Finally!
Another Reagan idiocy now emerging from the cesspool is "
Star Wars", officially the Strategic Defense Initiative. A "missile shield" over America sounds great, right up until you try to calculate the physics of hitting a moving target with an equally fast-moving missile. Then again, it may not actually work, but it is a great excuse to pour billions into well-connected aerospace firms, isn't it?
We thought we'd left
tainted food in the past right after Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle", and Republican Teddy Roosevelt created the FDA. And we were wrong. Reagan gutted the USDA inspection system because the meat packers couldn't make profits fast enough. Result: E. coli outbreaks that killed hundreds of children and left thousands more with lifelong chronic illness, and now, perhaps, "mad cow" disease.
Strange but true: Reagan served five terms as head of the Screen Actors Guild. Yet, as President, he revived the moribund practice of
union-busting. When air traffic controllers struck, he had options to get the planes back in the air: calling out the Air National Guard, for instance, since this was before the Guard was deployed overseas to feed another Republican's imperial fantasies. Instead he fired all the union air controllers and hired permanent replacements ("scabs"). Private industry was paying close attention. This marked the beginning of an open season on organized labor that continues to the present.
Victory at any cost. That was the motto of the Reagan Presidency. We must defeat the Soviet "evil empire", even if it bankrupts our country and sets us on the road to membership in the Third World. Yes, victory is sweet! Our factories may be shuttered, our social safety net in tatters, real wages plunging ever downwards -- but hey, at least we aren't as bad off as those evil Russkies!
Who could ever forget James
Watt? We don't need to preserve the environment, said Reagan's Interior Secretary -- because Jesus is coming back real soon now, and we won't need any of those endangered species up in Heaven! Amazingly, Watt was undone not by this lunacy but by his description of a commission as containing "a black, two Jews and a cripple". Rep Ed Bethune (D-Ark.), whose father had had polio and used crutches, objected strenuously to the "cripple" remark, putting Watt out of his (or rather, our) misery.
It's a matter of debate whether
Xtians -- specifically, fundamentalist evangelicals -- created Reagan, or he created them as a political force. What we know is that, for the first time, people like James Watt (above) were using the tenets of one extreme form of Protestant Christianity as a framework for public policy. Twenty years down the road, no one bats an eyelash when Bush* speaks of "faith-based" solutions to our nation's ills, or Ashcroft holds "voluntary" prayer meetings at the U.S. Department of Justice. But hey, at least we're not a repressive theocracy like Iran -- yet. (C'mon. I really needed the 'X'.)
"
Yes, Mommy?", Reagan would often say to his domineering second wife, Nancy. We'll try to avoid getting too deeply into Freudian interpretations; after all, our present (and single) National Security Adviser slipped up and referred to Bush* as her "husband" -- but contrast "Mommy" with the image of the cowboy, riding tall in the saddle, and you'll see that nothing was as it seemed during the Reagan years.
And finally, we close with Reagan's stock response to any question of national or global import, so long as it was put to him during his generous afternoon nap time: "
Zzzzzzzzzzzz".
Coming on 1/20/05: The Real Bush* Legacy, from A to the Hexadecimal Digit representing Ten to the Ten Thousandth Power!
Edit: Part 1 is here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1741239and Part 2 here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1741280
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