PERSPECTIVErnFlies Trapped in Honeyrnby Thomas FlemingrnNineteen ninety-one was the year of revolutions, the greatest,rnperhaps, since 1848. Many who observed the eventsrnfrom safe seats on this side of the Atlantic must have recalledrnChurchill’s great Fulton speech, in which he described thern”Iron Curtain” that had “descended across the continent,” cuttingrnoff “all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and EasternrnEurope,” from Berlin to Belgrade. Tliat curtain was lifted,rnnot slowly and ponderously, but—from the perspective thatrneven a year affords—almost all at once.rnVliat is really going on, almost no one in the United Statesrncan know, so ignorant are we of the languages and histories ofrnall of Europe, particularly the East. Even before the statues hadrntoppled and the names of cities had changed, swarms of patentmedicinernsalesmen were arriving on even, flight from America;rnsocial democrats from Harvard, urging the Russians to followrnthe example of Sweden at the very moment that the Swedesrnwere realizing what a botch they had made of their country.rnThe social democrats, however, had been beaten to the punchrnby professional free-enterprisers eager to sell ex-communists onrnthe merits of state capitalism. Wliat a competition: career bureaucratsrnand lapdog academics, slickers who had never earnedrnan honest dollar in their lives, direct-mail con artists who hadrnbeen living off what they could siphon from the pensions of retiredrnArmy officers and patriotic widows. The socialists and capitalistsrnalike are spending their hard-earned alms on “fact-finding”rntours of the Soviet Union or playing missionaries to thernvictims of communism. . . .rnWith all the disinterested goodwill in the wodd, it is hard forrnAmericans to understand what is going on in so apparently familiarrna countr)’ as Germany. . . . East Cermans—reportedlyrnfleeing from religious and political oppression—did not flock tornthe churches, universities, and newspaper offices of the West.rnThev headed straight for the discount stores where they loadedrnup on stereo systems, VCRs, and big-screen TV sets, all boughtrnon hme.. . . [T|he first item on the agenda of the new Rumanianrngovernment was, apparently, liberalizing abortion; BigrnMacs, jeans, rock music, and pornography are the products inrngreatest demand all over the former dominions of the Sovietrnempire; finally, it is pulp fiction a la Sidney Sheldon andrnStephen King, and not the censored works of Solzhenitsyn, thatrnare selling everywhere on the free market of the street. The repressedrnpeoples of the East are not lusting after the CommonrnLaw or a free press; neither individual dignit}’ nor the principlernof habeas corpus are the specters haunting Europe, but greedrnand self-indulgence. It is our vices—our depravities and addictionsrn—that we are exporting, not the virtues of our way of life.rnThis is in fact the triumph of what we call democracy overrnwhat they called commimism, though neither term has thernslightest thing to do v’ith the actual social and political systemsrnof America and the Soviet Union. Their system was doomed tornfail from the start, because it demanded sacrifices too great forrnmortal flesh to bear. Ideally, Marxist communism is a system ofrnequality in which all disfincfions of sex, wealth, class, and ethnicityrndisappear. People work in common for the commonrngood and rear their children in common to enable their wivesrn(if there really would be vives and not simply women) to sen’crnthe state to their highest producfive capacity.rnThis is, as I have written in a 1988 book, polifics against therngrain of hmnan nature. Even in the short run of a single generation,rnit could not succeed. Tell people they cannot work forrnthemselves and set aside something for their children, and theyrnwill either find ways to cheat or else they will quit working altogether.rnThe market was not something invented by AdamrnSmith; it is the automatic and inevitable tool devised by humanrnnature to satisfy natural needs. All the jackboots, propaganda,rnand concentration camps in the world will never succeed inrncreating a New Soviet Man, except temporarily among a fewrnteenage idealists. The rest of us are too lazy and too selfish tornlO/CHRONICLESrnrnrn