Page 1 of 2 When the pawnshop has it all By Julian Delasantellis
Historians of the future who accept the common paradigm that the United States
in the 1980s was a confident, proud nation, its triumphalist psyche restored by
president Ronald Reagan, will undoubtedly be quite confused when they come
across two remarkable cultural artifacts of the period, the movies Red Dawn
and Amerika.
John Milius' 1984 Red Dawn was a fairly typical teen movie, in that most
of the action of the plot involved clean-cut photogenic American adolescents
dissing adults and destroying their property - what made it unique was that the
adults who were tearing their hair out at the antics of the lil' tykes were the
invading armies of the Soviet/Cuban/Nicaraguan communist military force
that had parachuted into the teens' small Colorado town at the beginning of
World War III.
Donald Wyre's 1987 Amerika is a bit harder to dismiss. This was a
14ฝ-hour mini-series, broadcast on the US ABC television network, about
life in America 10 years after a bloodless coup installed Soviet-backed
Quislings as rulers of the country. One thing that made Amerika different
from Red Dawn was the quality of its cast, with Kris Kristofferson,
Mariel Hemingway, Sam Neill, Robert Urich and others. These were then the elite
of the made-for-TV movie gallery of stars, a definite contrast with Red Dawn's
cast of teen unknowns who previously could only get close to the A-list by
waiting on their tables.
Although denied by then-ABC network head Brandon Tartikoff, the common
perception at the time was that Amerika had been greenlighted in order
to quiet conservative critics of the network's 1983 anti-nuclear weapons TV
epic, The Day After. That showed what would have been the devastating
effects of even a limited US/USSR nuclear exchange on a small town in Kansas -
in effect, with Amerika, I suppose, ABC was giving equal time to the
other side, the pro-nuclear war lobby.
One thing that both Red Dawn and Amerika had in common (besides composer
Basil Poledouris' tub-thumping film scores) was that they depicted a very
different America than what was then existent. Red Dawn had a Russian
invasion force moving south from Alaska, attempting to link up with a
Cuban/Nicaraguan force marching north from Mexico, essentially bisecting the
continental US at the Rocky Mountains.
Amerika has the collaborationalist US Congress slavishly (so much unlike
the actual US Congress, which only slavishly takes its orders from US finance
capital) taking orders from the Soviets and combining the 48 states of the
continental US into 12-14 administrative zones, eventually, to be made into
independent nations. Resistance to the occupation is led by Kris Kristofferson,
who, as the movie opens, is being discharged from 10 years spent in a Soviet
re-education camp for his efforts. This opposition is ruthlessly suppressed by
blue-helmeted UN troops, logo and everything - I suppose that it was just too
much to think that conservatives were going to let 14ฝ hours go by
without calling the United Nations communist.
In 1984, the US National Coalition on Television Violence, counting 134 acts of
violence per hour, named Red Dawn as the most violent movie of all time;
that's why you can still watch the film virtually non-stop through the day on
American television. With Americans' continually shortening attention span,
mini-series, especially very long mini-series usually get few, if any,
rebroadcasts; Amerika has never had a second showing, and it was never
made available as either a videocassette or DVD.
Now, according to the prediction of one observer, America will soon suffer as a
result of the financial crisis, the dire fate prophesized in Red Dawn and
Amerika.
Last November 25, the Russian newspaper Izvestia reported on an interview it
had just concluded with one Igor Panarin, a Soviet-era KGB operative, and
currently the head of the diplomatic academy of Russia's Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. In it, he repeated a prediction that he had been making since 1998,
that the year 2010 would see the breakup of the United States into four
separate independent nations. Previously, he had based his prediction on
America's ethnic tensions and moral decline; now, he claimed that the ongoing
economic crisis and decline of American economic power only reaffirmed his
belief that the US was headed straight into the dustbin of history.
Even though Panarin carries the credentials to be called a bona fide
Americanologist (like the West's Sovietologists during the Cold War - for some
reason I now can in no way fathom, I went to school to learn how to be one),
his prediction of the post-breakup geography of America makes one wonder just
how many hot dogs he has eaten, baseball games he has watched, or Chevrolets he
has driven.
