On Reading Secondhand Time
Eileen Manion
Reading Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexoevich’s brilliant reconstruction of post glasnost Russia, I’m struck by so many parallels with conditions in the U.S.
Although nothing as dramatic as the end of the Soviet Union happened in the U.S., since the 1970s we’ve seen a gradual, but steep decline in corporate paternalism.
When my mother needed a job in 1951 after my father died suddenly, the oil corporation that he worked for (morphed later into Exxon Mobil) offered her entry level employment in their N.Y. head office reference library. The salary wasn’t generous, but she had job security, good health care, paid vacation. To discourage office workers from unionizing, the company gave them whatever benefits refinery workers gained through collective bargaining.
Today, a single mother in similar circumstances, with no special qualifications, might find herself driving for Uber or picking up shifts with Instacart.
Not only has corporate paternalism disappeared, but certain aspects of government responsibility have atrophied, so it’s now possible for private equity firms to buy hospitals, strip them of assets, and close them without effective intervention from municipal or state authorities.
Ironically, the 1980s Reagan right-wing claimed government was too big and should be reduced. Those cuts left the country increasingly vulnerable to vulture capitalists as Russia in the 1990s succumbed to similar predators with the collective loss of faith in socialism.
No wonder so many Americans fell for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” nonsense. As so many Russians fell prey to “Soviet nostalgia” (11), Americans are nostalgic for an era when capitalism seemed a bit less cutthroat and government took more responsibility for public welfare.
“At heart, we’re built for war,” she writes, “always either fighting or preparing to fight.” And suffering, one might add given Russia’s grim history.
Surely this statement describes the U.S. since the end of World War II when increasingly large portions of resources go to American warlords and their suppliers. During my lifetime we’ve been almost constantly at war or involved in proxy wars from Korea, through Vietnam, Central America, to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
“The intelligentsia grew calamitously poor,” Alexievich writes, describing their post Soviet impoverishment. And in the U.S., college graduates are saddled with debt, turning them into 21st century indentured servants. Those with post-graduate degrees scramble for part-time work since tenure-track jobs are disappearing and many universities are slashing liberal arts programs. All of which makes choosing a life of the mind an untenable option.
Who needs philosophy when you want technology? New clothes, cars, shiny consumer goods. Instead of talking about ideas, she tells us, the Russians discuss “credit, interest.” Sounds familiar.
“We lived in a world of mirages,” she says of the Russians contemplating the possibility of greater freedom. She could have been describing many of us who lived through the 1960s. The same civil rights and feminist issues are with us now, sixty years later.
“The heroes of one era aren’t likely to be the heroes of the next,” is another familiar theme. Think of all those disputed statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis. From traitors, they morphed into icons of a mythologized past. Now their images epitomize fault lines in American history, as we still confront the huge disparity between the Enlightenment ideals Americans claim as their birthright and founding principles and the brutal reality of racial injustice along with enduring misogyny.
For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, the world of the past seems a simpler place with only one country, one ideology to worry about. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, we imagined, for a while, we could relax for capitalism had won everyone’s heart.
But Russia and the U.S. continue in an uneasy relationship, clinging to nuclear weapons, updating rivalries with ransomware, disinformation, attempts at mutual destabilization. Their mutual hostility goes deeper than ideology; it reflects the will to power of each nation. Only now with China in the mix,there are three contender, a scenario chilling similar to that of the three mega powers always at war in Orwell’s 1984.
It might be helpful to recognize just how similar our trajectories have been over the last few decades, and recognize that “winning” what we used to call the Cold War was never an option. In fact, it seems as if we all lost.
