I was feeling nostalgic for the Cold War the other day. Those Russians, they were good for us! Americans looked up into the sky one evening to discover they had been scooped. A little beeping ball of steel, made in USSR, was orbiting our planet for purposes few of us had stopped to consider. Before you could say “Laika,” science education had become a strategic resource.

If Johnny couldn’t read and Ivan could, the leadership of the world was slipping out of our hands. Learning about language and culture (another thing we thought Ivan had been stocking up on while we were at the movies) became a matter of national importance. And the money followed. The government invested in talent and the talented people did what they always do, accept the money and refuse to be mere cogs in the system.

Because it was axiomatic that a hot war involving nuclear weapons was the absolutely undesirable outcome (and not the glorious realization of God’s plan to trash the earth and upgrade to something nicer), effort and money went into more peaceful forms of competition: diplomacy, cultural propaganda, steroid-packed weightlifters, and other means of luring people into a dream of the American or Soviet ways of life. We “won” big-time, by which I don’t mean the wall-banging of 1989 but of 1954 and 1965. Our practices of inequality, vividly denounced by our rivals, became an international embarrassment. Hence civil rights, voting act, great society; profound reforms and an actual debate about what our much-trumpeted “freedom” consisted of. The Soviets manipulated us into becoming a better people. I don’t think we’d have done it on our own. Learning is painful. People avoid it as long as they can. Anxiety about the Soviet threat made the pain of education less than that of just sitting around waiting to be colonized.

The way we conceived of and acted out the Cold War admittedly blinded us to things going on that didn’t feed into its storyline: the charade of “development” as practiced by both major powers, the degradation of the environment, the instrumentalization of everything, the civil wars our client regimes conducted with our bullets and our grand slogans, but with little actual relation to the contest between the Big Two Ideologies. Nostalgia shouldn’t perpetuate that blindness.

What prompted this jolt of affection for the Big Bear? Just a recent entry for the file marked “Lysenkoism, Red Guards, Taliban.” The New York Times decided to handle the Delaware school-board case pitting biology against “intelligent design” as a Jerry Springer show. It’s all about the personalities. In this corner, the ACLU and a clutch, or passel, or clade, of people who know the Krebs cycle from a Creamsicle. In that corner, a preacher suddenly propelled to fifteen-minute fame for this immortal utterance:

(Why the special odium for Ph.D.’s? Minds can be awakened as early as kindergarten—some minds have even been known to turn themselves on, like that of Tarzan who improbably enough learned English by watching the behavior of little black “bugs” on the pages of castaway books.) This man has discovered on his own the deeply weird behavior of the Chinese radical fringe who, at the behest of Mao who felt elbowed out by technocrats and bean-counters, launched a ten-year campaign to extirpate all signs of education, precisely because the more education people got, the farther they got from the People (the workers, peasants and soldiers whose idealized socio-cultural profile formed the vanguard) and the Party.

This wouldn’t have happened if the People’s Republic of China had not chosen to pull up its drawbridges and intoxicate itself with its self-congratulatory, lying media, its Manichaean images of the outside world, its cult of personality. Resentment and isolationism jammed any signals that might have competed with the urge for ever greater purity, ever greater devotion to the portly savior-figure whom the song named “the red sun in our hearts.” All that competing stuff was “babble.” I wish for their sakes they had chosen a different way of jamming—jamming with, rather than jamming out. The Cultural Revolution was a very costly learning experience. If it comes to Dover, Delaware, I hope the residents are able to cut it short. As of this writing, Dover is still served by highways, bridges and moving companies. Come on out and babble. I don’t mind if the Spirit hits you and you speak in tongues. Just remember the beep-beep-beep of the Sputnik, and that it tolled for thee.