Panarin postulates that one of the new nations, Atlantic America, stretching
from Maine to South Carolina and Tennessee, will eventually join the European
Union. Besides the fact that a nation that contains both libertarian New
England and bible-belt South Carolina sounds about as harmonious as a Bar
Mitzvah catered by Hamas, it sure will be interesting to see the reception the
French troops of the EU army will receive in those small Southern towns where
you still have to order freedom fries instead of French Fries.
The seven states of the US West will form something called the California
Republic, which will exist essentially as a Chinese satellite. I suppose that
there are cultural similarities between California and Utah, in that, in both
states, men of prominence frequently have many wives - in California,
sequentially, in Utah, simultaneously.
Alaska will become part of Russia, I guess state governor and would-be vice
president Sarah Palin got that one right.
The Wall Street Journal ran the Panarin prognostication on December 29. Since
then, the general reaction to his revelations has been, based on the sheer
cultural improbability of his vision for America-post 2010, one of derision. As
this is the American media we're talking about here, I have seen little or no
analysis placing this matter in any type of historical context.
Starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, and ending with the
dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the Russian people suffered
a national humiliation virtually unprecedented among nations that had not been
conquered by an invading army. The Russians may have indeed hated their
communist rulers, but that didn't mean they didn't feel pride in being the
rulers of an empire that stretched from Germany to the Pacific Ocean.
In economic terms, the breakup of the nationwide production and exchange system
established during the Soviet era's 70-year reign was just one more factor that
contributed to the Russian people's economic misery, culminating in the Russian
bankruptcy that spurred the 1998 Long Term Credit Management crisis and
prevailed in Russia up until oil prices started to rally as the 20th century
ended.
In the West, conservatives viewed the Soviet imperial dissolution and
subsequent hardship of the Russian people with total glee; at Georgetown
holiday celebrations in 1989, little chunks, wrapped with a festive bow, of the
Berlin Wall were a particularly welcome party favor. Liberals such as Harvard's
Jeffrey Sachs knew that Russia, especially the nuclear-armed-to-the-teeth
Russia, could not be allowed to descend into chaos and brigandry; they
introduced plan after plan to help the country.
None of these schemes ever made it much past the stage of a headline in the
Financial Times; the Russians saw through it all to see these would-be saviors
for what they all really were; condescending, haughty Westerners looking down
and taking pity on poor, helpless Mother Russia, treating the country more as a
dysfunctional African basket-case rather than a world superpower with 1,000
years of proud history behind it. In 2000, Vladimir Putin won the Russian
presidency and used petro revenues to restore the nation's pride, and,
increasingly, its swagger.
So, how the Russians must now love reading Panarin. "Think having your country
carved into little pieces is so great?" they ask America. "See how you like it
when it happens to you."
But even if the financial crisis does not lead to the breakup of the United
States, it is almost certain that, as the crisis continues and it deepens, it
will leave a lasting mark on the face of America, and, indeed, of the entire
world financial system.
As 2009 begins, the ongoing US recession is entering its 14th month. Some
observers see this as good news, in that, as the average length of post-war US
recessions has been only around 11 months, good times must surely be only
around the corner.
Those that advance this proposition display fundamental ignorance about what's
really going on. The current crisis cannot be compared to other post-war
experiences since today's difficulties originated as a financial crisis, not
from a rise in oil prices or a temporary turndown in aggregate demand. Crises
of the present type traditionally last much longer, and are much deeper, than
standard recessions.
After analyzing 22 worldwide financial crises from 1929 to 1997, economists
Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard and Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland
predict that the US unemployment rate, currently at 6.7%, will rise to over 11%
by 2011. (For my account of how this economic downturn will be much more severe
than those previously experienced during the postwar period see
A nasty blizzard, Asia Times Online, October 30, 2008.)
US real estate prices, where the crisis began three years ago, are continuing
to decline; indeed, according to the most recent
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