The woman was pleased as punch or maybe as eggnog. The timing, she told the television reporter, was just perfect. Imagine, the wall had come down on schedule for the Christmas season.
This joyful commentator was not thinking about peace on earth, or goodwill toward all. Her St. Louis company had apparently gotten ahold of three concrete slabs of the Berlin Wall. It had shipped them to America, chopped them into pieces and packaged them in little gift boxes. In short, with a bit of help from Erich Honecker it had the pet wall of the 1989 Christmas season.
Here we have another heartwarming international holiday tale about people who are beating the Cold War into stocking stuffers. They are proving the victory of capitalism over communism, of private over public enterprise. It`s all part of the story.
These days, we wake up to discover another government has fallen. The television set is full of young Germans, Hungarians, Poles and Czechs wearing headbands fashioned after Tiananmen Square, raising their hands in victory signs imported from the American `60s via Winston Churchill`s `40s, and uttering sentiments that resonate of the French Revolution.
The international pursuit of freedom of expression and government is ripe with the sense of fresh possibilities. But sometimes it seems there is a smaller, shabbier piece to this new international style. Along with the best of the West that is winning in the East, we are also seeing the worst. We are witnessing the takeover of the truly tacky.
It`s not just this perestroika of pet walls, although the Germans may one day ask us to glue it all back together for their museums. It`s what`s happening in Moscow and its Warsaw Pact pals. There is a case of kreeping kultural kitsch.
Until recently the only Communist-approved symbols of Western culture were American jazz and Pepsi. Then along came glasnost and right behind it came a Miss Moscow contest. It was the first post-glasnost meat market in the city.
Next came Bloomingdale`s. Remember when the Russian musician in ”Moscow on the Hudson” entered the Manhattan store, took one look at the goodies and defected? Well, now the Soviets are importing the total consumer concept. They`re negotiating to bring Bloomie`s to Moscow.
Even when the Soviets buy ideas, something happens on the way to the cash register. Glasnost has brought more fresh air to the pages of Soviet press. It`s also brought some fairly spacey reporting. This fall they printed, deadpan, a story about a three-eyed alien with a robot sidekick who landed by spaceship and made a boy vanish by zapping him with a pistol. From the censored Truth to the National Enquirer in less than five years.
As for the newly emancipated Soviet colonies, Hungary has just opened up to those harbingers of Western culture, Playboy and Penthouse. The first issue of Playboy reportedly on the stands now brings a ”pictorial” of LaToya Jackson to the freedom-starved souls of Budapest.
Some of this is just the allure of the different. We buy klunky Soviet watches, they buy underpants with Bloomie`s written on them. More of it is the inexplicable allure of the lowest common denominator of Americana: McDonald`s food and ”Dallas” TV are sweeping the world.
But in the case of East following West, something else is going on. Americans may purchase pieces of the wall as history; Soviets are setting up beauty pageants as hip. Their present is our past, their trend is our rerun.
It`s as if the folk from the Eastern Bloc were trapped in a time warp of Soviet Realism and mimeograph machines. They had four decades of the 1940s, while the rest of us went through the `50s, `60s, `70s and `80s. Now they want to catch up by reliving our Oldies but Baddies.
In America, beauty pageants have become camp, the tabloids are read for the laughs, Playboy has lost its youthful lust and Bloomingdale`s, the citadel of consumerism, is up for sale. But in Eastern Europe, in a host of ways, people seem to be longing for what we are losing or leaving behind.
The talk is about the future over there. Funny, how in some ways that future looks an awful lot like our past.
