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Good riddance President Amnesia |
Current rating: 0 |
by Dick Tracy
(No verified email address) |
07 Jun 2004
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regan was a lame ass actor the real regan administration is the same fascists wolflwitz negropanti Donald duck rumsfield running this country now with the bone head imbecile gw bush as the new figure head if we were lucky enough to be rid of them this world would be truly a better place here is a few high lights of the s-o-b’s crimes
pResident Amnesia R-I-HELL |
President Amnesia’s Obituary
Those of us who came of age during the Reagan years did so in an era that had optimism surgically removed. Perhaps our parents, as young people in the 1950s and 1960s had thought that by 1984 the nation would truly be a sweet land of liberty. Instead, 1984 looked a lot more like 1984, in the Orwellian sense of the year. For all of the false sense of me-first optimism, a cynical era produced a cynical generation. It is a wonder that any of us, now in our early thirties, ever manage to pick up a picket sign.
Amnesia has always been the fuel of empires. Reagan perfected the art and science of perverting language in order to justify tyranny and inaction. Reagan’s understanding of science could be summed up by his statement that “Trees cause more pollution than cars, ” his concern for child hunger, pinpointed in the moment that he declared a tomato a vegetable.
So when conservative commentators attack my generation’s use of language to justify “moral relativity,” I have to ask, “Where did we learn that trick from?”
In Reagan’s America, an army of “Welfare Queens” secretly ruled the nation, strong by ill-gotten gains pilfered from the paychecks of ordinary people. In the America that the rest of us lived, in junk-bond traders and Savings and Loan scandals depleted many a senior citizen of their retirement.
In Reagan’s America, the lives of regular Nicaraguans and Panamanians weren’t even considered for a moment in the grand chess game of cold-war brinkmanship. When the United States was found guilty by a United Nations tribunal of mining the Managua Harbor, the government didn’t even blink an eye. Yet many of Reagan’s ilk still cry out about a lack of “moral responsibility” in our generation.
When asked about that little Iran-Contra affair Reagan said he couldn’t remember. It took the focused direct action of ACT-UP for the president to even utter the word AIDS, and by that time it was too late, thousands had died. The epidemic even claimed the master of amnesia, Roy Cohn, chief council to Joe Mc Carthy. Even in the 1950s, when Reagan stilled positioned himself as a liberal, he had no problem naming names of the “disloyal” in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
While we were expected to say no to drugs, the CIA looking for another source of funding for a Banana Republic excursion, was not only expected to say yes, but encouraged the importation of it.
In the dying Navy town, I grew up in, I remember an aging librarian, rumored to be a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to be careful about what I checked out, as the FBI regularly accessed patron’s personal information. When I studied the USA PATRIOT act years later, I found it ironic that Section 215 basically lifted this kind of behavior to the level of sacrament.
Reagan’s legacy is his strategic use of amnesia and denial to assault the very social gains that our parents and grandparents had helped to build. High-paid consultants led the union-busting onslaught, civil rights protections stripped back, and the privatization bonanza began. Although he frequently compared himself to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he put many of the New Deal gains to sleep for once and for all. This was the same Governor who gassed the Berkeley Anti-War protestors and called for the “eradication” of the Black Panther Party.
President Reagan was the President of a nation that never really existed-an affluent ivory white one powered in part by the nuclear family. In reality, both nuclear families power plants were on the verge of a nervous break down. In the nation we all lived in we saw wages for many decrease as lay-offs devastated once stable communities, while profits for pirates skyrocketed.
Today, George W. Bush II is as much the son of President Reagan as he is that of his own father. While other presidents a least have given lip-service to the horrors of nuclear war, Bush has openly discussed the possibility of mini-nukes. The cold-war has been replaced with a never-ending series of warm ones.
Yet, the battle for memory is far from over with. Today’s young people, perhaps the first generation in fifty years to live completely without a safety net are turning to activism and quite significantly many elders are returning. In just over three short but full decades on this earth, I know better than to hold too many illusions about this, but it is enough to spark hope.
As the Republicans prepare to exploit New York’s trauma yet again for their convention/coronation this summer, we would do well to remember than the best way to memorialize Ronald Wilson Reagan is to organize to defeat the conservative agendas of both parties.
And this can only be done without even a small dosage of amnesia. |
This work is in the public domain |
