Menage à Trois Bingo

I was born in 49 A cold war kid in the McCarthy times Stop 'em at the 38th parallel blast those yellow reds to hell cold war kids were hard to kill under their desks in an air raid drill -- Billy Joel, "Leningrad"

Remember the late 70's and '80's? We didn't bother with air raid drills
any longer--everyone knew crawling under your desk was hopeless against
radiation--but we did still have many buildings labeled as fallout
shelters.

My high school and college friends and I used to have long deep
conversations about what to do if the Soviets fired ICBM's at us. Was it
better to run away from Ground Zero or toward it? Try to live through it
and hope you stayed mostly healthy and something remained of
civilization or you had enough strength and skills to survive the
post-apocalypse world, or just make a quick end of it. Did it depend on
how far you were from a large metropolitan area that was likely to go up
or for that matter how far you were from a major military installation.
Etc.

Then we had a sudden outbreak of democracy and freedom and peace in
1989-91: the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed and most of
their satellite states established fledging democracies...I remember
thinking "Peace is busting out all over". It was an amazing moment.

But as moments are prone to do, it ended. The tension between two big
powers is now replaced by the animosity of the entire world against the
one remaining power, instead of "yellow reds" now we have the "Muslim
menace", and McCarthy is back, only this time he's in the blogosphere
and on rightwing talk radio, advocating the death penalty for such
"treasonable" activities as dissenting from the present administration's
policies on torture.

I have a tendency to say things like "this is not the America I grew up
in," in reference to the administration's myriad of offenses against the
Ideal America I dream of. But it is, isn't it. Fear, uncertainty, and
distrust: only the Other has changed.