Who Watches The Watchmen? Me, that's who.

I’m reading Watchmen again, it’s been a dozen years or more since the last time I read it, the Most Important Comic Ever Written EVER. And it still is. But the setting really does inhabit a mid-1980’s world, when the Cold War loomed in everyone’s consciousness, when stakes of the game were the destruction of the entire planet. That drama is so hard to connect with these days. My emotional response is so different, with the perspective of what America has been doing, global superpowers are much less scary when you see them get rightly spanked. In the book there’s this newspaper headline “SOVIETS INVADE AFGHANISTAN – PAKISTAN NEXT!” I think it was originally supposed to give this impression of how scary the USSR was, but now my reaction is “Good luck with that, guys. We’ll get some popcorn, pull up a seat and laugh as you bankrupt yourself and decimate your military.” Pretty much how the world has been laughing at us in Iraq for the past five years.