Octopodial Chrome

USS Consitution has been designated the Ship of State, which means a stepped-up ceremonial role for the 212-year old ship. She’s the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world, and one of the first six frigates in the US Navy.

When I was in Newport for DCO School we spent liberty on Saturday touring her. It was a great experience!

It has been twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years since Eastern Europe broke its shackles, twenty years since our victory over socialist tyranny.

I grew up at the very tail end of the Cold War. As a small boy I remember leaving home before dawn to greet and say goodbye to my father as he sailed with the Navy. I grew up on movies like Top Gun. I was raised just outside of Norfolk, the headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet. Once I asked Dad what would happen to our family if there were a nuclear war; he replied that we’d be radioactive grit. It sounds harsh & heartless now, but it was true.

And then in the summer & fall of 1989 things started to change. The various states which formed the Soviet Empire started to lose their grip on their citizenry. The Hungarians opened their borders. The Poles rose up. Change was in the air.

But change was in the air in 1948, 1953 and in 1968—and nothing changed, except for the blood that was spilt & the lives which were lost, anyway. The Communists had crushed dissent then, and could have tried to do so again. But this time they didn’t. This time the people rose up, and they were allowed to stand. This time the people headed for freedom, and the border guards didn’t stop them. This time, the walls came tumbling down.

I was only eleven at the time, not much more than a boy, and I didn’t fully understand what was going one, but I knew enough to know that it wasn’t just historic—it defined historic. The radio the following year had Scorpions’ Wind of Change and Jesus Jones’ Right Here, Right Now on constant rotation. Event followed event: first the Wall, then Ceauşescu, then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics herself fell.

We. Had. Won.

After a world war, after a cold war, after numerous hot wars, after untold expenditures of blood and money, we had won. After the stalemate of Korea, after the losses of East Germany, Cuba & Vietnam, we had won. After the lies of the twenties and thirties, the necessity of the forties, the treasons of the fifties and sixties, the blindness of the seventies and the final struggle of the eighties, Truth and Freedom won the day. The appeasers, the dupes, the fellow-travellers, the traitors: they were shown for what they were; they lost.

But we—we had won!

The years since have been anything but simple or easy—or peaceful. Far from the end of history, what we have seen instead has been the resumption of history. The black-and-white of the Free World versus the Second World has been replaced with the grey of each nation’s self-interest. History continues, as it ever has.

But no matter what the future brings, one thing remains: we were right, and we won.

Slowly but surely the forces of freedom are pushing back the liberty-hating brigades of anti-smoking fascists. This is a Good Thing, not because cigarettes are particularly pleasant (they’re not) or because Big Tobacco is particularly decent or honest (it’s not), but because it’s a fundamental principles of property rights that a property owner has the right to allow what he wants within extremely broad limits, and the public has the right not to attend if they don’t want to.