Maturity

Imagine if you will, a duel between Stanislav Petrov and Wayne Rooney. Hold on. Who the fuck is Stanislav Petrov!? Wasn't he a player for CSKA Moscow...hmmm, or did he defend for Spartak? He wish he was. He's not a footballer, nor a Soviet gymnast with 229 medals from various competitions hanging around his neck. Fortunately, he's not a politician, singer or actor. He's not a famous lawyer or an Orthodox saint. There's nothing about him that would be "televised" enough to dig him out of deep anonymity.

He's just the man who saved the world.

Nothing more, nothing less.

The first reaction after reading something like this would be quite natural and would move towards imagining a Russian counterpart to American and Hong Kong B-movie productions where various characters save the world, fast, precise and strong, driven by a derivative of universal virtue and their default affiliation with the forces of good and, of course, their muscles.

But as mentioned, Stanislav is not an actor, not even a bad one. He was never even close to acting as a profession, although he existed in an environment where the path to the top depended on bad acting. Comrade Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the strategic air defense of the former Red Army, on duty in the operational alarm center of the satellite system "Oko" ("the Eye") which was the first instance in detecting a possible nuclear attack on the USSR by the USA/NATO. He received the alarm signals from the satellites.

Among the monotony and paranoia that were constant roommates in such a place, something unusual nevertheless crept in. And that was what that system was built for. Alarm. An intercontinental ballistic missile was fired from the USA towards the USSR. Could it be a system error? But before that thought could reach rational processing in the brains of those present, a second signal was received. Error? A third. The fourth and fifth already seemed to confirm what was at stake.

From the alarm to the news reaching the ears of the Secretary General and the codes being forwarded to the strategic action units, not much time should have passed in an event such as that which took place on September 26, 1983. Any hesitation would have reduced the possibility of a counterattack. It was a matter of minutes. However, Stanislav somehow remained calm despite the roar of the alarm, the pulse that hit his head like a 20-megaton hammer, and the panic of his colleagues who demanded that he stick to the procedure. Which he violated and made a completely rational decision that five missiles were too few for a general attack. He decided that it was a system error and not a real attack. Although theoretically there was a safety mechanism for launching missiles that provided for confirmation of the attack from another source, no one knows what would have happened if he had acted as the rules required.

And no one would have known even if paranoia had prevailed, reinforced by the upcoming NATO military exercises in West Germany that would begin within a few days of the false alarm at the satellite center, and which would also include a simulated...first nuclear attack on the Warsaw Pact forces. Of course, they knew about that exercise in the East. And their basic assumption was that the attack would come under the guise of maneuvers. This event was classified as a military secret that only became public after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Both during Bolshevism and during "democracy" Stanislav was promised awards and recognition, hills and valleys. Of course, more cynical readers already sense what he received as a reward. There were neither palaces nor yachts, not even orders, nor was a school named after Petrov.

Those amenities in life are reserved for other people. Not for those who save the world in real life, but for those who do it on film. Not for those who contribute to a better quality of the experience called life but for those who deny it.

Which brings us back to the opening sentence and the announced Petrov-Rooney duel. The man who is why we are all here and doing what we do with our lives has no chance against the semi-retarded Wayne who earns more money per week than Stanislav will ever see in his entire life. A dingy apartment in a Moscow suburb and a pension that cannot keep Petrov alive.  

I have nothing against Wayne and his ilk, I'm just using him as a symbol. He could be a random basketball player, handball player, rugby player, volleyball player, tennis player...whose highest career achievement, which will be paid as if it were worth its weight in gold and over which there will be orgasmic contractions of generations of people...millions of people...is that he passed some kind of leather ball between three beams or through a metal hoop. Nothing more, nothing less.

And one would say that at the very least they saved the world or something similar, given all that noise around.

Does the comparison seem unreal? Maybe.

Or maybe it's just a testament to the maturity of a generation. A biological species. A global culture. A civilization saved only to continue blindly moving towards self-destruction.

(Roger Mortis 024)