What we didn't learn when the Berlin Wall fell

Check this out:  25 years ago tonight, my forerunners at the Daily News were laying out this front page, heralding the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union -- which would then implode over the next two years in a long, inevitable goodbye. That front page is a familiar sight to me -- it's on a main corridor in the Daily News newsroom, alongside the JFK assassination and the 1969 moonwalk, but yet seeing it today still brings back a small tingle of the exhilaration from that night. It was a remarkable event for those of us in the (sigh) Baby Boom who were born into a world of fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills and who never thought the Cold War could actually end.

If you weren't around or were too young to drink in the remarkable autumn of 1989, it's hard to convey what a giddy moment that was...especially looking back through the grim filter of war, terrorism, and economic backsliding that's marked almost all of the 21st Century. At home, there was excited talk of finally shutting down the military-industrial complex -- just as President Eisenhower had long before urged -- and creating a "peace dividend" to invest in new roads and rails or in hiring teachers instead of solders. A best selling book of the era suggested that the conclusion of the rivalry between capitalism and communism was "The End of History." The mood was captured in a popular song of the era, "Right Here, Right Now," by Jesus Jones ("...there is no place I'd rather be....Watching the world wake up from history.")

In other word, this now seems like a long, LONG time ago. What did we learn from the collapse of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 -- and, more importantly, what didn't we learn?

For starters, we did learn what should have been clear for a long, long time, which is the communism is a completely unworkable system. (I wrote about this at length in another post earlier this year.) Economic growth stagnates without any promise of reward for the innovators, while totalitarian restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly and religion (among others) were an affront to the human spirit -- and the good news here was that the human spirit won. A younger generation of Soviet leaders, most famously Mikhail Gorbachev, saw communism was imploding and tried to reform it, but it was too little, too late. The idea that Ronald Reagan adding billions of dollars to the U.S. defense budget had much of anythng to do with this is a myth -- and a dangerous one at that.

But the tragedy is how quickly we watched the revolutionary opportunities of November 1989 dissipate. That so-called "peace dividend" -- which would have been the truest celebration of the good side of capitalism, by investing dollars where they could do the most good -- never happened. Instead, Americans were informed by our leaders just nine short months later that Pure Evil resided no longer in Moscow but could now be found in Baghdad. It was as if a page had been ripped from Orwell's "1984" -- the page in which Oceania's enemy magically changed from Eurasia to Eastasia in mid-sentence of a speech. It was as if: "We've always been at war with Islamofascism."

The Cold War was simply replaced with a different war, the War on Terrorism, except that this one was constructed without a Berlin Wall that can be toppled, so that it will never end. That's how the powers that be made sure that there was no "peace dividend." Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, America's annual defense budget of $640 billion is more than the next eight nations COMBINED. Meanwhile. the nation's roads and bridges continue to struggle, and we lag behind other developed nations in everything from education to infant mortality. Someone like me, who's 55, had essentially never known what it's like for the U.S. not to be on some kind of war footing. At some point you have to believe that's not a bug in the modern American way of life, but a feature. So that's one lesson of 1989 learned after the fact -- that the thirst of the military-industrial complex for a Big, Bad Enemy is unquenchable.

But there's another takeaway from the end of the Iron Curtain -- that it only seemed inevitable in hindsight. Before the arrival of Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, most Americans believed (in part thanks to some good salesmanship by Reagan, the Great Communicator) that the Soviet Union was a more powerful Evil Empire than ever. Yet within less than a decade, it was gone. Both the Kremlin and arguably the White House were too caught up in the Great Game to see the rot that was destroying communism from within.

Meanwhile, the almost completely unfettered and unregulated brand of capitalism that took root in America since the 1980s has now failed its citizens, on an increasingly grand scale. The current economic and political system has created a nation where a handful of oligarchs have unprecedented control over elections and the puppets that they elected, where wages for the common woman and man are completely flat and almost all economic gains flow to the top 1 Percent. A shockingly large number of our citizens have been thrown behind bars, while government uses new technology to systematically spy on the rest, and some cities in the Heartland now resemble ghost towns.

I mentioned earlier than when Gorbachev and his cohorts saw the tsunami coming, the changes they made came way too late. A quarter-century later, is there enough time for America's leaders to make the kind of radical changes that we need? Or have the cracks in our own wall grown too wide?