My friends, our little community here in the TPM comments sections, and indeed, the vast silent majority of lurkers that the egotistical sods who write these things  devoutly hope is out there is, I have surmised, made up of people of all ages.  Or, at least of people of many ages.  I suspect that the ten and under demographic is badly underrepresented, perhaps more so, even, than the 70+ group.

Speaking as someone who considers himself to be in the middle of the bell curve age-wise (no matter what those goddamn actuarial tables say!), I'd like to ask those of you who are in their twenties and early thirties to let me be, in the mortal, yet eminently forgettable, words of Bob Dole, your bridge to the past.  I feel qualified to serve as a generational span, as it were, because, while I share many memories with those creaky fossils who are older than I, I think I am "hip," as you kids say, to the life experiences of you kids in the younger generation.

Specifically, I'd like to be your bridge back to the early eighties when Barack and I were (unbeknownst to each other, of course) both majoring in political science.  In those days, the faculty and curriculum of political science departments in colleges and universities across the nation were largely preoccupied by two overwhelming obsessions.

The first, naturally, was imbuing students with a set of skills and a bodyof knowledge spectacularly unsuited to any reasonable post-graduation employment expectations those students might have harbored.  This has, as best I can determine, continued to the present day.

The second preoccupation was the study of the history, government, politics, and military power of a nation known by the rather opaque name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the long and tense relationship of that now defunct nation to the United States of America and the impact of that relationship upon the world as a whole. 

All of our studies, at some level, tied back into that overarching obsession.  If we studied voter behavior in the U.S., at some level, unspoken in that class, was a comparison to the lack of elections in the U.S.S.R.  If we studied the politics of developing nations, a current that ran through the class how the superpower rivalry affected, usually for the worse, the politics of those nations and their sporadic, quixotic, even quaint, efforts stay out of the fray.  If we studied foreign policy, it was . . . well, you get the idea.  As recently as twenty years ago, the whole world as we knew it was still constrained by the works of Potsdam and Los Alamos.

Lending spice to our existence in those days was the certain knowledge that the two sides had accumulated somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty thousand thermonuclear weapons and almost all of them were armed, precisely targeted and on hair-trigger alert.  At any given time, in those days, several H-bombs were Targeted on a City or Military Base Near You.

We endlessly studied game theory in those days and worried about deterrence through the deliberately chosen acronym MAD (mutual assured destruction).  We worried over the destabilizing effect of this or that new weapons system and whether it had the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons so swiftly or stealthily that it would tempt the system's owner to a first strike, or induce the other side to launch a preemptive strike before the new system was adopted.  We studied the closest historical analogies to our own situation that we could find--the Peloponnesian War, the Punic Wars--neither of which was really analogous because the possibility of turning the entire world into a radioactive cinder wasn't in the end game. 

Many of us worried a great deal about the summer of 1914.  Many of us spent a lot of time trying to understand why and how the hair-trigger, irreversible war plans laid by two locked alliances of anachronistic empires turned what at first seemed to be a routine crisis in the Balkans (the persistence  of crisis in the Balkans being one of the constants of the last two centuries) into a catastrophe that consumed a generation.  Yes, this worried many of us a great deal because, in our own time, the U.S. and Soviet nuclear launch plans were clearly more inexorable and less easily unwound than the mobilization timetables of the Schlieffen Plan or the French Army's Plan XVII.

The point I'm trying to make here is that for about forty years, until sometime in the late 80s or very early 90s,  the price of following current events and being politically aware was living with a (usually) low grade fear of nuclear annihilation.  Every day you lived, you knew that one of the uncounted moments of moment of human stupid of the kind that we all commit had the potential to escalate into a ghastly global nuclear fusion orgy before anyone knew what had happened.

If you didn't live through those days as an adult or a teenager, you really can't have a full emotional understanding of this fear, so pray don't come back with lame-ass comparisons to Al Qaeda or AIDS or global warming because we'll just sneer at you.  We know all of those too, and they ain't shit by comparison.  In times of low tension, the Cold War fear of nuclear war was like a low-grade infection, a mildly debilitating disorder that affected your daily enjoyment of life.  In times of heightened tension, it was more.  When there was a real crisis going on in the world, the high pitched squeal of your local radio or TV station conducting its mandatory monthly test of the Emergency Broadcast System (which had nothing to do with weather back then) could send your heart into your throat and your pulse racing.

