However thick a tank’s armor is, something can always get through it.  Strictly speaking, in a situation like this, the tank commander would launch smoke grenades and switch on ECM “music” to jam the missile, then throw on violent maneuvers to try to defeat visual tracking.  For comics purposes, though, this does the trick.

It’s been another really tiring week of missteps and faux pas, for me.  Well, why not?

On the plus side, though, today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  It’s one of those things I really do remember from my childhood.  My dad brought the TV into the kitchen, something we never did, and we watched it over dinner.  “Remember this,” he said.  “You’re watching history.  The Cold War is about to end, and the communists are doomed.”  I guess it’s a sign of the kind of upbringing that I had that I even knew what the Cold War was at age 10.  That was one of the great pronouncements I remember my father making when I was a kid – another, of course was about a month later when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown, but we’ll get to that in December.

But at a time when communism, Sovietism, and other such ideologies that glorify violence are back in vogue, it’s instructive to reflect on the German experience (to say nothing of the greater Eastern European experience, generally) and to try to remember that the only way to build a state based on force and oppression is to turn a country into a prison, or to turn it into a graveyard.  It was the promise of freedom and peace that led the people of Berlin to rise up and throw off the shackles of communist oppression.  The years since then have not been easy, but liberty is not about having it easy, it’s about living with respect for the dignity and the individuality of your fellow human beings, treating them as equals, not as objects to be manipulated for your own purposes.  The fall of the Berlin Wall was hardly the only sign of the end for the Communist Empire, but it was the most visible, symbolic, and in many ways the most memorable.  Vielen Dank und möge Gott Sie segnen, miene freunde!