You damned Russians! I was getting all psyched up to fight you, and then you disappeared on me. I knew the number of your warheads, and the number of ours, I weighed your massive bear-style of giant bombs, swarms of tanks, and Siberian hordes of Stalingrad clones against our precision-guided systems, our technical deftness, and big-hearted citizen-soldier nice guys. I was ready for you. You were in my dreams, splitting my sky with a red flash, firing your orchestras of mortars at the green earth, digging into little countries with your claws and making helpless patriots cry, giving me the evil eye from under your fur cap while a thousand missile trucks rolled by. You’re the ones with the dark onion-topped palaces and the shadowy sky, whose fortress windows choked the sun trying to get in, you’re the ones with beautiful intellectuals in chains and poets in a cage, with brilliant books behind barbed wire; you’re the ones with Ivan the Terrible looking out of your Third eye, the ones with cold corpses laid out in the middle of your square. You’re the ones with freezing nights and warm ballerinas, hiding their desire to run away by pretending to be dying swans, you’re the ones with the beautiful spy with the pouting lips, the one who makes every red-blooded American wish he had the blueprints to the satellite, you’re the ones sending assault rifles to the desperate and navigating rivers of blood towards a future of raised fists without jeans. You’re the ones who wait half a day for bread, the ones who beat your wives because they’re not yet dead like you, the ones who break your factories with vodka and sit in the cold cursing capitalism. You’re the ones who were thrashed by Hitler and Napoleon until the bitter piles of snow and knife-like wind, your abusive ogre of a father, came stumbling back into the house with the belt of winter in his hand, and beat the generals of the enemy like children. You’re the ones in big offensive coats of fur, cutting the line in the vegetable store, and fighting like animals for a fruit. The angry defeated ones who I am supposed to love.

Damn you, Russians! What happened to you? Why did you lose the Cold War?

What will I do without an enemy, with nothing but my prejudice on the lonely pinnacle of history?