
                                WINNING THE WAR
                By DAVE BARRY, Pulitzer prize winning columnist



          I'm happy to announce that, while you were outside trying to get
     the barbecue started,  we  won  the Cold War.  To understand how this
     happened, we need a  global  perspective  on international communism,
     which we can obtain by  examining  a  globe.  When we do this, we are
     immediately struck by the fact that  somebody, quite possibly my son,
     has put a dent several hundred miles  deep  in the Indian Ocean right
     next to Madagascar (the famous "Madagascar Dent").  But we also can't
     help but notice that China and the Soviet Union, although they appear
     at  first  glance  to  be two monolithic blobs colored, respectively,
     Gatorade  orange  and  cheese  fungus  green,  are  actually, when we
     examine them  closely,  made  up  of millions of individualized human
     beings who have  the  same  hopes  and  fears  that we have, plus the
     additional fear of being stared at by an eyeball the relative size of
     the moon.

          They're  used  to  hardship.   Life  under  communism  has  been
     difficult, especially in the Soviet Union,  where for years there has
     been  virtually  nothing  to eat except a  traditional  peasant  dish
     called  "nyetski"  (literally,  "nothing").   Soviet supermarkets are
     very depressing.    They're always out of everything, including those
     little numbered slips  of  paper you take in the deli sections to see
     who gets served next.    Sometimes,  a  new  shipment  of  slips will
     arrive, but because of some  bureaucratic  foul-up,  they'll all have
     the  same number, so you'll have  several  hundred  Soviet  shoppers,
     every one of them holding, say, a  29,  crowding around the deli case
     and staring possessively at a single alleged sausage  the  size  of a
     Chap Stick.  The Express Checkout lanes in Soviet supermarkets have a
     zero-item limit.  It takes the average Soviet shopper more  than  800
     years to save up enough Green Stamps for a single fondue fork.  Which
     will be missing at least one prong (Snare drum:  Ba-dump BOMP.)  Take
     my wife,  please.    (Ba-dump  BOMP.) Hey, you've been a great crowd,
     and....

          Sorry.  I was getting carried away there with Soviet supermarket
     jokes.  Not that  I  see  anything  funny  in this.  Two years ago, I
     myself was briefly behind the  Iron  Curtain,  in East Germany, and I
     was appalled by the incredible devastation and grim hardship that was
     being wrought by the brutal Communist system  in  the  form  of a car
     called the "Wartburg." I am not making this  car  up.    Nobody could
     make up a car like this, except Communists.   If  you  were  making a
     science-fiction  horror movie wherein atomic radiation causes a bunch
     of small, repulsive soil-dwelling creatures to become enormous, you'd
     select the Wartburg  to play the role of the slug.  This car actually
     deserves the name "Wartburg." This car is so ugly...

          AUDIENCE:  How ugly is it?

          ...it's so ugly that, when they show TV commercials for it, they
     superimpose a little black strip  across  the  headlights.   (Ba-dump
     BOMP.)

          So, when I saw Wartburgs crawling  all over the place behind the
     Iron Curtain, I thought to myself (in  English,  so  as not to tip my
     hand to the Communists), "We're going to win  the  Cold War." Because
     in the Free World, we don't have to put  up with conditions like that
     unless you count the Chevrolet Vega.  Remember?  The  Vega  came out,
     along with the Ford Pinto and the AMC Gremlin, during the early '70s,
     when  US  auto  manufacturers were conducting an experiment to see if
     consumers would  be  willing  to  buy  cars  so poorly made that they
     frequently broke down in the design stage.  An engineer would be just
     thinking about one of these cars, and oil would leak from his ears.

          I know this because  I  bought  one  of  these cars, a Vega that
     could be started only by  touching two pieces of metal under the hood
     with a screwdriver, and even that  worked  only some of the time, the
     result  being  that  I  passed  many  carefree    hours  waiting  for
     professional  help  to  arrive  while I amused myself  by  poking  my
     fingers  through  the  fenders,  which had a severe factory-installed
     case of Deadly Car Rot.  You hardly ever see Vegas anymore.  Probably
     they're  all  in  the  hands of collectors.  Probably there are  Vega
     Owners  Clubs, where the members bring their Vegas to the meetings in
     the form  of  legal-sized  envelopes  full  of rust.  Of course, they
     would be unable to do this without Freedom of Assembly, which is what
     people in many nations  are  struggling  for  right  now as part of a
     massive worldwide change in the  political  climate, possibly related
     to the Madagascar Dent.  This change is occurring even in places that
     had seemed to be totally closed to  the  forces of democracy, such as
     Poland and the US House of Representatives, which  has  dwindled to a
     record  low  of  17 members as a result of  a  recent  highly-popular
     outbreak of mindless cannibalism.  We can only hope that  this  trend
     continues  and that one day the entire world enjoys the new  openness
     that Soviet Premier Gorbachev has dubbed "glasnost." Which is Russian
     for "Wartburg." (Snare drum.)
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