Pumpkins threaten Russia

Smashing pumpkins! Breaking hearts! Stunning news out of Russia.

The Russian Duma (analogous to our House of Representatives) is considering a bill to ban celebration of Halloween and Valentine's Day as "bad influences on Russian youth," according to a story in USA Today. Not because of religious objections, but because the two holidays represent Western cultural threats to Russian civilization.

Maxim Mishchenko, a Duma member, says he is pushing the bill to guard the "moral and spiritual upbringing" of the nation's youth and to promote traditional Russian culture and values rather than those imported from the West. ...

"If the state won't interfere, they (Russia's youth) will behave like little monkeys, copying what doesn't fit with the soul of our culture," Mishchenko says.

Russian legislative leaders concede that an absolute ban would be counter-productive. Any legislation probably would be designed primarily to prohibit observance of the holidays, including the wearing of costumes, within the schools.

My first reaction is to laugh. Yeah, right, I think, and we should ban observance of St. Patrick's Day and Cinco de Mayo. I'm sick and tired of Irish and Mexican cultural imperialism. What a joke! But then I remember that even so rational a people as the French have fought for years to protect the purity of the French language from any foreign influence, especially the adoption and adaptation of English words ("Franglais"). (Recent reports suggest the French are gradually giving up this battle, but it still rages on in Quebec.) Fear of losing one's culture appears to be a natural human response.

All of which makes me realize how unique we are in the United States, and how lucky. We have a salad culture, an immigrant culture that is a mixture of ingredients. Plain old lettuce -- the culture of Great Britain -- may still constitute the matrix of the salad, but additional fruits, vegetables and spices are constantly being added from other countries. These new flavors don't "ruin" the salad. To the contrary, they add new interest. We don't "taste" the same now as we did fifty years ago, or even ten. There's no way we can predict how we'll taste in another decade.

When anyone claims that Hispanics or Vietnamese or east Indians are changing America, you have to just shout "duh!" ... and ask which America are they changing? The America of 1950? Or 1980? Or last year? "All is flux, nothing stays still," wrote Heraclitus, 2,500 years ago. He could have been talking about American civilization today.

While various acts are properly illegal in this country, no thought or idea is "un-American," because no prescriptive standard exists for what is "American." We have no "soul of our culture" to protect, other than our willingness to accept and experiment with novelty. This trait makes our lives more complicated, in some ways, than the lives of a Frenchman, or a Russian, or a Thai. But we remain the most cosmopolitan society in the world. That cosmopolitanism makes us innovative and flexible. It's not a weakness, but one of our greatest strengths.

Telling kids they can't celebrate with skeletons and cupids is just another example of an age-old Russian tendency toward isolation, a tendency that's caused them no end of grief in the past. They should get past it.