I miss the Cold War

www.gocomics.com reruns several classic strips like Peanuts, Cathy, Boondocks and Bloom County. The one above took me back in ways I didn't expect. As a Cold War Era International Relations major at UC Davis, an unbelievable portion of my graduating 3.0 GPA depended on being able to write thousands of words worthy of essay that boiled down to "USA good, USSR bad." I had exactly one professor in 4 years + two summer school sessions who alluded to a post-Cold War era, and lost the crowd to hilarity in the middle of a sentence that began with "the world will no longer be bi-polar," and ended with "multi-polar," because Huntington hadn't written Clash of Civilizations yet. How they would have howled if the prof had even speculated that religion would form the basis of most conflict, foreign and domestic.

I wish more Cold War Era IR majors had gone into tech support rather than the State Department. We might have a better chance at the mental flexibility today's political environment requires.