Video Killed the Soviet Star
And now for the flip-side to our previous post on the recent book, The Sounds of Capitalism — let’s hear it for pop culture’s ability to inspire those in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations to seek a better life. As Nick Gillespie of Reason notes in the above encomium to the late Larry Hagman and the show that made him a superstar, in the 1980s, Nicolae Ceaușescu allowed Dallas to be aired in then-communist Romania, because Ceaușescu believed that the CBS prime-time soap opera showed all that was wrong with decadent capitalism. Instead Romanian viewers loved what the saw — and wanted a piece of it for themselves. That Soviet and Soviet-backed leaders had such a skewed vision of America brings to mind blogger Karol Sheinin’s recent brilliant observation:
In 1977, the year I was born and the year my father, his mother, his aunt and many other Jews left the Soviet Union (my mother and I left in 1978), the Soviet propaganda machine began circulating a rumor. It went, roughly: life in America is so terrible that the old people eat cat food.
This was…perplexing.
People didn’t quite get it: they have food specifically made for cats in America? What a country!
A lot of things about America remained beyond their comprehension.
Concurrently, plenty of truths about the horrors of the Soviet Union remained beyond the comprehension of the last of that late, unlamented basket case nation’s true believers, as Theodore Dalrymple writes at City Journal.
“Concurrently, plenty of truths about the horrors of the Soviet Union remained beyond the comprehension of the last of that late, unlamented basket case nation’s true believers…”
I thought you were talking about Barack Obama and the Demosoviet Party.
“…Instead Romanian viewers loved what the saw — and wanted a piece of it for themselves.”
Former Romanian here, got out in 1986, and I can verify that “Dallas” did air and was a fairly good depiction of the possibilities and opportunities that existed in this far away land. The fools who whine about evil capitalism here and anywhere else, and espouse socialist/communist ideals, are those who want all the benefits of capitalism for themselves. It’s the rest of us that have to live out and suffer their ideals.
My greatest fear, which seems to be panning out, is that America is heading down the same path Eastern Europe, and now much of Western Europe, embraces. I hope I am wrong because there is no place else to go to.
Some family friends had a guest from the former Soviet bloc to stay with them in London not long after the fall of communism. They took her shopping to their large neighbourhood supermarket, without thinking of the psychological effect it would have on someone inured to deprivation and scarcity. They later said that it was indeed the pet food aisle that most confounded their guest. Not only was the area devoted to it bigger than most stores where she had come from, the range and quality of the foodstuffs that were lavished on pets was beyond her comprehension. To the rage and despair of the Left, the free market is very good at what it does.