Sarx

HAT I Remember most from November of 1989 is the images of people standing on top of the wall. One of my fraternity brothers (I was in his dorm room) said, “We’re watching history. Everything is about to change.” He was right. Regardless of what we might think about Reagan or the cold war and its attendant propaganda, the presence of “Good and Evil” in the world (I don’t care which side is which) makes things a lot easier to understand.

It was easy to hate the Other because there was a huge wall between us.

Now, with much of the American Right trying to recapture those days (using Muslims and Arabs, sad to say) we are stuck: those people live in “our” midst, among “us”. There is no wall between “good” and “evil”.

This different dynamic plays out in some sad, strange ways. I’m never sure if this difference, which leads to an omnipresent fear generated by “us”, is an accidental or on-purpose part of the current gov’t propaganda.

I liked it better with the wall: the “other” was safely contained. And I secretly wanted to travel there, with romantic ideas of spies and covert intelligence. When the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA spoke of celebrating Pascha with the Moscow Patriarch, I wanted very much to have been there: a church filled with spies! Russian winter! Dr. Zhivago!

Before the wall fell I saw the mirror: I knew that “good and evil” were interchangeable in the cold war context. Being a cold war spy would have been all about seeing the grey while the rest of us imagined black and white. I could enjoyably imagine being a spy for either side.

Today, being a spy is about imagining black and white when the rest of us only see grey.