Bunny Troubles

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I hate to sound nostalgic for the cold war, but it did make reading international news a lot easier. During the cold war, when ethnic or tribal conflicts popped up in countries you didn't know from chopped liver, there was no need to go through the laborious task of trying to ascertain which side was marginally less beastly than its adversary. Whichever side the Red Menace was for we were against. Simple as that. And consider this: during the cold war, the meltdown of the Russian ruble would have been treated as good news.

In fact, all the horrors of the past decade in places like the former Yugoslavia would have been treated as good news during the cold war. Any trouble in the Evil Empire was good news for us. If there was a thorn in the side of the Kremlin, we were on the side of the thorn in the side. While the cold war was going on, we actually rooted for droughts, so long as they were behind the Iron Curtain. A drought causes food shortages that could divert military spending or even destabilize the government. I personally drew the line at floods and pestilence, but, then, the people known as hard-liners during the cold war always suspected me of being a softie.

At one point this summer, I found myself concerned with the deterioration of the ruble of Belarus, a country that didn't even exist during the cold war. According to an article by Michael Wines in the New York Times, the Belarus ruble is commonly called a zaichik, or bunny, because there's a picture of a small hare on the note. Wines' piece included speculation that calling your currency bunny, as if addressing a debutante, might not be the best way to win international respect, even if your economy didn't happen to be a shambles.

That brought to my mind the recent weakness in the Canadian dollar, commonly called a loony, after the loon portrayed on the dollar coin. Coincidence? Or should the economists we send over to advise East European governments be supplanted by some zoologists? What if Belarus replaced the bunny with a silverback gorilla or a cougar? But does Belarus have any silverback-gorilla habitat? Suddenly, I threw down the paper. Since when did I have to start worrying about the stability of the Belarus bunny?

Since now. If I were a truly responsible citizen, I'd also be worried about the Ukrainian groundhog and the Azerbaijani chipmunk or whatever those currencies are called. Now that the cold war is over, we not only have all of our worries, we also have all of what used to be their worries. Their drought is now our drought, and no longer something to cheer about.

Yes, of course I'm grateful that the Russians no longer send people to slave-labor camps for remarking that the factory's party boss is getting a bit plump, but I'm confused about why it's all right for the Chinese to do that sort of thing and still be our pals. See how complicated it is? Sometimes I find myself wondering what they did with the Iron Curtain after the cold war ended. Did they throw it out? Or is it just in a basement somewhere with a lot of large busts of Lenin, ready to be put back if everyone misses it too much?