initial shock wave, already losing momentum, was renewed, strengthened,
fortified. A firestorm developed. Hurricane-force winds hurled the superheated
fire-mass around until the very air itself seemed to ignite. The Potomac River
was sucked up into the fiery sky in a vast, roiling waterspout that evaporated
even as it rose. Dust and ash and pulverized debris cut off the sunlight, as
though someone had thrown a switch. Immense damage was sustained in Baltimore,
Hagerstown, Fredericksburg, Annapolis. The city of Washington, along with its
inner and outlying suburbs, was wiped off the face of the earth, leaving only a
crater large enough to house a few Shea Stadiums and a lot of seared rubble.
IT IS NOW, OF COURSE, CLEAR that this was merely the climax to the first chapter
in the grim saga of the end of Western civilization. For the catastrophe was not
the result of a sudden mistake on someone’s part, an ill-understood order or a
chance accident. There had to be a prologue.
Some might argue that the prologue began to unfold when Karl Marx first met
Friedrich Engels and began to postulate an alternative political creed to that
which held sway in the early nineteenth century. Others might push the
jumping-off point further back in time: to the French Revolution, say, or the
teachings of Rousseau and Babeuf. Or perhaps the insurrectionary sermons
preached by the fiery hedge priest John Ball prior to the Peasants’ Revolt in
England in 1381 were indirectly to blame. Or even…
But this is academic. Although the roots of the virtual destruction of a global
way of life must necessarily lie deep in the past, the actual concrete and
significant causes clearly took place within a generation of the moment of
disaster.
The history of the last fifty years of the twentieth century is one of general
gloom shot with stabs of light. Perhaps one could say the same about the history
of the world since man first shuffled out of the caves and began to hunt and
gather and till the land. But so much happened during the twentieth century, and
so much of it happened so fast, that a good analogy might be of a car on a long
downward slope whose driver suddenly discovers that the fluid is running out of
his brakes. No matter that the slope is a gentle one; once momentum has been
achieved, a certain point reached then passed, there is no stopping the downward
rush that very soon becomes headlong, irreversible, terminal.
The United States, deliberately isolationist in between the First and Second
World Wars and yet historically jealous of Great Britain’s high global profile
during and before that period, was swift to change its foreign policy and seize
the guardianship of the Western world from the 1950s onward.
During this time atomic power became more than just a science fiction cliche;
West and East glared at each other during the Cold War; tensions eased as
detente became a political priority; pacts were signed, treaties ratified; an
arms race began, got out of hand; black-gold blackmail became a hideous reality
when the Arab oil states became greedy for power; money markets throughout the
world rocked and teetered; enormous economic depression arrived, stayed for more
than a decade.
In the 1960s and 1970s America got its fingers burned in Southeast Asia,
fighting a war that, despite what later apologists maintained, could never have
been won. In the late 1980s to early 1990s, the same old story was rerun in
Latin America, for the same old reasons. This time, however, the stakes were
higher and the face cards more evenly distributed. For a time the world tottered
on the brink of a Third and probably final World War. In the end, both
superpowers, Russia and America, backed off. For the moment, mutual face-saving
became the order of the day.
In 1988 President Reagan was succeeded by his vice president. The crisis in
Latin America had slowly grown during Reagan’s two terms of office, but it was
his successor who, early in 1992, had to face the Soviet leader Mr. Gorbachev
across a table in Geneva so that both could pull back from the brink with as
much grace as could be mustered.