Red Star
When I saw the invitation I was pleasantly amused. What a name for a restaurant!
An age ago, before any of my students was born, the Red Star was the emblem of the Evil Empire that would consume the world unless held back by the clean-cut boys of the CIA and other mythological figures. It was half my lifetime away, and America was still pretty beautiful to those who thought of a free world, open skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties and stuff like that.
But those days, the Reaganesque days of the 1980s, the days of harlequin happiness and a powerful economic legerdemain that shuffled the world's priorities and threw money into the air, are gone. It was an interesting era. At the end of it, the time of Star Wars come to life and the threshold of a brilliant human future, we were full of optimism. To a large extent, the ghosts of Saigon and Berlin were thinned out by time, even if not fully exorcised. The red birthmark on Gorbachev's head became a sign of how far the Red Star had declined, if not fallen totally like a meteor in the mud.
I lived through the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Jr administrations. No matter how much the United States agonises and pretends that it is no longer a superpower, we still benchmark ourselves against the myth and reality of America. The emblems of liberty and freedom still seem to paper over the cracks of Guantanamo and genocide.
I wonder how long it will last. Maybe some day I will limp into a Holocaust Restaurant, appalled that nobody remembers enough to think about why it was once unimaginable to name an eatery that way. This is the way of the world.
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Edit: Actually, someone pointed out that there was a themed restaurant like this in Taipei a few years back. I believe that they changed the decor and name after people complained. As always, the unimaginable is only too imaginable.
An age ago, before any of my students was born, the Red Star was the emblem of the Evil Empire that would consume the world unless held back by the clean-cut boys of the CIA and other mythological figures. It was half my lifetime away, and America was still pretty beautiful to those who thought of a free world, open skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties and stuff like that.
But those days, the Reaganesque days of the 1980s, the days of harlequin happiness and a powerful economic legerdemain that shuffled the world's priorities and threw money into the air, are gone. It was an interesting era. At the end of it, the time of Star Wars come to life and the threshold of a brilliant human future, we were full of optimism. To a large extent, the ghosts of Saigon and Berlin were thinned out by time, even if not fully exorcised. The red birthmark on Gorbachev's head became a sign of how far the Red Star had declined, if not fallen totally like a meteor in the mud.
I lived through the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Jr administrations. No matter how much the United States agonises and pretends that it is no longer a superpower, we still benchmark ourselves against the myth and reality of America. The emblems of liberty and freedom still seem to paper over the cracks of Guantanamo and genocide.
I wonder how long it will last. Maybe some day I will limp into a Holocaust Restaurant, appalled that nobody remembers enough to think about why it was once unimaginable to name an eatery that way. This is the way of the world.
=====
Edit: Actually, someone pointed out that there was a themed restaurant like this in Taipei a few years back. I believe that they changed the decor and name after people complained. As always, the unimaginable is only too imaginable.
Labels: History, Reflections, Symbols
etched with acid at 7:55:00 am
1 Comments:
Just a bit too late for the Barisan Sosialis era, I suppose? ;-)
What exactly happened politically and socially in Singapore during the 1970s has always seemed to me quite the enigma, when compared to the abundance of literature (and textbook propaganda) on the strife of the 60s and the boom of the 80s.
If you look at Wikiquotes for example, on the entry for Lee Kuan Yew, the 1960s section shows his idealist side, and the 1980s section shows a growing despot side. Apparently, nothing quotable was said in the 70s.
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