This made me laugh.
Especially this bit:
[quote]
"This is about the dismantling of this country," shouted a woman named Katy Abram at Senator Arlen Spector, in the course of a chaotically emotional event in the town of Lebanon, Pennsylvania. "We don't want this country to turn into Russia!"
Older readers will be with me already as I savour this madeleine. For the decades of the Cold War, the standard taunt against anybody even marginally to the left of the centre was that he or she might feel more comfortable back in the USSR. "Love it or leave it," said the red, white and blue bumper stickers to anyone who had the smallest reservations about the US of A. "Moscow gold" was the supposedly hidden incentive for any disagreement, from the early civil rights movement to those who declined the opportunity to serve in Vietnam.
Yet what I suddenly noticed about Ms Katy Abram, quoted to such effect in the New York Times in her protest against this and other forms of socialism and big government, was that her age was given as 35. This means that she was 15 when the Berlin Wall fell. Golly.
How persistent and durable certain rhetorical traditions must be in these old, blue-collar, conservative Pennsylvania towns. If she had been born in Russia in 1974, Ms Abram would now be living in a country that featured crony capitalism, a bent and wobbly stock exchange, a servile media, grotesque income inequality, a huge prison population, a severe Aids epidemic, endless trouble with rebellious peripheral neighbours and a healthcare system that was random and rationed by price. But I feel quite sure that this is not what she intended to convey.[/quote]