And then, he came to town. With a mix of Andy Griffith meets Timmy and Lassie; Laverne and Shirley grit mixed with a dash (a big one I might add) of The Walton's, Ronald Rea--GUN, as he was so lovingly known to many of his droids, set forth the downfall which has led us to where we are today: the end of the Post-World War II era, the end of the American Century; the end of Pax Americana; the end of our empire of good-will and common-good and good-manners and good-wine and good-music, and, well, everything that could be "good"...good riddance, I say.
Many today who support President Obama as he tries to revive our nation after the worst 8 years of governance since the 4 years of missing leadership under James Buchanan, our 15th president and the last president before our nation was pulled into the vortex of Southern emotion, hate and rascism that led to the premature deaths of over 1,000,000 (direct battlefield deaths of soliders were around 618,000), believe that Reagan was a great president.
Nutshell
Let's assess in a nutshell. Ronald Reagan took office and immediately began to cut social programs that he complained had been bankrupting America; our so-called welfare state, the least developed of all industrialized nations, was creating a culture of poverty: those born into poverty would remain poor because the "system" wasn't giving them the needed stimuli to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" so they could pick up and get out of the ghetto.
In order to give America its winning edge back, Reagan started to cut back on federal funding of this "welfare system." His cutbacks, really, were quite small compared to what would happen under W.; however, the demon seed under Reagan was the combination of increased goverment spending on things like defense and the massive tax-cuts that his economic witch-doctors had proposed to feed the hunger of the voodoo-economic's swamp-thing.
Ronald Reagan's appeal to the masses was similar to an Amway meeting; in some random Hyatt ballroom, hyper-hair-sprayed southerns with names like Robertlee Davis and his sparkling wife Crystal Maryjoy would take the stage and start telling stories to crowds of lower-middle class followers of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" about how they had flown to this meeting (which each Amway member had to pay $35 for attendance) in their "own private jet!"
To hoots and hollers and high-fives between people whose rating in Amway were based on the rareness of stones--the gem level, the diamond level, the rock level, etc.--the Davis' would brag about their worldly possessions while deftly sprinkling in words of gratitude to the greatness of "our Lord Jesus Christ" and, of course, to the American way.
Yes, this was the effect that Ronald Reagan has had on Americans who formerly knew pretty much where they would end up on the economic side of life: middle-middle class (or lower-middle class), happy with a set of kids for whom some government funding would be made available to send those kiddies to college; a job in some factory or company and some very limited health care; and, of course, a pension from their employer and an SS check each month. But, Reaganway told us that extreme wealth was just around the corner for all: just need to cut taxes and live as if we were all Donald Trumps.
So, given that we are all potential Trumps, such a "welfare state" would've been simply too generous. They also felt that our streets had too few weapons so by manipulating a so-called heartfelt respect for the Constitution, they claimed that being anti-handgun was the same as being anti-American. What it really meant was real big profits for their friends the gun manufacturers. What it has meant for us future Trumps is not just the deaths of over ten of thousands of Americans each year from handguns; but, now on our boarder we have a northern state in Mexico adrift in chaos as a result of unprecedented violence thanks to weapons that just pour south from Americans whose only moral compass is the bottomline: oh, yes, and the "Lord Jesus Christ."
As the foundation for the economic and moral bankrupting of our nation was laid, Reagan made it acceptable to "hate" and "ridicule" anyone who sought any kind of federal support or protection. Support and government investment in the infrastructure and the people that really seemed to fall so obviously under the lead of a federal government, were suddenly squeezed from federal budgets until eventually everyday, American life for us, the average, struggling, working Joe's became like a walk through the Atari game "Pitfall." If you don't know the little secrets, then you fall through the cracks.
The newly-Christened-enactors of his "revolution", people who desparately needed those "Happy-Day-esque" emotive umbrellas like "Evil Empire" and "culture of povety" started to dismantle any government oversight whose chief task was to have ensured that middle America could live in a safer, cleaner and happier America: eating breakfast can be as dangerous as Russian roulette nowadays due to the missing-in-inaction Food and Drug Administration.
