How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The...

birthmark on Gorbachev's head, even though those in my evangelical milieu would conjecture that it was the mark of the beast and a sign of the end.

On March 10, 1985, twenty-six years ago this week, your humble narrator began to breathe easy, having spent most of her childhood and preadolescence--just like many of us who grew up in the waning though incredibly tense days of the Cold War--scared to death that Reagan would finally push the button and induce the Second Coming, with Jesus coming to earth shrouded in a billowing, rolling mushroom cloud. On that day Konstantin Chernenko died and Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, and would soon start engineering a thaw between the Soviet Union and the U.S. If I could attach sound files, I'd cue a little "99 Luftballons" by Nena or "Russians" by Sting (Oh, Sting, you pretentious rotter, padding your peacenik dirge with Prokofiev. And I fell for it!) Accept this artifact above as substitute, won't you?