I kind of feel like I’ve been here before. You see, I was a 19 year old college student in 1980 and it was then that I first experienced the tidal groundswell of a Republican/Conservative/Military occupation. Until then, I had grown up in a world dominated by the Left. The Nixon Years in the early seventies didn’t really count as Republican rule. Dick Nixon was always an island unto himself. In retrospect (as the Watergate defendants liked to say), Nixon was the last of the independent Republicans. Nixon’s agenda was “perfectly clear”, it was Nixon. Yes, he hated the Left, but only because they got in the way of his singular ambition. By the time the 70’s reached their midpoint, the Left, with the fresh taste of Nixon’s blood on their tongues, ran the rest of the decade. Ford was merely a placeholder until the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter, the first United States President elected by the New Left. Except, in what was to become a public relations debacle, they were no longer the New Left. They were now Liberals.
When the terminology switched from Left Wing/Right Wing to Liberal/Conservative, it put the Left at a significant disadvantage in the public mind. The word “conservative” has a safe, frugal, even nurturing quality while “liberal” connotes foolhardy abandon. Conservatives value your piggy bank while liberals might just give away the store. A shrewd PR man like Reagan knew this and exploited it with great zest by the end of the decade. It was at that time, 1980, when I first saw the shadowy, Dr. Strangelove characters of the Right Wing move through the American landscape, securing positions with the precision of a military drill. From the halls of power to the halls in my dorm, everyone felt the cold chill of big business and the Social Darwinism it always implies. Overnight, art became evil, schools decayed, and the black neighborhoods had a never-ending supply of a new scientific innovation: an affordable form of freebase cocaine! How conveeeeenient. You could get a group of our leading chemists in a room for a week and none of them would be able to even think of more psychologically, and physically addictive substance than what quickly became known as crack. This hit the black family structure in these areas so hard that it is still recovering, twenty years later. Without the solid foundation of family, these neighborhoods withered and gangs of highly paid urban mercenaries trafficked this poison, in service to a vast, international drug network they didn’t even comprehend.
Even PBS suffered! The flagship network of the Left was kicked in the nuts so hard that couldn’t afford to stay on the air all night. After 1 AM, you just saw this sad little message saying that they didn’t have enough money to show you something right now.
All the while, the Right (and, yes, it is both a military and industrial complex) pillaged the nation’s economy, under the guise of supply-side economics, also known as “trickle-down”, undoubtedly a euphemism for pissing on the poor. Greed was good, and the United States became one big golden parachute for a few powerful CEOs. The savings and loan banks even collapsed under such a raping. I remember seeing the crowds of frightened middle class people outside their banks, being told that they couldn’t have their money like they were a bakery sold out of jelly donuts. By the way, that whole mess was conducted by Neil Bush, the new President’s brother.
Believe me, the much heralded economic boom of the eighties was highly overrated and nothing like the boom we have just experienced. When I graduated college in 1984, I remember hearing Dan Rather saying it was the worst year for college students joining the work force since World War II and 1989 was the year of the greatest stock market losses since the twenties. So what we are talking about here is a 3-4 year period when the Reaganites were able to get enough of a strong-hold so they were able to print more money for themselves and plunge us into a national debt four times greater than the previous 208 years combined! Sure some of the middle class were lucky enough to have some flying money stick to them but that was never the point. The gap between the rich and the middle class became wider every minute and not much trickled down. I remember walking the streets of New York City in the early morning hours and literally stepping over the bodies of those left behind in that economy.
And now here we are, at the dawn of a new age that promises to be like that one. How can we expect different when so many of the players are the same. Dick Cheney, his faithful ward, “W” and all of the former Reaganites and Bushmen filling the Executive Cabinet are going to assert a very strong agenda regarding the economy, the environment and overall social structure this year and it will be startling for those who really pay attention.
What is truly best for our country? It’s a functioning balance between conservative and liberal policies. Let’s go back to calling it Right and Left because, as Bill Clinton learned, the desired place is in that gray area. Too far Left and you have communism. Too far Right and you have fascism. As I write this, President Clinton spends his final days frantically trying to brace the environment for the coming onslaught with a barrage of last-minute orders that will save millions of acres of national forests from the industrial locusts en route. Good for him. This year, as the great ship, US America tips so strongly to the right, let some brave souls paddle hard on the left. How else can we hope to maintain the course?