So here I am in the end-of-summer doldrums and waiting for
the sixth and final series of “The Americans,” a spy drama that takes place
when Reagan was president. It will be a
frustrating wait until the final season airs in 2018 because events happening
now seem tangled up in events that happened then.
Back then there was the Cold War. The word “war” in that phrase was no
exaggeration. Nasty things were done to
Russians and Europeans and Americans in the wake of Soviet style
communism. There is very little left of
Soviet style communism which basically began to collapse in 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev
was Reagan’s opposite number.
The collapse became widespread in the 1990s and there
was a mad grab for money, power, and
position. Elbows were thrown. People
were hurt. A country doesn’t become a
full fledged democracy in three seconds flat any more than American did after
the American Revolution.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was every reason to celebrate the demise
of soul crushing communism. But then it was abandoned, forgotten, left along it
until it was needed again by American political elites who wish to seize a
political moment to gain and keep power and, with that in mind, to revive the
Cold War.
Every day someone gets up in Congress or goes on TV to talk
about the ‘Russians’ as if a straight line runs from every event in that vast
country to a former KGB Colonel become President named Vladimir Putin. Contrary
to the average American’s real interests ( which include terrorists, the
economy, high cost of health insurance premiums, the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea) both major political parties are trying to upstage each
other with fake patriotism.
Don’t believe it. Don’t
cooperate. It’s naïve, it’s stupid, it’s phony. It’s never a good thing when you have nearly
99 percent of the members of Congress marching in lockstep, all trying to outdo
each other by raising their voices the loudest and shouting meaningless cant
about ‘Russia.’
And these same people think that ‘Russians’ changed all the
people who were going to vote for Hillary Clinton into Donald Trump
voters. And that it was Vladimir Putin’s
fingers on the keyboard used to hack into the Democratic National Committee
election plans to reveal John Podesta’s sideways manipulations of Democrat
Party dirty tricks. Is all this blame-shifting
and propagandizing against Russia not embarrassing?
We are not in the 1980s any more.
In the First Episode of Season Five of "The Americans," there was a
new character named Tuan.’ Tuan is a
young Vietnamese KGB trainee posted with Soviet spies Philip and Elizabeth
Jennings as their adopted son. He’s hard-core, a blind believer in the Soviet
system, gung-ho to the point that even Elizabeth can hardly stand his psychotic
utterings at the dinner table. One
astonished gaping look from Elizabeth says
it all. The kid is too whacked even by KGB
standards.
It’s not as if American espionage agents were playing
softball. The CIA has hired a dissident
Russian working for the U.S. to develop
a strain of fungus that will destroy the Soviet Union’s wheat crop. That’s
a bit of overkill. The failure of the Soviet socialist-communist system is
evident in filmed food lines, bare supermarket shelves, rotting food, tractors
mired in mud up to the hubcaps.
There is a KGB joke which shows the cynicism that pervaded
all aspects of Soviet Communism: “ A guy
goes into a food market and asks: “Don’t you have any meat?” Market owner
replies: “We don’t have any fish. The market that doesn’t have any meat is
across the street.” Starving and chaotic Venezuela is a paradise
by comparison.
The dissident scientist Alexei in “The Americans” has a great deal of enthusiasm for America,
its freedom and plenty. He criticizes
his home country while unwitting talking to Soviet spy Philip, who is
disguised as an airline pilot.“Good thing you don’t work for Aeroflot. Their
planes crash all the time. They’re dirty. You want food you have to stand in
line for hours. In Russia, you must
share toilets, pay bribes. Awful country.”
The Americans is never without humor, though it’s often of
the droll, mordant kind. Stan Beeman is a Steven Martin style ‘lonely guy’ FBI
agent when he pops in on the Jennings with a sixpack of beer. Neighborly chit-chat.
Stan’s been isolated too long and divorced not long enough.
He bores a wry Phillip (Matthew Rhys, great
actor, and real life husband of Keri Russell) with a non-eventful tale about a woman he’s
seen at the gym. “I met a woman,” he tells Phillip. To ordinary mortals, this
would mean he has possibilities. To nerdish Stan however, it means the woman on
the treadmill next to him smiled at him while walking away.
But the primary concern of the Soviet spies is to get a sample of a biological warfare
agent developed at an FBI lab in Virginia.
The Lassa virus had accidentally killed one of the embedded Soviet
agents and it’s up to Elizabeth and Philip to dig up his body to get another
sample. It’s not going to be easy. The CIA secretly buried the toxic foreign agent in a sealed plastic
overcoat inside a metal box buried fifteen feet deep in Fort Dietrich’s back
yard.
A team of agents, under the guidance of Philip and
Elizabeth, sap the perimeter of the American compound and beginning digging.
And digging. And still more digging. It’s pretty hard to explain how about 20
minutes of film digging can make for exciting TV but it does.
You smell the dirt in more ways than one. The KGB team digs
up the stinking body of their dead agent, cuts a chunk of his flesh out for
transport back to Moscow. One of the KGB
team members slips off the ladder and cuts his wrist during the process. This
exposes him to the Lassa virus. He panics,knows he’s going to die. Elizabeth calmly reassures him that everything’s
going to be all right, don’t worry, be
calm. When the man calmsdown,
Elizabeth pulls a pistol and shoots him
in the head. Dead fall into the hole.
The ends justify the means. It’s brutal. This is a depiction
of the real Cold War.
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