Looking glass land

(Dissolve slowly through pink to November 1989)

A wall came down.

Two years later, Francis Fukuyama declared, ""What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

The liberal democratic West had won. The oppressive communist East had lost. A miasma of Nuclear Holocaust that had loomed over the planet for four decades had lifted and we could all see clearly. The failed experiment would never be repeated. And all forms of 'Commie Lite' pedalled by now discredited votaries of re-distributive egalitarianism were going to be exiled to the outer darkness.

Country after country, economy after economy, society after society was enormous pressure to line up behind the new Valhalla. In India, the dour faced Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao earned himself the sobriquet of Father of India's Economic Reforms by becoming a votary of this wonderful nostrum. A long oppressed middle class celebrated. Their moment had arrived.

Burdensome shackles were being shed. Onerous regulations were being extinguished. Command and Control was giving way to Energy and Entrepreneurship. Wealth went from being a Really Bad Word to a VERY NOBLE OBJECTIVE. We were all 'Wealth Creators' now after all.

And the beacon of this new world, the United States of America, shone brightly. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave stood for all that we looked up to, our faces awash in unabashed admiration (and only slightly veiled envy).

(Jump cut to September 15, 2008)

Lehman Brothers filed for Bankruptcy Protection under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Act.

We had just crossed over into Looking Glass Land (and Alice, we discovered, was working for the Mad Hatter).