A big day

December 22nd is a huge day. I remember December 22nd, 1989 so clearly. The dictator Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife Elena got were apprehended in Romania by agents of the uprisen people. American troops moved in on the rogue drug-dealer Noriega in Panama. I remember well watching the news on a big screen in the Student Union in Chapel Hill and thinking that things really were changing, incredibly. On Christmas day, when they lined the Ceausescus up and shot them dead like the dogs they were, it sealed in blood the genteel progression from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Prague through the release of Mandela in February of 1990. It's instructive to recall that there was a moment in our lives when history really opened up and revealed seemingly endless possibilities, when it really seemed like progress was in the wind. The oft-posited analogy with 1848 is well taken.

That 9/11 is the counterpoint to the solstice of '89, and that its preconditions were already simmering at that time in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere, that's the great irony. Frances Fukuyama already in the summer of '89 speculated that religious fundamentalism might supplant the Cold War struggle as the dominant sub-narrative after the "end of history," but he didn't quite sense how quickly and violently a virulent hatred of the West and secular "progress" would flow into the cavity left by the fallen demon communism. Who did? Whoops.