Going Russian

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, Russia was all the rage. The cuban missile crisis was as close as we got to relity TV, other than "Candid Camera", and I developed a certain fondness, through habit, for ducking beneath wooden desks and darting underground into basements with bladk and yellow signs on the door. By the time I was fifteen I was determined to lean how to read, write, and speak Russian. The determination didn't endure: I was fifteen. The urge began to wane by the time I had learned the words "da" and "saladna". In those days, it was the liberals who were the Russia lovers, the consevativew were the hawkish cold warriors. Exactly when the role reversed cannot be detemined with precision; it happeed incrementally. Back then, the Republicans wanted to raise taxes, for defense. The Democrats wanted tax relief for the working class, sicne taxes were already high on the wealthy, and the massive array of welfare programs under the "Great Society" hadn't yet been created. Now, the positions have reversed. Right wing love of Russia is a recent phenomenon, as recent as the Trump administration. Whereas liberals admired the idealisim of communism in the old days, today's right wingers, in the post communist post Soviet era have their own Russia lovin' reasons. When Russia liquidated its empire and its communist mandated social and economic equality, it brought back, or rather, allowed to return, religion, which had become dormant and gone underground in 1917. Any resurgance of the Christian faith, anywhere in the world, quite naturally appeals to America's conservative base. Somehow, however, there is the sense that there is something more in play, something more than Trump's obvious man crush on Putin, and probable indebetedness to him for assisting his election to the presidency in 2016. The best candidates are racism, and heterosexuality, in that order. Race-wise, Russia is about as lily white as it gets in our neo-nomadic world of inter-racial marriages and multi-culturalism. Most of the color was drained out of the old Soviet Union when the satellite sates broke away and became, at least nominally, independent nations. Sexually, russia and the United States are the two most prudish cultures in the non-Ialamic world; conservatives in neither are tolerant of sexual nonconformity nor of cultural or ethnic diversity. Small minds think alike. Show me a conservative culture and I'll show you a racist, hompphobic mob of self righteous philistines. To those of us on Social Security there's literally nothing new under the Russian sun; a culture of corruption, lies, and endless propaganda, aggressive and belligerent, all the while preaching peace, much like our dear old United States of Animosity. Here's a new idea: invite russia to become a member of NATO, thus safeguarding it against its expansionist tendencies, and, most of all, against itself.