Today a colleague of mine, who is from Russia, explained an aspect of the international Space Race of which I was not aware. It seems that the docking of the U.S. and Russian space stations had led to an interesting difference of opinion.
Each country, she explained, wanted its space station to take on the male role: Both the Americans and the Russians felt strongly that their space station should be the one to penetrate the other.
I told her that I found this to be ironic. After all, in the larger geopolitical struggle the situation was quite the reverse.
“How so?” she asked.
“If you think about it,” I said, “the real desire of each country was to envelop the other.”