I was too young to have experienced the worst of the worst of that fear.  I was a baby during the Cuban Missile Crisis  and by the time I was in elementary school, Duck and Cover drills were a laughable artifact of an earlier generation--laughable, however, only because by then there were too many nukes in the world for anyone to believe there'd be a place to hide and we all knew it.  I don't even really remember when a half-drunk, scandal-plagued Richard Nixon ramped us up to DEFCON 3--and in some places 2--during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war ("DEFCON." Now there's a blast--heh--from the past). 

But by Jesus,  I remember Reagan's first term with crystal clarity and on the days I believe there's a God who interferes in human affairs for good, I remember when He/She/It looked down upon us, saw Reagan in Washington and Andropov in Moscow and said "okaaay, that's one crazy old militarist too many with a finger on the button!"

Many are inclined to credit Reagan for having the nerve to ramp an arms race and spend the Soviets into oblivion, and in hindsight, I'm glad he did it.  But that was a dangerous, dangerous game that old man played with the world, and a good outcome was not preordained, by any means. 

There was a point in the early eighties when the men on the Politburo, a bunch crazy old ideologically rigid militarists leavened with that charming, uniquely Russian, brand of paranoiac xenophobia, were convinced Reagan was planning a first strike.  Andropov actually ordered the KGB to task agents to watch U.S. hospitals, looking for preparations to receive nuclear casualties.  At about the same time,they were absolutely certain that NATO's annual field exercises were a prelude to invasion and, unbeknownst to us, they ramped the alert level of the Strategic Rocket Forces to the "One Fuck-up from Apocalypse" level. 

It was a near thing, even at the end.  We just got lucky. 

Being President was a fearsome thing in those days and the proximity of universal annihilation often required hard, morally complicated, choices.  Choices like the one made by a yellow-bellied liberal appeaser named Dwight David Eisenhower.  The eggheads who worked for this dumb liberal traitor, Eisenhower, "Ike" to his besotted and deluded supporters, made made a rather serious miscalculation.  They covertly and, to some extent, overtly encouraged Hungarians to rebel against the puppet regime the Soviets had installed after the Second World War.  Somehow, all quite accidentally of course, the Hungarians even got the odd idea that we'd come to their aid if their rebellion succeeded.  So they launched their revolution.  It was short, violent and quite successful.  The Hungarian quislings and their Russian "advisors" were shot, strung up or otherwise subjected to the kinds of indignities customarily inflicted on the ruling class during revolutions.  The Party emblem was excised--literally--from the flag and freedom was on the march. 

Naturally, the Soviets took umbrage, what with this being in what they considered their sphere of influence and the shooting and the hanging and the heartfelt commitment to preserving the Revolution of their socialist brethren in Hungary and all.  The Soviet tanks rolled in and over the revolutionaries and the rebellion was put down in the traditional ham-fisted Russian way.  Ike was faced with a dilemma.  Send in NATO and US forces to support our friends and almost-allies in Hungary as we had kinda sorta implied we might if they stood up to the Russian bear, thereby risking igniting a nuclear war, or stand back and let the Russians crush them. 

Lacking Bill Kristol's courage, sense of history, and his wealth of political, military and strategic wisdom, Ike let the Russians crush the Hungarian revolution into a bloody smear rather than risk touching off a nuclear war.  That's how it worked sometimes in those days.

The point of all this unpleasant history may be evident to some, but let me spell it out.  John McCain made it clear today that he wants to be our bridge back to the past.  That past.  Yes, my young friends, McCain wants to give you back the world that he and I grew up in.  That's where he feels most comfortable and we have a golden opportunity to take the world back to a time when it made sense to people like him and me.  A world where the nukes were armed, targeted and ready to roll at a moment's notice and the threat of unleashing them was behind everything we do.  When there was us and them and the them was easy to i.d. and everyone else had to pick a side or we'd pick it for 'em. 

Unfortunately, McCain also made it clear that, like his neocon buddies, he has no capacity to actually learn any lessons from history that are more complicated than those taught by World War II propaganda cartoons.  That he, in fact, lives in a comic book parody of that world where there are no complex choices, no adverse consequences and no problems that can't be put to rights by Our Boys in Uniform.  McCain is, in Kristol-clear terms, telling us and the world that that he wants to be the crazy old militarist with his finger on the hair trigger alert nukes, and the lessons he's learned from history tell him that the guys who brought the country and the world  through the Cold War in one piece were cowardly appeasers.

Oh, wait, the folks in the MSM who know him best assure me that he's not really like this at all.  That all this saber rattling and rhetoric and saying we should stand by brave little Georgia in its hour of need is all just campaign politics.  Whew.  Thank heavens.  I was really worried there for a minute. 

Now you kids get off his lawn and let him do what's right.  Besides, a little daily gnawing fear of annhiliation would do you good.  Builds character.