Good Bye Lenin" Revisited By Jack Kemp In 2006, I wrote a blog piece at American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2006/02/the_goodbye_lenin_press... that compared the movie "Good Bye, Lenin" to the attitudes of the mainstream press. In that German movie, a dedicated Communist school teacher in East Berlin fell into a comma just before the Berlin Wall came down. When it appeared she could wake up soon, after major social and political changes had happened, her doctors warned her caring son that any shock to her could produce a fatal reaction. What the son, now a television satellite dish and installation entrepreneur, then did when she woke up and was brought home was the whole point of the movie. He got old clothes from the local equivalent of Goodwill Industries and only wore them in his mother's presence. He stuffed the new pickles imported from Portugal in the old East German pickle jars. And he filmed his own nightly news broadcasts, using his business partner. When his mother saw a huge Coca-Cola banner outside her window, he filmed a news story that said Coca-Cola admitted in the World Court that they stole the East German cola recipe and would be fined as well as starting a co-branding sale of its' sodas in East Germany. Using the son's faux news broadcasts, I likened it to the mainstream press always slanting the news to fit their leftist agenda. But I'm afraid the left in the US has now done "Good Bye, Lenin" one better. Now, because of high oil and food prices, as a result of bans on drilling and subsidizing the removal of food supplies to make ethanol, the left has forced the many average Americans to buy the cheaper pickles, do with older clothes (whether from Goodwill Industries or not), and switch to the cheaper brands of cola and beer. Whereas the young man in the movie was touching in his dedication to make his mother's last months on earth emotionally comfortable, the left is virulent in its' attempts to make our time on this earth more Spartan with less surplus funds for life's small and large pleasures. You can't afford Haagen-Dazs if you need the money to fill up your car to get to work. So the left has gone from the "Good Bye, Lenin" press to the "Hello, Stalin" food and gas shortages. The only thing that approaches a silver lining to this story is that some Americans are getting to see how their grandparents struggled and lived on a budget and did without. I don't know how much character it will build, but it will give some a different take on reality. Hey, liberals, aren't you glad we didn't drill for oil in ANWAR years ago and Clinton put the clean coal of Utah out of reach in a national park? When you can't afford to visit your friends or your children's grandparents or you are sitting there listening to the baseball game on the radio instead of going to the ballpark - even a minor league park - you can ask yourself if the Alaskan caribou appreciate your sacrifices so they won't have to run an additional three miles to another site. Maybe the left is correct, in one respect. When the population of people gets too large living easy, they need some challenges to weed out the dumber ones. Government-induced shortages are a way of inducing black market competition for scarcer resources. As in the Soviet Union, there was an official idealistic economy and a more cynical, ruthless underground economy that dealt in black market currencies, favors based on job related power and access to supplies. Either way - meaning capitalist or socialist - there will not be a utopian "withering away of the state." If those Alaskan caribou could understand our environmentalist laws, they'd be laughing at the Greens. Or at least smiling at the absurdity of it all. Are the typical Democratic voters smiling at the gas pump? I doubt it. Yeah, I know it's "Bush's fault" because the son of an oil drilling family is against - drilling for more oil. Huhhh?