Brezhnevschina

I've traveled some in the Former Soviet Union, and worked for a couple of years in Kazakhstan (with side business and pleasure trips to Mongolia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan), and I always enjoyed talking to people about their lives. I've always been interested in the Soviet Union, and its predecessor and successor states.

I can't claim this as authoritative (i.e., "I could be wrong!") but a lot of people talked to me about the way things were under Brezhnev (and his successor party heads).

By that point in time, pretty much no one believed in the "Soviet system." No one really believed that the workers of the world should unite and cast off their capitalist oppressors.

But there was some stability, and if you were smart and worked hard and had some luck and knew the right people, you could make some money, have some status, do okay for yourself.

In Russian, adding "-schina" to someone's name turns it into a new noun, meaning "Age of X" or "reign of X". I don't think anyone's used the term Brezhnevschina before, so it's my very own little term of art.

For me, it means, "We all know it's a fraud, but there's still money to be made pretending, so we keep on going through the motions."

So . . . would that make it the Bushschina? I mean, here, now, for us.

We still talk the smack: freedom, democracy, capitalism. Does anyone still believe that smack? More particularly, does anyone still believe that the United States Government represents that smack?

I suppose I can take comfort in the more euphonious-sounding impending "Obamaschina."

Right?