Iowa State: Soviet PoliSci class #1

This is related to Iowa State: Soviet PoliSci class #1 about PolSci 444…which reminded me of PolSci457, my Tuesday night class I’d taken previously. 457 was “Soviet Foreign Policy”, taught in the basement of Carver Hall from 6-9pm.

457 was an interesting class, interesting material, and again Dr. Moses knew what he was talking about–but he tended to have a monotone delivery…and that’s not good with a night class in a room with no windows. Of course, there were other issues–obvious ones if you’ve been in college.

• It’s three hours in a lecture-based class.

• It’s at night after (theoretically) a long day of school/work.

• It’s after the dinner hour, so either you’re going to class with a full belly OR you’ve chosen to starve until afterwards and just eat Domino’s around 10pm.

All of those are valid–but there was another issue for the first half of the class. I was taking it Spring semester, so that the first half of the class was in January and February when it’s a cold walk from Westgate or from the Windows/Dungeons cafeterias. That was a problem because Carver was kept quite warm in winter. So on the night we started talking about the disintegration of Sino-Soviet relations, it was warm, I was in a sweater, and I had a tummy full of food. Warmth+heavy clothes+food = sleep.

I tried to fight off the head nods but I wound up with my head on my hand.

SIDE NOTE: Look, I was a *professional*. If I nodded off in a class, I knew to ask a question once I was fully coherent again to look like I’d been paying attention. I knew to keep a pen in my hand, so it looked like I was taking notes, knew to flip back a page when I was coherent to look like I was checking something. I was NOT some sort of loser frat-boy.

It was taking work for me to stay focused–Moses’ voice was a drone and it was sooooo warm. At no point did I ever stop hearing Moses. I never went 100% asleep, but for some reason my brain went to La-La-Land and I started seeing the spinning wheel from the opening credits of Speed Racer. I’m not sure how much time passed–what I remember now is that I was returning to reality, Moses said it was time for the mid-class 10-minute break, a chance to get a drink, walk around, go to the bathroom. I did all that and was again completely alert. Yay.

I looked at my notes to see where I’d dropped out and would need to fill in from our texts–and now we get to the meat of this story…I saw my notes on Khruschev meeting with Mao, saw the handwriting start to get a bit shaky…then shakier still saying “Sino-Soviet doctrinal disputes…”–and then the pen becomes a jagged line that dropped about three lines on the paper where it continued in *perfectly clear, distinct block capital letters*:

“…CAUSED BY SPEED RACER.”

It’s a unique perspective on world politics. Who knew a cartoon could be that critical–especially since it wasn’t made until a decade after the political rupture.

I still have the notes from that class in one of my old drawers or cabinets. I kept it only for the Speed Racer comment.