For two score years did the United States and the Soviet Union lock horns in the desperate struggle of the Cold War. A trillion dollars annually were thrown toward military hegemony. More hundreds of billions were discretely delivered in futile efforts to assure political hegemony. Brobdingnagian international bribes called "foreign aid" swelled favored national leaders' private fiduciary trusts secreted within numbered accounts in Swiss gnomes' domains. Clandestine organizations like the CIA and the NSA mocked our constitutional democracy of laws in their eager frenzy of ineptitude and pure malice. It was great fun. the proper people acquired great wealth and awesome power. In 1992 the Soviet Empire collapsed. Two generations of Eastern Europeans and Asians denied the quintessential self-actualization of pantyhose and washboard tummies overthrew Marxist dialectic in favor of traffic jams, racy magazines, loud music, and other seductive manifestations of blatant capitalistic excess.
Winter came. The Russians starved. This is a time-honored traditional celebration of the pre-Lenten season of fast. Russian winter hunger, malnutrition, and outright death from starvation pre-date the Tsars. But lo! The New World Order stood aghast! "The Russians are cute and cuddly and we must save them (or meet those scrofulous stinking multitudes sneaking in over our borders)." The United States joined the world in mounting a massive military airlift of life-saving provisions.
The US shipped the smallest tonnage of all the civilized countries that threw food at the Russian problem. Far from being a cruel travesty of humanitarianism, this act hinted at a glint of common sense weakly shining from a White House basement ventilation duct. Donations were tax deductible, and you well know the vast physical and conceptual gap yawning between what goes into the Goodwill bag and what appears on Form 1040! Our chests swell with pride when we consider not merely the insignificant quantities we donated, but also the insultingly impertinent junk that it was.
Imagine a seething horde of Russian pensioners reduced to begging for food or accessing their inevitable personal denouement. Imagine their sea of faces glumly gumming the strangely foil-wrapped kibble, hundreds of pounds of it donated by the wealthy Amerikanski. Can you appreciate the Cyrillic imponderability of Preparation H? (What did you expect them to do with it, shove it up their... but I digress.)
Imagine hundreds of tons of Anbesol, USDA-approved chitterlings, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Cap'n Crunch, and aerosol cheddar cheese flooding the Russian Steppes. The low technology of wood-burning stoves and outhouses meets the high technology of Shake & Bake and Tidy Bowl! A vigorous Black Market in polyethylene bags and gaudily enameled steel cans will commence. Their original contents will pollute fields and waterways, ruining crops, killing game fowl, and rendering the roads' mud ruts extra crispy and whiter than white.
The multiple tentacles of the Russian military, fat, sleek, and scared down to its green sock surrogates, is profitably trading in international plutonium futures. Hard currency prostitutes reap the whirlwind of foreign trade representatives. They indelibly establish the lamentable Soviet provincialism of inept professional sex and obsolete social diseases. Speculators, that peculiar breed of Marxist-Leninist entrepreneur, now deal openly. They bitterly complain that their wealth cannot suborn a disestablished bureaucracy. Representatives of the American Democratic Party, proudly dogmatic descendants of Hubert Horatio Humphrey and Jimmy Carter, prowl the Caucasus in some confusion, promising everything to everyone for only modest tax increases while desperately searching for the New Hampshire delegation. The largest hamburger joint on the planet, a MacDonalds, squats in Moscow. It has collected dumpsters of greasy rubles boasting the same convertible economic significance as Confederate dixie notes. Fond memories of Mercantilism, the Triangular Trade, British colonialism, and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria are the opium dreams of Government-supported think tanks encrusting the Washington, DC Beltway.
The Cold War is over. We won. We horribly bobbled the French World War I debt. The present Russian opportunity cannot be absentmindedly abstracted, or we will die in turn. On to the reparations!