Albino CARRILLO
The Reagan Revolution
Out here in the midwest, in the Great
Lake states, summer is tranquil and lush: there are so many lightning bugs on
the lawn, there are hints and whispers of night birds chasing one another over
thick corn fields and alfalfa fields. Among this season's certainties, the Gipper
is dead, laid low by Alzheimer's, sent from us in a fitting Presidential tribute.
He was a man who became larger-than-life for the sake of all of us reading these
pages. The death of Ronald Wilson Reagan passed like a beacon-comet for those
of us who grew up in the 80's. From the dripping dye-job cartoonists lampooned,
to the realities of the Salvadoran and Nicaraguan wars, Reagan always seemed
to really be an iconically clean-cut All-American, and in footage from
various Republican conventions he is what he is: a true believer, an all-American,
determined to defeat cattle rustlers or communism and all its manifestations.
My immediate acknowledgment
is that he gave America hope during a time of disillusionment,
a time of decay. Remember the late 70's? I do. The crappiest automobiles.
Shitty music. But more. A lack of commitment at school from teachers.
A lack of solutions from our government. A cultural morass. There
were the crumbling freeways and bridges, crumbling inner-cities,
inflation, and job-losses, too. And after the failure of the Carter
administration to light-up the economy, after so many foreign
policy failures, after Vietnam, Watergate, and Iran, after so
many failed military ventures, Reagan's "Morning in America"
ad rung many bells.
Not many people know
this, but it is quite possible to surmise, that, by 1983, the
Soviet Union had reached overall superiority in the field of InterContinental
Ballistic Missiles. Specifically, the possession of up to 200
or more SS-18 "Satan" missiles, each containing ten
one-half Megaton warheads, gave the USSR overwhelming first-strike
capability. Knowing this, the Reagan administration early on increased
defense spending to an almost limitless horizon of possibilities:
the installation of nuclear-tipped Pershing 2 missiles in Western
Europe in 1983 and the demand for a "strategic defense initiative,"
along with intense design and production quotas in the defense
industries, made it possible for Reagan and his ministers to bluff
Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko into destabilizing their own
state through increased production it could not afford. The US
barely afforded its own stockpiling, relying on the masters of
capitalism to finance an increase in the speed and efficiency
of mass-production through the untaxed, unbalanced, and often
unethical trading of stocks, bonds, and other forms of capital.
What Reagan basically
presided over was the dismantling of the Welfare State as envisioned
by Roosevelt and Johnson. It was a backlash, to be sure: the Welfare
State which had made things admittedly better for some of the
disenfranchised unfairly burdened capitalism, and its systematic
bureaucracy of rules and regulations of operation stifled free
market competition. As Reagan would say, well, that all had to
go if the West was going to win. It's not that he was racist or
against the poor. His opposition to welfare and the system of
socialized rights his predecessors had gathered together to help
the marginal was, by his way of thinking, only natural considering
the facts he saw: the Soviet Union on the way up, pushing over
little states here and there, shooting down airliners, building
its forces for a final, decisive run at the Ruhr valley. A 3000
warhead barrage that would leave most of America's stockpile of
death in ruins. Who among us children of the 80's can forget the
face of the brutish, Stalin-esque Soviet Air Defense Ministry
Chief explaining, coldly and arrogantly, the downing of Korean
Flight 007?
The morning in America did not arrive as Reagan had promised. Sure, the sun comes up everyday, and it is especially wonderful to see it clearing the Eastern horizon. Could Mondale or Carter have really handled the USSR? Would their defeatism have become ours? In retrospect, I am glad, in one sense, that Mr. Reagan was president when he was. Reagan lead us through tough times, when it seemed that America could fail. Times of our parents and grandparents making, nuclear times. But in many ways, Reagan was nothing more than an excellent, albeit shallow, symbolic talking head representative of a cultural backlash against the progressiveness of the 60's and the disillusionment of the 70's. All one has to do is look at who voted then, and who votes now, who contributes to American politics then, and now. Finally, what Reagan symbolizes is a reawakening to a kind of comfortable, white, middle-class isolationist patriotism that authors like Vonnegut openly mocked in the 60's. While some find it to be ignorant of history, disingenuous, and lacking in ethics, others in America still find it comforting, for it is based on a false optimism inherently and necessarily blind. It cannot account for things like Wounded Knee, or My Lai, or even Abu-Ghraib, but it can account for large SUV's, Wal-Mart, and even the speed at which you get your burger served to you.
In Solidarity,
Albino Carrillo, Managing Editor