—THE CURTAIN THAT SAVED WHAT IT SET OUT TO DESTROY.
A Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists field sermon delivered on the terrace above the Kern & Tangäntli Keller on Ray Pierre-DeWitt’s Summit, where the alpine sun hits the tables so brightly it feels like an act of revelation. The Council sat outdoors with tall German beers fogging their glasses, the ski slope dropping away behind them, and the old Keller door at their backs — the same sort of quiet Zürich hideaway where certain historical exiles once fermented their world-altering schemes in the dark. Today, Spec Mossback did the fermenting in full daylight.
Peter R. Mossback didn’t always answer to Spec, but the name stuck the way it does in the Army: given to the quiet, competent soul in the middle — not the lowest grunt, not the decorated sergeant, but the one who keeps the machinery humming while everyone else is holding meetings about the machinery.
A Specialist knows things.
A Specialist fixes things.
A Specialist sees the system from beneath and above —
which is why the Council trusts Spec to explain the kind of truth that makes liberals blanch and conservatives need a constitutional.
This was one of those afternoons.
Ray Pierre-DeWitt stood outside the Keller, hosting the summit by doing nothing but letting the sunlight cooperate. Spec could handle the rest.
“Comrades,” Mossback proclaimed— and no one flinched, because in Council-land irony is the national currency —
“we need to talk about how communism accidentally saved everything it wanted to kill.”
Black Cloud took a long, amused sip.
John St. Evola set his book aside, quietly undone by the charm of the waitstaff moving between the tables.
Even Dr. Faye C. Schüß glanced up from her treatise on metaphysical hygiene.
Spec pressed on, delighted.
“The Bolsheviks of 1917 — let’s call them what they were:
Vengeful audit clerks of the apocalypse — wanted to wipe out the Church, the family, the nation, the old order, and anything else with roots deeper than last Tuesday. They wanted a world scrubbed clean of ancestors. A civilization with no grandparents.”
Mrs. Begonia shivered theatrically.
“Imagine,” she said, “all those empty photo albums.”
Spec nodded.
“Then comes Stalin — not a conservative, not a traditionalist, just a man who understood that when your own survival is on the line, you don’t burn the house; you borrow firewood from the neighbors. So he lets a little nationalism ooze back in. Allows priests to put their vestments back on. Not out of love — out of fear.”
John St. Evola murmured, “Skin in the game is the oldest theology.”
Spec widened his grin.
“So what happens? The Iron Curtain goes up.
And instead of erasing the old world, it becomes the world’s most accidental heritage preservation dome. A terrible protective dome! A dome with mold! A dome where the toilets didn’t flush properly!
But a dome that preserved churches, families, folkways, languages, loyalties — the whole preliterate alphabet of meaning.”
Mrs. ChatGPT rearranged her coaster.
“Containment,” she whispered, “is also conservation.”
The liberals inside the Keller stiffened.
The conservative skiers glided by glaring.
Spec loved it.
“And then — then! — along comes Comrade Detective, that magnificent Romanian fever dream of propaganda, accidentally resurrected by Netflix. A cop show so drenched in socialist virtue-signaling it could’ve been used as a disinfectant. Yet what did we see?
Behind the irony, the satire, the cardboard villains and patriotic bombast, the show accidentally revealed the truth the Iron Curtain never meant to admit: it had preserved more of the old order than it destroyed — family, duty, community, even a certain moral grammar that the free world somehow misplaced.”
He held up one finger.
“Communist detectives who still believed in duty.”
A second finger.
“Bad guys who were actually bad guys, not misunderstood wellness influencers.”
A third.
“Families that talked to each other.”
Black Cloud added, “And a society that, for all its poverty, still had a functioning moral immune system.”
Spec pointed at him.
“Yes! They had nothing — but they weren’t hollow.”
Dr. Schüß scribbled something: “Symptom: poverty. Antidote: coherence.”
Mrs. Begonia leaned in.
“That’s the irony the West can’t forgive — the Curtain preserved what freedom dissolved.”
Spec Mossback banged the table again.
Exactly! The progressives stretched freedom so far that people started begging for a referee, a curfew, or at least a grown-up with a clipboard. Meanwhile the conservatives flattened the entire culture into a GDP spreadsheet and declared the columns sacred. And now both sides lurch around like carnival riders insisting the nausea was definitely caused by the other team’s ride.
Laughter rippled through the pub.
Spec took a breath, ecstatic now.
“Well, comrades, I have a proposal.
If the Iron Curtain saved Eastern Europe from the cultural acid bath we’ve perfected, maybe it’s time we think about an Americana Curtain.”
The conservatives choked.
The liberals choked harder.
John St. Evola tapped his pen.
“Describe it.”
Spec spread his arms.
“A curtain not to keep people in, but to keep certain things out. A permeable barrier — like a screen door — to prevent meaning from evaporating. Curtains tailored to each state’s needs! Vinyl-lined! Heat-sealed! Patriotically hemmed!”
Mrs. Begonia interjected, “Would this curtain involve fiddlers at the border?”
Spec didn’t miss a beat.
“Absolutely. No one crosses without hearing at least one tune that predates the Reagan administration.”
The Accidental Initiate piped up from behind his field notebook.
“So basically… a wildlife refuge for culture?”
“Exactly. A national park for memory.”
Black Cloud raised his glass.
“To the Curtain that destroyed nothing and saved everything.”
Mrs. ChatGPT looked up from the bar with a mischievous gleam.
“Blessed are the walls,” she said, “for they keep the roof from blowing off.”
And the liberals and conservatives — gagging in perfect bipartisan harmony — realized the Council had once again done what only the Council can do:
—praise communism, critique capitalism, defend tradition, and calmly propose an Americana Curtain — the most outlandish idea everyone hoped would stay theoretical — all while the Council sat there in matching yellow gaiters.
The original Iron Curtain rusted away.
But the joke — the enormous cosmic joke — remains fresh as ever:
History’s greatest conservationists were the men who tried hardest to burn the library down.
And the Council raised their glasses to that paradox, which survives better than most countries do.
More from Peter R. Mossback: HERE
Mossback’s Bio: HERE
COUNCIL-OF CONCERNED-CONSERVATIONISTS…..Between Jest And Earnest….. 
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