Because the fire lit by Reagan and stoked by Bush-I and then set ablaze across the West Texas prairie by W, America has lost its true moral compass. FDR said in his second inaugral address (to paraphrase): a nation needs to be economically moral. Wealth is not a virtue.
The Collapse
From Reagan until this most recent and final collapse of our economic way of life, wealth had become virtuous. We were not economically moral. The "virtual wealth" that had been driving our economy for the last 20 years has so rapidly lost it steam, that the government was forced to seek ever new places for savings; eventually, with the poor safely off the political radar screen, the GOP began manipulating and attacking the backbone of America: the middle class.
Today, being in the middle-class is such a rarity that it is almost comporable to being in the upper-class 100 years ago. And the criteria for being poor and thereby "not virtuous" have been so expanded that many who had traditionally been middle class are now at best "the working poor."
Over the past 28 years (except for the 8 under Clinton) our government has inflicted an economically amoral way of life upon our nation. The virtue of wealth as they see it, which should be gained at any cost regardless of what it takes from our nation and regardless of how it enriches other nations, has driven the vast majority of widget-manufacturers to seek cheap labor elsewhere. At the same time, the elected officials, usually republicans, have repeated like a mantra: tax cuts, tax cuts, less government, less government, more guns, no abortion, no family planning, war, war, no immigrants, no head-start for kids in poverty, less government, eavesdropping on Americans (the Patriot Act, Orwell at his best!), etc.
The drive for virtuous wealth has made American businesses more myopic than ever and today despite still so many brilliant ideas that are spawned in America, our industrial infrastructure, with the ability to create jobs for Americans and to refortify the disappearing middle class, is so weakened after these 28 years that again it is Asia, not just China, which will lead the next economic revolution. The republicans under the guise of Reagan's revolution have weakened our nation in every possible way for their own personal gain. We are an economically amoral nation.
A perfect example is the lack of federal response to Katerina. This was because the Bush White House had no privately-owned, politcally-reliable company that could move fast enough to get into New Orleans and clean things up. There had been no time for funneling billions in rescue efforts to crony-companies because no one expected the hurricane to be so bad. Because the government and its ability to respond to crises had been so stripped of any resources it might need, FEMA, run by an incompetent with no prior experience in any such organization (a Party man), just sat (an in some cases flew) and waited for the waters to recede. This is the nation that is ours today and 11 weeks of Obama hasn't changed this.
That natural disaster showed us why Reagan was wrong; why all of these Reagan-worshippers are not true patriots but selfish and even anti-American. They would rather guarantee their own wealth and comfort and America be damned! It is exactly this kind of love/hate that the Communists in the Soviet Union had for the Party and country--they loved the party because it made them wealthy but hated their country. This relationship led many of them to abandon their Party when it stopped enriching them and then their country, the USSR, collapsed.
America's refusal, let's say, the Republican refusal, from Reagan onward to take responsibility for its citizenry is treacherous. If in a wealth beach-front neighborhood, homes are damaged by hurricane seas, the Army of Engineers, using tax-payer money, will rebuild the beaches to not only return the lost value to the wealthy but even increase the value of that property. What is New Orleans today? Why is it still so abandoned and bleak? Because those people, the sufferers, are not wealthy and therefore, they are not virtuous.
We the People...
As Americans, we should all be ashamed of ourselves. We have not been true to those who lost their lives on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. Those boys did not leap into cold and violent seas to charge machine-gun nests for what we have become today. The boys whose lives have been lost in all of the wars, except for those who fought for the CSA (Confederate States of America) did not die or kill for this loss of economic morality.
Resetting our moral compass will not be easy and a lot of people who are now realizing that the last 28 years of our nation's history have been the single most wrong period of our development might just become sore loser's and do something foolish.
I say, beware of the the losers; beware of Dick Cheney; beware of anyone who says Ronald Reagan was a great president. These people don't have America's true interests at heart.
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