“the chickens”), and Carter’s group, the Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government (“the geese”).
What Carter thought he was doing, besides proving there are worse things than marines that the U.S. can send to Nicaragua, I don’t know. But there he was, the man who gave the store away in the first place, still grinning like a raccoon eating fish guts out of a wire brush and still talking in that prissy, nose-first, goober-grabber accent, except this time in Spanish: “… new-WAY-vuh KnickerRAH-wuh deh-muh-crat-TICK-uh …”
Carter oozed moral equivalence. “There have been serious problems in the campaign process on both sides,” said Carter. “We have to give credit to the Nicaraguan people for establishing an excellent electoral process,” said Carter. “If the election is certified as honest and fair, the United States should lift sanctions,” said Carter. It’s a shame Jimmy was too young to be an international observer at Germany’s elections in 1932. “We have to give credit to the German people for establishing an excellent electoral process.” Maybe he could have given Hitler some help rearming.
The “press” at the press conference was a dirty and confused bunch, even by press corps standards. Inspection of credentials showed most of them to be correspondents for the Xeroxed newsletter of the Berkeley High-Colonic Liberation Front or television reporters from the Ann Arbor Reincarnation for Peace Coalition’s public-access cable program. When a genuine newsman asked Carter about a report of UNO poll watchers being arrested, the backpack journalists hissed.
