Washington: Let us pause in sombre tribute to the 30th anniversary of a momentous — and shockingly unremembered — turning point in the long twilight struggle between communism and capitalism. An event every bit as important as the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down this Wall” speech and Yakov Smirnoff’s defection to the West. We write, of course, about the debut of Dallas, the 13-year soap opera that shook the world.

Yes, April 1978 was the first time the US turned its eyes to Southfork Ranch, the diabolical genius of J.R. Ewing (as played by Larry Hagman) and Victoria Principal’s high-waisted pantsuits. It was the booze-and-sex-soaked caricature of free enterprise and executive lifestyles that proved irresistible not just to stagflation-weary Americans but viewers from France to the Soviet Union to Ceausescu’s Romania.

Dallas wasn’t simply a television show. It was an atmosphere-altering cultural force. It helped define the 1980s as a glorious “decade of greed”, ushering in an era in which capitalism became cool, even though weighted with manifold moral quandaries. Dallas was either the highest or second-highest rated show in the United States for a half-decade.

Dallas created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love: an establishment tycoon who’s always controlling politicians, cheating on his boozy wife and scheming against his own family. But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu, viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.

“I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the (Soviet) empire,” Hagman said a decade ago. “They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, ‘Hey, we don’t have all this stuff.’ It was old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority.”

In Romania, Dallas was the last Western show allowed during the 1980s because President Nicolae Ceausescu was persuaded that it was sufficiently anti-capitalistic. By the time he changed his mind, it was already too late — he had paid for the full run in precious hard currency. Meanwhile, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap Romanian car.

The impact of Dallas on people’s worldviews reminds us that the “vulgar” popular culture that left-wing highbrows and right-wing cultural conservatives love to hate is every bit as important as chin-stroking politics in fomenting real social change.

That lesson is more relevant than ever in an increasingly globalised world in which movies, music and more cross borders with impunity — and the free West engages the semi-free East, whether in China or Iran. For all the talk of boycotts and bombs, if the US is interested in spreading American values and institutions, a little TV-land may go a lot further than armoured personnel carriers.

In demystifying wealth production —and pouring enough sex, scandal and whiskey to drown communism here and abroad — Dallas arguably stimulated our domestic political economy. Alas, like Mikhail Gorbachev, Dallas did not long survive the post-Cold War world it helped create, exiting the scene with the Soviet Union’s last Communist prime minister in 1991. But it left us far richer than we ever dreamed possible.