Workin’ for the (Labor Day) Weekend #13: Bye Bye, Gorby

Also: Remembering how Michael Jackson’s codpiece didn't win the Cold War

Not sure how any episode of a Michael Moynihan-affiliated podcast could fail to mention the croaking of Mikhail Gorbachev just three days prior to taping, but such is the urgency of Joe Biden’s anti-fascism and Michael Jackson’s, um, imagery.

Speaking of which, to get the unpleasantness out of the way, Kmele is absolutely right: “Carousel” had no business being on Thriller. Also, to call back to the crucial Cameo convo on M.O. #131, M.J. did not himself lack in the codpiece department. In fact—and I frankly wish I was making this up—during the HIStory tour back in 1996 Jacko ordered the erection of a 36-foot statue of HIMself on the same hilltop pedestal in Prague where once stood the largest-ever statuary of Joseph Stalin:

Thankfully I was no longer living in that fair drunken city during that crime of passion, though I’m pretty sure the eye-scarring on pals left behind proved permanent. What made Blanket-daddy’s hubris even more off-key was that—unlike, say, the Velvet Underground, or Frank Zappa, or more popular acts like the Beatles, Stones, and Queen—Michael Jackson back in the day was just not much of a culturally important figure for Czechs and other commie-captives. Him spiking the football on Stalin was like, I dunno, The Dixie Chicks claiming credit for ending the military draft? Just none of it made sense. If we’re going around giving credit to Yankee cultural products for winning the Cold War, we all know there’s only one right answer: Dallas. Ask your favorite Romanian.

Moynihan’s Gorby archive includes writing about the birthmarked one’s shilling for Louis Vuitton, plus one piece that begins “Because the average Russian drinks like an unemployed Foster Brooks,” and another that starts: “I could be the only (non-Russian) person alive who thinks Mikhail Gorbachev, accidental destroyer of the Soviet empire, is a one of the most overrated historical figures of the last half century.” But the deepest dive comes in Reason’s 20th anniversary November 2009 issue, where Hollywood surveys the post-Cold War historical literature. A sampling:

Gorbachev's economic reforms were vague and ad hoc, and they wound up being tremendous failures. His chief foreign policy aide, Anatoly Chernyaev, grumbled during glasnost that Gorbachev "has no concept of where we are going. His declaration about socialist values, the ideals of October, as he begins to tick them off, sound like irony to the cognoscenti. Behind them—emptiness." As historian Robert Service has observed, Gorbachev intended glasnost as "a renaissance of Leninist ideals," while his books "still equivocated on Stalin." He avoided repeats of 1956 and 1968, when the Soviet military ruthlessly cracked down on its restive satellites, but did send troops to murder residents of Vilnius, Tblisi, and Baku. As Mary Elise Sarotte observes in her new book 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, Gorbachev "had not sought to introduce completely democratic politics into the Soviet Union."

Both Mann and Meyer are correct that without Gorbachev, the end of the Cold War wouldn't have arrived so quickly. And Vaclav Havel is surely right when he argues that Gorbachev's "historical achievement is enormous: communism would have collapsed without him anyway, but it might have happened 10 years later, and in God knows how wild and bloody a fashion." But Mann's case is convincing that the man of the decade, the great peace laureate, destroyed the Soviet Union "unintentionally," not as an expression of any democratic desires.

It is difficult to accept heroic portrayals of those who were complicit in the mass enslavement and murder of their unwilling subjects.

* Did I write a Gorby obit? C’mon, man! I also exhumed over at Paloma Media a 2007 L.A. Times piece about a bizarre 2006 lunch I had with the guy, back when he was busy pushing environmentalism. (Western fellow travelers who never actually traveled to the systems they sympathized with are generally quite ignorant when it comes to how literally poisonous Really Existing Socialism always is.) For those who prefer audio, I read both pieces out yesterday as well. Completists can watch me (and my office background) on The First TV’s The Dana Show talking even more:

* Some extracurricular programming announcements: We lads are slated to be on The Megyn Kelly Show (also broadcast on SiriusXM and YouTube) on Tuesday, Sept. 6 at noon ET. Also, though it hasn’t been announced yet, I might be on a certain HBO television program this Friday. Check your local listings!