I’m reading a spy novel from the early eighties. Back then, the story would have been straight from the news and a real nail biter. Many decades later, I would have thought it would be more of a curiosity than a compelling novel. After all, there was that whole glasnost and perestroika thing in the late eighties, which should have relegated all these old cold war era book obsolete, but here we are, once again, in a competition with the Russians.
And so this old book is, for the second time, straight from the news.
I’m still rather mystified by the whole thing. I mean, there we were in the nineties and aughts, one big happy family, with only the middle eastern terrorists spiking our Kool-Aid. Makes me wonder what the heck is really going on now.
To be honest, the cold war conflict wasn’t much of a war. Oh, we were told it was, and the newspapers did their job of riling up folks, but behind it all, if you dig deep enough, you can find western countries (most notably the USA), parceling out technology to both sides. Apparently, Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” was too complex to willingly let go of all the power they’d garnered during WWII and then Korea. And so they kept us frantic about the possibility of a wide-scale nuclear conflict. (Nu-clee-ar, not nuc-u-lar!) [If you’re curious, Anthony C. Sutton, a British-American economist, historian, professor, and writer, was one of the incredibly knowledgeable researchers who tended to find out the truth of such matters.]
Still, the cold war hostilities did come to an end for whatever reason. Probably because nuclear power became old hat. Other means of annihilation are so much more efficient. Just think what would happen if some erstwhile favored country didn’t like the USA’s new economics policy that tried to even out the trade deficit, and instead of unleashing their nuclear weapons in a great show of force, they gradually let out a lethal bio-weapon that killed off the old and feeble rather than the young and healthy as the old way of war did. A lot of people would become causalities of a war they didn’t even know was being so stealthily fought.
Of course, that could never happen to such news savvy people as we are.
And anyway, we are back to the old days where Russia is once again the enemy. I have no idea what happened to glasnost and perestroika. Apparently, I was so busy reading about the past, I neglected to keep up with the present, so it came as a shock to find that Russia is once again up to their old anti-American spy tricks. (Or perhaps being put up to their old tricks?)
The end of the movie Blast from the Past was supposed to be humorous, with good old Christopher Walken unable to believe the truth that the Russians were no longer the enemy. Knowing how wily they were, he immediately began planning a new bomb shelter to protect his family from them. And what do you know — the ending of the movie turns out to be less than simply humorous and a lot more prescient.
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If you haven’t yet read A Spark of Heavenly Fire, my novel of a quarantine that predated this pandemic by more than ten years, you can read the first chapter online here: http://patbertram.com/A_Spark_of_Heavenly_Fire.html
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