Gorby in the Basin

Former Soviet Premiere, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Pizza Hut spokesman Mikhail Gorbachev was in the Permian Basin last night as part of UTPB's John Ben Shepperd Distinguished Lecture Series. He covered a gamut of issues. Most prevalent, of course, was his role in the ending of the Cold War, his relationship with American presidents, especially Reagan and George H. W. Bush (who Gorby seems to hold in especially high esteem), current global politics, the situation in Russia today, and even the building of a wall on the Mexico border, an idea he opposes.

There was little especially memorable about anything Gorbechev had to say. I found it especially instructive to hear his views on the various presidents he has known. He seemed to feel ambivalently at best about Clinton, but the subtext was one that probably won't come as good news to Clinton's many detractors: Gorby made it fairly clear that Clinton was probably the most difficult for Russians to deal with because he was the most skeptical of just how much Russia had changed.

CNBC's senior economics reporter Steve Liesman led the evening. He and Gorbachev sat on a stage at Midland College's Chaparral Center (in both a sop to local political tensions and the realities of UTPB having no venue big enough to host such an event) alongwith Gorbachev's translator and the exchange was a simple Q&A format. Gorbachev was witty and confident and you could easily understand how he was such an important global figure. Liesman was sometimes a bit hamhanded in his questioning, such as when he tried to get Gorbachev to participate in a sort of gameshow in which Liesman would say a president's name and Gorbachev would have to sum that president up in one sentence of less. Gorbachev won in that as soon as Reagan's name came up, Gorbachev spoke for about ten minutes on his old sparring partner, wholly abandoning a conceit that he made clear he did not think worthwhile.

Above all last night was a great one for the region. Despite the fact that Gorbachev was frank in his condemnation of much current American policy, he received rousing applause almost every time he finished answering a question (revealing, I thought, that a lot of people were a bit starstruck). The event was a feather in UTPB's expanding cap and the entire experience was perhaps best for our students, as well as those at the two local community colleges and the area high schools.