There's something missing from the lives of young people these days. It has taken some time to identify it, but finally it has become clear - and the answer should have jumped into the minds of any person my age (older than dirt) or, if possible, older.

The answer is "Communists".

Young people today are missing communists. I remember the good old days of the Cold War, back when we knew that the commies were coming to kill us, possibly because of the hockey game in the 1980 Olympics, a rare year when neither America nor the Soviet Union was boycotting the games because, basically, the other side had done something unspeakable, using some other country as a pawn. Whatever had been done was, of course, an outrage, one that $country would not stand for, and would, in protest, take their athletic teams and stay home, thus depriving local television networks of the slim revenues generated by the Olympics in the pre-Tonya Harding era. It wasn't until the introduction of blunt weapons that the Olympics actually became interesting. The only reason they were both there that year was because the men who were supposed to liaise to find out which country wasn't coming had gotten on a bit too well and decided to open a noodle shop in Kabul. This is the real reason for the Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan, and don't let your history books tell you different.

But back to the Communists. We knew the commies were coming, because that was part of The Ineffective Social Change Manifesto, somewhere after how no one could believe in God because religion was the opiate of the masses. "Watch out for capitalist running dogs," it says, in the immortal words of Marx and Engels. "They're going to try to kill you because they're of limited intelligence, tend to react to things by smashing them first a la The Incredible Hulk, and are hereditarily incapable of listening, so you should stand just on the other side of your borders (or the borders of any convenient nations you manage to "convert" to Communism) and taunt them."

The important part here is not, as might be suspected, the reference to the Incredible Hulk some hundred years before that character was even invented, but the use of a term that would later be popularised by Chairman Mao ("capitalist running dogs"), who, it is very well known, by anyone over the age of 25, hated the Soviets.

And we never got that. "They're commies!" we used to say, in recess, in between wondering why, why that annoying chick in our class had worn the same sweatshirt as us, what mysterious force was at work to cause us to wear the same item on the same day, ignoring completely the last three weeks that we had not worn that shirt in fear that the other one would*."Why do they hate each other?" It was years before anyone thought to let us in on the big secret of Chinese Communism (based on leaving the peasants in one place to shoot them, as so many economies are) versus Soviet Communism (based on moving the peasants to collectives, then shooting them - this was an innovation), the smaller secret of the American Communist Party, the definitely-not-a-secret of the McCarthy hearings, and the totally ignored fact of Albania. And by the time they did, the Soviet Union had done what true evil always does (I know because I read it in Lord Of The Rings, somewhere around all that hoyay subtext) and collapsed Of Its Own Weight.

What a good Evil Empire for a group of sixth graders to conceptualise. It was simple, straight-forward, and completely obvious why we hated each other: we both had The Bomb and it was a question not of whether one side or the other would use it but of when.

Anyone else remember the Doomsday Clock? I do.

So with a worldview so simplistic that it resembles a Mondrian painting (har!) but that nonetheless managed to cover all the major threats (1. Commies; 2. Nukes) at least until they started telling white kids who had never, ever, dreamed that there might really be some strange creature called The Homosexual, or, more to the point, that some of the same people who had been in class with them for the past several years might be representatives of The Homosexual species, about AIDS. Obviously, only gay people got AIDS, at least until the world was destroyed when Ryan White died, proving that, in fact, you didn't have to be gay to get AIDS.**

But even though we had AIDS, we still had the Commies and their nukes, and they were still coming to get us. The world was reassuringly normal.***

Obviously, I'm writing all this down now so that when I have Alzheimers and can only drool I will be able to recall with total coherency the events of fifty years ago and will be able to recite this Lost Writing with absolute accuracy while wacking the recipient of my lecture about the head, neck, and shoulders with my cane. So - if you haven't already done so - add in the "Back in my day"s and the "You young people, you don't know how good you have it, with your triple-filtration atmosphere domes capable of repelling either nuclear weapons or the latest political foray by the latest member of the Bush clan"s.

