In June 1962, Boris Badenov threatened to destroy the world with the fearsome Guns of Abalone. It was a typically dastardly plot by the foreign evildoer and his partner in Crimea, Natasha Fatale.
Fortunately for civilization-as-we-know-it, Boris and Natasha’s fiendish plot was foiled by Bullwinkle Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel. The dreaded Guns of Abalone were destroyed and Boris and Natasha landed squarely in the pokey.
Around the time moose and squirrel were doing battle with their enemies abroad, Russia’s real-life fearless leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was busy dispatching medium and intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles to Cuba. Those missiles were capable of striking U.S. cities in minutes, killing tens of millions of Americans.
It was a scary time. Rocky & Bullwinkle tried gamely to take the edge off:
Rocky: Bullwinkle, do you know what an A-Bomb is?
Bullwinkle: Sure, a bomb is what some people call our show.
Rocky: I don't think that's very funny.
Bullwinkle: Neither do they, apparently.
It was no laughing matter. Back then, one atomic bomb could ruin your whole day. We Americans lived in fear of the red menace that threatened our lives as well as our way of life.
In the 10-year run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Americans experienced Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts (aided by future Trump mentor Roy Cohn), the Hollywood Blacklist, the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the U-2 Incident, Rudolf Abel, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, the Bay of Pigs invasion, as well as the detonation of the Soviet’s Tsar Bomba, the world’s most powerful nuclear weapon.
In 1962, there was no question in the minds of Americans who the enemy was.
In 2017, things have changed.
Somehow, over the course of 55 years, the party of McCarthy learned to stop worrying and love the Kremlin. In our present day fractured fairy tale, a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 49% of GOP voters regarded Russia as either an “ally of” or “friendly to” the United States – up 11 points from March.
As Bullwinkle might ask: Wossamotta U?
Is it because there’s no Bikini Atoll anymore and we don’t fret about mushroom clouds erupting in our living rooms as much as we did back in the day?
Or is it that we admire bare-chested tough guys on horseback and secretly want them to MAGA? We’re willing to give that guy a pass for invading Crimea and knocking off his political enemies with a gunshot to the head or polonium-laced tea. A leader’s toughness is what makes a country truly great, after all. Greatness has nothing to do with brains – it’s all about brawn. The education of a country’s people, the modernity of its infrastructure, the fortitude of the rule of law – that stuff is boring and tedious. We want mighty superheroes who can defeat our enemies with a single rock ‘em sock ‘em blow. Those villains who made America forget how to send people to the moon, invent Internets and build the world’s tallest buildings. The ones who took away our manufacturing jobs and left us destitute and hooked on opioids. You know who I’m talking about – all those people who don’t belong here; the ones who are somehow responsible for making America impotent and weak.
Decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia’s current fearless leader figured out that he didn’t need expensive and messy nuclear weapons to destroy the United States. America was already primed to self-destruct. Someone just needed to light the fuse on our ACME bomb.