You see, these students’ knowledge of English is infinitely better than my knowledge of Polish, and I wondered aloud whether we had Ronald Reagan to thank for that, as they might otherwise have had to learn Russian in school, as Dr. Banaś had. We liberals—this liberal anyway—like to think that the Soviet Union was at the point of collapsing of its own sclerotic ideological and centralized economic weight, which may have been proximately true as well. But what if that collapse had been delayed or deferred ten years, what if the Politburo had clumsily temporized on a bit longer, what if Putin, or a Putin, had been available instead of Gorbachev? Ten years in the larger historical picture doesn’t mean much—except for those actually living under those conditions for ten more years in central and eastern Europe. What if U.S. military overspending, as the argument goes, actually did pressure the Soviet military to keep pace, a pace its rickety economy simply couldn’t match or sustain, hastening the realization that their system was broken and prompting efforts like glasnost and perestroika. Even if the arms race wasn’t cost effective for us, perhaps it actually made a significant difference to Poles, in their lives, proved their lucky break. What if trickledown really does trickle, though it takes forever and trickles out to the strangest places? Otherwise, I might not have had an audience this week.
I also granted that Reagan reversed the political economic discourse in the United States from one of social welfare progressivism to that of a diminished governmental and deregulated capitalism—whatever the realities. Such a shift in social messaging is no mean feat—at least in the sense of “small, negligible.” That Greed might be Good proved a surprisingly good sell by the late 80s, even to those who couldn’t afford it. Such free(r)-market entrepreneurialism has its appeal to intelligent, well-intended Poles who have lived under Communism and live now under a kind of recovering, cronified capitalism. But already, relatively early on, there are signs of an awareness that the benefits of economic growth might be divinely complicated, à la this Cracovian Banksy. A not so sacred heart.
