Yay, Yay for USA!

Reviewed: John Lewis Gaddis' "The Cold War: A New History" (Penguin, 2006)

Ok, let's get realistic and lower our expectations here. As in: it would be foolish to expect anything other than smug gloating in an account of the Cold War by an aged American insider like Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis, who has spent a lifetime battening on the uniformly wrong predictions of the Sovietologists' Guild. So suppress your gag reflex and any vestigial intellectual rigor, and you can enjoy this book. After all, Gaddis' thesis is simple and sensible: "For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distractions, and moral compromises, the Cold War-like the American Civil War-was a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all. We have no reason to miss it. But given the alternatives, we have little reason either to regret its having occurred."

Fair enough, though you have to wonder why Gaddis needs 200 pages to point out that not having a nuclear exchange which wipes out the human race was, in retrospect, better than having one. It's kind of like the old joke about old age being preferable to the alternative -- comes under the "Duh!" category, more suited to the punchline format than a book-length treatise.

Which means this book must have some purpose other than its ostensible one. And it's not hard to discern this purpose: yup, good ol' gloating. Of course, Gaddis' book, like the two million other gloat-histories Western cheerleaders wrote after 1989, isn't so much a history as a long Monday-morning sports page, another chance for Reaganites to relive their Superbowl victory over the Moscow Medvedy.

At the risk of offending such sports fans, I'd like to say I'm getting a little tired of this genre. Folks (I gather you're "folks" now, ersatz Texans that you are) -- folks, how many times do readers need to be told about the heroic manner in which "we" beat the Soviets? At least half the books I've reviewed in the past few years fall into the category of British Tory-style revisionist accounts of the last century, footnoted Narnias in which the Tweedsters not only won, but were always going to win and looked wonderful doing it. I'm telling you, folks, this era is not going to be remembered as a glorious one for Western literature, but rather as the literary equivalent of that pitiful gully in the mid-70s when Neil Sedaka sang in chorus with Elton John.

If you think of other examples of victory-gloats cranked out by the dozen, two parallels come to mind: the Battle of Britain in Commonwealth culture, and the Great Patriotic War in Soviet film and literature. And both commemorated the final, fatal victories of dying empires. So all you America boosters out there should maybe be a little more wary of buying your two-millionth history of how we gloriously stomped Russia by outspending on useless weapons and outbribing sleazy dictators. You might just be funding the text on your culture's headstone.

Connoisseurs of smug victory stories will not be disappointed in this book. Not only is Gaddis' account of the past half-century absurdly simplistic and skewed, but the ethos he adopts is even more irksome than one would expect, combining the ponderous levity of the emeritus with the self-satisfied tone of a reactionary eager to tell us how his party defeated all that was potentially interesting or dangerous.

It's all there, starting with a preface full of lame attempts to mimic his first-years:

[A]s they learn more about the great rivalry that dominated the last half of the century... my students... leave class trembling. "Yikes!" they exclaim (I sanitize somewhat):and then they invariably add: "Awesome!"

Gaddis segues easily from patronizing his students to an even more condescending tribute to his wife: "I regard listening to my students as only slightly less important than listening to my wife:" Ah yes, an uncharacteristically concise summation of academic hierarchy there: first, the Prof, then, way down below him, the long-suffering wife, and "only slightly less important" than her, those loveable doofii, the students.