LH, I appreciate your response, but I think your point makes mine.

The Soviets did not have a political system that not only mandated regular change, but defined rules for doing so. To those of us who thought Clinton was the worse thing to happen to the honor of a serving government, we still knew that it would only last 8 years, and that the rules for changing it were well defined. Even to those who disagreed with the outcome of the last election, and the Supreme Court's role in it, they never attempted to oppose the Courts eventual role in that process. It is the way we do things... There was never a history of anything similar in Russia.

Not every culture is destined to survive for any great length of time. The Incas and Aztecs murdered and enslaved millons of its local populations to the point where 138 Spanish soldiers and 30 horses took the whole empire. The French language is dying and so will it's culture. German used to be the language of science, now a few phrases are used to discribe phychological problems. English is the language of the sea, the sky, and space beyond.

And I believe that language is an intergral part of culture. English is growing at a rate 10 and twenty times of any other language. It has proven the most adaptable of any language, by borrowing the concept of prefixes and suffixes form the Germans, without the stilted constructs. The English dictionaries add words every year, at a rate matched by no other language.

Thus, it is my conceit that, with the most adaptable form of governance, coupled with a language and culture that drips adaptation will, in the end, triumph over all but the most physical termination of the Earth. And who knows, by then it may be the stars.