But young people today don't have Communists. There are still Communist countries on earth, of course, but they tend to have one of two looks. They are either a) battle-scarred and non-productive, or b) suspiciously capitalist looking. More importanly, due to accounting errors (and this is why you should never, ever hire Arthur Andersen to do anything for you; I used to work for a company that was responsible for the plants in their Seattle office, and let me tell you, I am not surprised that there is the occasional "accounting error" at Arthur Andersen - I'm surprised the top corporate tier hasn't been shot) the Soviet Union has either sold or lost all of their nuclear weapons, and because they were isolated from modern television for so long (or the modern world, in any way) it is no surprise that they tended to give the weapons to gentlemen in black trench coats who could not produce an end-use certificate. Those wacky, trusting Soviets!

And now the big threat to the world is Random Terrorists. It is not possible to focus all your hate and fear on one entity (even if it was (and still is) the largest politically unified landmass in the world, it is still significantly underpopulated) that you can pick out by the fact that they are "Red Communists" and have "The Bomb".

By the way, that scene in Star Trek IV, where Sulu tries to get onto the aircraft carrier? Comedy gold.

Instead, the menace now is the Random Terrorist, whose only identifying characteristic is that he has a pocket nuke. Or possibly a vial of chemicals so foul and potent that they will strip your nasal hairs right off, mere milliseconds before stripping the flesh from your bones. Or possibly a conventional weapon, such as a ballistic missile with a depleted-uranium tip, because on the scale of radioactivity, depleted uranium is practically health food. Granted, it's cancer-causing fatal health food, but undoubtedly someone in an oxygen bar somewhere has overdosed on oxygen, and I hear about St John's Wort overdoses all the time.****

And there's no way of identifying the Random Terrorist until he whips out his weapon of choice, either. It's not like the Commies, where you knew who they were because they had invariably crappy clothing, thick accents, moustaches you could paraglide with, and silly hats. Also, because the US government did a better job of keeping them out. They were pretty easy to spot, though sometimes it would turn out that they came from Aunt Poland rather than Mother Russia, and hated the Communists even more than we red blooded capitalists did.

The Random Terrorist probably does have a cause, and it may even be a better one than "My holy book told me to kill you", but if so, it is generally on the supporting evidence. ("My holy book told me to kill infidels. By the way, your government is extremely unpleasant, and I like thinking that by killing you I will cause your government great distress, though I am aware that Scott Adams was remarkably prescient about the outcome of the 2000 elections when he created the Pointy Haired Boss and your president is not capable of an expression beyond 'pained thought', or possibly 'constipation'.") Ever since the Commies turned out to have been playing An Elaborate Joke on America, by causing America to run up their deficit spending, proving the fundamental flaw of capitalism - willingness to spend money that one does not actually have - America has taken to acting as though what the international community really wants, aside from parking spaces and several million yards of wall-to-wall carpeting, is random acts in their countries.

Some of those are merely annoying, like the secret prisons that aren't secret when you can hear the dogs barking and there are Budweiser deliveries every day - even overseas, many Americans are afraid to find out what good beer tastes like. Some of those are accidents. "Oops!" we say. "It was an accident that we shot down your plane/bombed your embassy/held the map upside down and invaded your country by accident!" Some of them are just along the lines of "No one will EVER KNOW it was us, tee-hee, wink wink, nudge nudge."

Newsflash: it works a lot better when you run those plans to depose Hugo Chavez past a five year old child, searching for obvious flaws in the plans. Obviously, the unconsidered one was that he would be relentlessly nice to us later on.

So it's obvious that, rather than having some sort of Serious Ideological Difference ("We have the bomb and you don't!" "You are wrong, Comrade Americanisch!" "Deficit spending it is!") Random Terrorists actually have causes, come from many different locations, and have few, if any, common identifying characteristics. This all contributes to the world of uncertainty that young people live in these days, as they write in their MySpaces, attempt to mark the world of Impervious Consumer Goods as their own, and generally define the world and the theory of cold fusion.

