The Trojan President
I am showing my age here, but I remember vividly hating Reagan and his gang of buffoons. He was the Teflon President; nothing the press nor Congress (a Democratic Congress at that — there I go showing my age again) could say or do would diminish Reagan in the eyes of his handlers or the public. Reagan is now treated as a mythic, god-like president, an untouchable, redoubtable, unquestionable presence in the 20th-century world stage. And I miss him.
I haven’t changed my mind about his awful presidency. Nor have I come to believe the pundit-wisdom that he was responsible for the fall of the Evil Empire. He led the nation into an intractable conservative mode of thought that we haven’t been able to shake off, despite all reason and moral clarity otherwise, for nearly 25 years. Yes, he was bad and made my nation poorer in the process, but, Lord, I miss him, because he was original.
Now our puppet president is just a super-condensed rehash of the original. Want moralist Ed Meese? We’ve got fightin’ John Ashcroft. Want a dab of George Schultz, Al Haig, and James Watts? Hey, glom them all together in Dick Cheney. Sure, the cast today is more colorful than the pasty-white team that was the Reagan administration, but pound for pound W’s crew is just as reactionary as Reagan’s. Reagan, too, reduced our rights and invaded our privacy, and set it all to the sweet music of the dawning of a new morality. Reagan, too, blithely ran up deficits while cutting taxes for the wealthy, calling it economic stimulus. Reagan, too, deregulated industry just enough to feed the vultures, but never enough to ensure that trade was fair, nor that prices were truly market driven.
But this is all name-calling. So what? Who cares? The only reason that this is pertinent to me is that we’ve been issued what can only be called a Civil Defense warning, by our Office of Homeland Security, to duct tape our doors in case of terrorist attack. Department stores in Virginia have run out of stock, so if you live in that area, let me know. Long Islanders are apparently more blasé about the warnings. We have plenty in our stores. I’ll send you a roll or two at cost. No need to profit over groundless fears.
Groundless? No, that’s not the right word. Useless. Yeah, that’s the one. See the whole thing reminds me so much of the Civil Defense instructions that we received when we were sure that the end result of Reagan’s arms-buildup was nuclear war, that I just can’t take these warnings seriously. We were actually told, in the event that Soviets launched their arsenal of massive death, to dig shallow trenches in the soft earth and cover ourselves with something sturdy, like a wooden door. Yep. When over 10 feet of the Earth’s crust evaporates into fine dust particles to hasten a nuclear winter, we’ll all be very happy that we dug a shallow trench.
So, I’m thinking that duct tape around our doors won’t keep out the radiation or Anthrax or Smallpox or Halitosis or whatever those sneaky terrorists are going to unleash on us. I’m thinking that this is the media sideshow that takes away from what is really happening, and what really needs to be done. And what really needs to be done is voting these ingrates out of office, but it looks like it will be a long couple of years before we get to do that.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:18 AM, 13 February 2003
I’m of the mind these days that occupants of this planet needs to utterly destroy themselves.
Then whatever survives may have a clean slate to start over.
Then again, I’m starting not to care about much anymore either.
Posted by: Naladahc at February 13, 2003 10:49 AM
OK I agree with the duct tape & plastic being useless thing. You’d run out of oxygen too fast anyway even if it was useful. But whats all this rubbish about “He led the nation into an intractable conservative mode of thought that we haven?t been able to shake off, despite all reason and moral clarity otherwise, for nearly 25 years.”. Since when was morality a bad thing? Since when was doing something right an invasion of privacy? I suppose our lives would all be better if we were free to persue whatever lowlife behavior we wanted right? I mean why stop with abortion? Maybe I wont know till my kid is five years old that I just havent got the time to take care of him/her. Should I be allowed to exercise my right to conveniance & take my child to a doctor at any age before 18 & just have it killed? Why keep telling kids about abstancance? Lets just go into all the schools and have orgy day so they can get it all out of their system. After all pregnancy isnt an issue cause we’ll just kill whatever we create. As long as they can avoid STD’s theres no real consequence. Why let anyone keep their guns? After all me being allowed to keep what I have a right to own is aparently (according to this logic) an invasion of YOUR personal privacy. Forget all the reasonable arguments for being allowed to keep a gun and all the ligical arguments that legislation will not keep anyone who wants one away from it. What it really comes down to is that it just makes a bunch of people in America “uncomfortable” and “scared” and I’m expected to bend to other peoples desires? Is that your idea of a better america? Where people’s rights are taken away but we’re expected to never notice because we’re all locked into a massive drug enduced sexual revolution where marrage is irrelivant, life is valueless, and our opinions are based on “feelings”? I’d love to know exactly what your “moral clarity” exactly is. If you consider the current state of liberal morals preferable to the conservative agenda, then it really doest sound much like you have any moral clarity at all.
Posted by: CP at February 22, 2003 2:20 PM
I’m glad that you think that my morals are liberal slanted, because, in truth, they are, but I’m not sure you understand what a liberal sense of moral values is. See, I don’t really care if kids have sex. That’s not my business, and it will happen anyway. I don’t really care if people own guns, because, as you point out, legal or not, we’ll manage to get them anyway. What I do care about is ignorance. We, in America, severely lack any sense of what is right or wrong, because we politicize it.
Abortion is a sticky, intractable issue, and as a person who thinks I don’t think there is a right or wrong moral value inherent in the subject. What I do believe is that we owe it to our children to teach them about birth control. Does that invite them to have sex at too young of an age? No. They will have sex whenever they possibly can, because we are human and that is what we do. Can we teach our kids that there are better times to experiment, and when you get older is a preferable time because of the inherent problems with teenage pregnancy and STDs? Yes. And, as noted, we owe it to our kids to do this. Should this be taught in school? Hell if I know. But, someone has to do it, and our culture prevents parents from doing a good job.
The idea that any one who is pro-choice believes that a 5-year old can be killed by a parent who finds the child inconvenient is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Try to find a different straw-man, because no one is suggesting that, and your argument immediately fails.
As a true liberal, once again, I don’t care about owning guns. I do think that education is also a key factor here. I was brought up to not trust firearms or the people that carry them. Simple. I don’t own one, and I won’t own one. This makes me an enemy of the NRA, but I don’t want to take away our Second Amendment. A civilized society isn’t one stuck in the wild-west mode of thinking, and gun laws eventually will be an anachronism. We won’t need them, because we won’t carry them. That’s my pie-in-the-sky bleeding liberal heart doing the talking of course.
So it is interesting to me to think that I lack moral clarity, because I don’t find the morals of today’s conservatives to be attractive. Honestly, I don’t see the moral clarity of anti-abortion, gun-toting, pro-death penalty, Bible-thumpers to be all that consistent. So sue me. And as long as we have a liberal society, you’d be free to do that. Under Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush, you have a hell of a lot less of a chance to do that. Better get that tort started.
Thanks for writing with your opinion.
Posted by: Jonathan at February 22, 2003 4:03 PM