I was around 16 years old the last time I wore a lapel pin: an AC/DC “Let There Be Rock” button that I bought at a head shop along with a couple of vials of amyl nitrite. Such is the level of sophistication I associate with declaring oneself in sartorial shorthand. But before long I decided, or at least hoped, I contained multitudes that couldn’t be expressed in the span of a lapel, so I tossed out my AC/DC button with the last of the poppers.
Several years later, while in college, I traveled to the USSR for a summer study program and was amused by the Soviet mania for znachki: that is, lapel pins. Not content with the already broad politicizing of Soviet life—sports, science, literature, history, art, industry, most public spaces—the party had all but nationalized the folds of everyday clothing. And several of my American travel mates loved it, however ironically. The znachok (singular) they most eagerly sought on the black market was the “baby Lenin,” purported to be a grainy photo of the infant dictator, but they could be satisfied with hammer-and-sickles, anything space-age Cyrillic, and images of the bearded Lenin pointing the way to the socialist future.
It wasn’t lost on anyone―certainly not the average Russian―what an all-around joke this was. While we were buying up nationalist kitsch that the Russians themselves had stopped taking seriously, they desired, in exchange, anything Western. Anything. I paid for cab rides with Marlboros, swapped old Nikes for a Russian Republic flag, old Levi’s for a Red Army belt and buckle. Michael Jackson and Madonna tapes could fetch great returns, as could packages of tampons or condoms—which, while not strictly Western, were hard-to-obtain commodities. All the trappings of Soviet glory had ended up, if not in the ash heap of history, at least in the bargain bin. The Cold War seemed to have been won on the playing fields of the average American strip mall.
No comments:
Post a Comment