I certainly pick it out as being the reason that I so often want to hit a Young Person. Their uncertainty and my utter certainty about the world is not a function of age. It is a function of enemies and knowing exactly where your enemies are coming from is not only a more solid foundation to build your world on, but it also actually disproves Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle by demonstrating that we know exactly where our enemies are - Russia - and who they are - Communists. So we have intellectual superiority as well as a sense of certainty, and I feel sure that the US Government would do well, in considering the future, to make Osama bin Laden into an enemy on the order of Communism - this means not engaging in those charmingly ADD tendencies that the government likes to demonstrate every so often as they go tromping off to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and then Canada - and focusing solely on pre-empting him as much as possible and spending a lot of money in the process. It does not matter if we have no money as long as we have a total spin-up of the defence industry and have a better rate of employment. This will lead to certainty in the long run, and it is just possible, with total certainty, that there will never, ever be another Bush elected to any office of greater probity than dog catcher ever again.

But Random Terrorists, unfortunately, are not so obliging as to stay where they should, by right of fiat and subluxation and general tradition of warfare. So I can't say that I'm delighted about the state of the world, because not only do I have to cope with Young People with the intellectual depth of broccoli (or Madame Bovary), I can look forward to another Bush presidency at some point, and god knows that Jenna and Barbara are nearly as stunningly capable of so-called "clean living" and "political thought" as their father is. Not quite - there's definitely room for improvement there - but then, no one's perfect.

Except Communists. Only as enemies, mind.

Sleeping in the back of the bus,

Channon

*It was one of those yellow Esprit sweatshirts. I can safely say that it was the last item of clothing I ever owned that had a giant logo emblazoned across the chest, mainly because I got my International News sweatshirt shortly before and the brand name on that was Zebraclub anyway. Also, the Esprit sweatshirt was a birthday gift from someone whose parents hated them. Ah, the trauma of birthdays where you were supposed to invite your whole class, despite the fact that there were maybe three people in it who didn't actually throw rocks at you. As I recall, one year my parents had a pool party for their two children that was a birthday party for each of them, but given the date that their birthdays are (10/14 and 11/16) was also a Halloween party. Nothing says trauma like wearing a homemade unicorn costume to a pool party that you share with your brother, your entire class, his entire class and is for Halloween as well. Not even germ warfare.

And somehow, the fact that they didn't come to your parties ("Sorry! Cameron and Jason have to regrout the bathroom this weekend, despite the fact that they are twelve years old!") that never stopped them from inviting you to theirs, because it was Well Known, no matter where you went to school, that your parents had this insane belief that you should go to other peoples' parties, even though you had all the social grace of kelp, even for a twelve year old, and it was going to be Miserable. It was, for the happy birthday child who could put up with your distressing presence for several hours (in real time; in subjective time, I'm sure it felt like weeks) an opportunity to get a present.

People wonder why I hate everyone. This would be a big part of it, yes.

**You know, it really was about that simplistic, back in the early days of HIV, particularly in a mostly-white, significantly-incomed school in suburban Seattle where all the students were presumed to be, on the lack of any identifying evidence, totally straight and unlikely to move to San Francisco and have sex in bath houses with strange men.

***Except for The Big One, the earthquake that has, at this point, still not arrived (seventeen years later) and is beyond fashionably late now. But clearly it would get you in height order, reaching out small chasms to get the shorter students, then larger chasms to get the bigger ones, up until the moment that the ground ate the teacher. Clearly, having us line up in height order after the earthquake drills was about confusing the chasms so that the teacher was the last to die and could get a good runup on escaping, because the chasms would start with the short students at the front of the queue, go all the way back to the tall students at the back, expecting all the while to get to the main course of its meal (the teacher), pause, think "Bzuh?" and have to look around for the teacher, who, by then, had legged it to Peru.

****Is it just me, or is it hard to take Anthony Kiedis seriously, now that we know that he sits around and has someone inject him with ozone every day? WAY TO BE PUNK ROCK, ANTHONY.