Reagan is Dead

I really want to know what is wrong with trying to make our nation a better, safer and healthier place in which to raise families? I really want to know why so many people, and they are usually people who are doing financially "ok" (unless they are dumb and white and from the South), think it is wrong to want to make our nation truly better?

America used to have limitless resources. America used to lead the world in pretty much everything. We were usually on the right side when fighting a war outside of our national borders. For long periods we have tolerated policies that were not in any society right ones; that were not in the bible right ones, that were morally very, very suspect (slavery, hangings, no justice for blacks, segregation, anti-immigrant laws, corruption, etc.); yet, we have always somehow righted the clock's mechanism and time would go ticking onward, taking us from the past and present and into an ever brighter future.

However, I can honestly say that after Ronald Reagan came into Washington, despite his mild-mannered way of whispering sweet-nothings into our living-rooms about an America that conjured up visions of Capra-esque Anytown, USA, America's lost vision of herself, thanks to a drawn-out and lost war in Vietnam and a run on the Constitution by Nixon, was restored. Sadly, however, that vision was more like the one that D.W. Griffith silently laid out before aghast audiences in "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.

My genuine dislike for Ronald Reagan stems not from the fact that he did do some good by bringing the Soviets to the table (although, most of Reagan apologists know nothing about the man Mikhail Gorbachev and had Reagan not had Gorbachev those troops cuts would never have occured); but, from the fact that Ronald Reagan finished the conversation that Richard Nixon began with the silent majority--and, he gave them the right to be really, really noisy.

And, with that boisterousness, came school-yard bullying of anyone and all not in agreement with those who fell in awe of Reagan's masterfully painted vision of small town USA: a place where whites were the kings and the upidy blacks knew their place; where taxes were minimal and charity was supposed to cover all of the gaping holes in a social safety net (charity is good but when it is THE system, it will keep the givers always economically and socially above the takers); where women were supposed to be at home and pregnant and where "girls were girls and men were men"; in a society where even the "old LaSalle ran great."

Much of what Reagan painted for us, in a very Seurat meets Rockwell way, sounds really nice; but, in that same fantasy, I am walking in from church to the smell of baking bisuits in the kitchen, the electric knife is slicing off pieces of roast beef and my Uncle Albert is sitting in a haze of smoke reading the Sunday Press. My grandmother is wiping her hands on her apron, my dad takes his chair and my grandfather offers up a cranky greeting to the five kids that have just invaded his house for another Sunday dinner.

In other words, the lovely scene that Reagan gave the US, and to which his followers still cling today is of an America that a) is no more; and, b) an America that never was. America has been a place of bigorty and greed and close-mindedness and hatred but at the same time, the principles inherent to our national experiment have always forced someone, an American, to challenge those with hatred and greed and bigorty and eventually, goodness has always won. The Reagan freaks hang onto that America that did not right itself and still honors bigotry, deception and even theft of our common resources.

The Reagan cult, not unlike personality cults in other nations of historical relevance, is so against any kind of government support for the expansion of the American dream to all corners and walks and races of life, that they have sought (and continue to seek) the complete bankruptcy of our nation.

They make up enemies in every corner of the globe; talk about how dangerous it is to travel outside of the US (I recently heard a hard-core republican say that it was too dangerous to travel to Rome because of all the terrorists!!); if any money is spent by the government on anything other than tax cuts or military then they go crazy and start shouting about socialism; they would rather see a city with the cultural richness of New Orleans wither away than support it rebirth (probably because most of those who would have received help were again, "from the other side of the tracks in their Reaganesque world-view"); despite their so-called fiscal conversvatism, they advocate the accumulation of massive societal debt so as to enrich those who resemble themselves and to build bigger armies and more secure gated communities; and, they advocate extreme lassez-faire economics which has led us to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

In their small town, "we are always on the right side of the moral issue", they can justify the invasion and occupation even of other nations. The consequences of Iraq, the lies by their president, the abuse of the Constitution and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people including soon to be 5,000 American soldiers, on our economy will be felt for generations; and, then today, when a president comes to town, a man who is truly leading our nation like it has not been led since the time of the Roosevelt cousins, they can only pull out their tired and worn out visions of Reagan's anti-America.

We are a better nation than the one that Ronald Reagan gave them. We do not hate those who don't look like us. We don't hate foreigners or immigrants; we don't believe in Church and State mixing; we believe that everyone should be allowed to be who they want to be, with whom they want to be; we believe that in any market based economy NOT EVERYONE can be wealthy so society MUST provide a safety net for a substantail minority who will end up below the poverty line.

In Bedford Falls, big business lost and the little man won. The bastardized, flag-whipping ways of Reagan's followers are anachronistic. They too have become irrelevant and so now, so soon will their politics.