President (S) Amnesia
January 3, 2007
With the recent passings of Ford, Hussein and Pinochet, (none of which could hold a candle to James Brown!) I was reminded of this (not overly respectful) obituary for Ronald Reagan I wrote for Z Magazine. While the mainstream press fawns over the passing of Ford, remember that he can only be considered a “moderate” judged by the standard’s of King George II. Ford’s moderation came more from the fact that his party was put on the defensive from the defeat in Vietnam and Watergate. Otherwise, he was part and parcel of building the foreign policy that built the murderous Hussein and genocidal Pinochet.
1983 Picture of Rumsfield and Hussein. U.S. tax dollars built Hussein up when he was still shooting who he was told to shoot and sending the oil revenues to the right address.
Amnesia
Ronald Wilson Reagan, RIP
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 any of us, now in our early 30s, managed 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 ketchup 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 robbed many senior citizens of their retirement.
