Yes, Virginia, there WAS a Golden Age of America. It started in the mid-1950's, after we had sloughed off the malignant cancer that was Senator Joe McCarthy...a Republican, of course. The Korean War had ended, the cross-country turnpikes were being linked up and we began construction of the Interstate Highway System. Television was new and fun, mostly live-in-the-studio and not yet commercialized. Milton Berle and Ernie Kovacs made us laugh, Edward R. Murrow's news kept us informed, Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame entertained us with thrilling dramatic presentations. Walter opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California.
It was grand and gleeful and glorious, so heady we knew it couldn't last...but it DID last! We ended segregation in the South, established Medicare and drove the sharpest, snazziest automobile creations that Detroit could put on the road. Thunderbird. Mustang. Stingray. We made plans to go to the moon because we just knew we could do ANYTHING; we were the champions. We were invincible.
And then they killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy...
When coerced into
conversing with conservatives, it is always helpful to remind them of history. They do not study it. In fact, they are so much given to revisionist spin--Deep Throat, anyone?--that they CANNOT learn from its mistakes and are thus doomed to repeat them. (Thanks, Santayana.) In the first part of this monologue, I laid some fundamental groundwork for dealing with the disconnected, confused and woefully uninformed dittoheads you are most likely to happen across in your daily journey.
Now we come to the graduate course.
It is imperative that we realize how wrong they are about nerarly everything; their vision has been distorted and thoroughly skewed by the right-wing hate media under Rove's direction. They are incapable of perceiving the simple fact that they are voting against their own best interests and decreasing their standard of living as long as they support Republicans. The cheap-labor conservatives' sleight of hand has separated politics from economics to the extent that people in the poorest parts of the nation move resolutely to the right, vote tax cuts for the richest of the rich even as they are having trouble paying the rent...and feel rewarded in doing it.
Pay close attention. I've got some irrefutable and emminently quotable statistics to offer here that can help put things back in perspective for these poor souls in a global context...and enable you to mop the floor with the next flying monkey you meet who wants to mindlessly spout the party line of steaming balderdash. (They're mostly angry and intellectually-challenged people, a combination that makes them prime pickings for Fox and Rush and Ann.)
After the assassination of JKF, everything came unglued. Everything. The cultural change, so abrupt it was almost palpable, transformed the nation, and, by extension, the world. Children were approaching adulthood who had never known anything but the over-arching spectre of the atomic mushroom cloud...and there were inevitable psychological effects. The Cold War turned out to be a whole lot hotter than anyone expected when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. With strong handsome Jack taken from us, no one could be sure that the end wasn't just around the next radioactive corner. "Eat, drink and be merry" became the national philisophy to a shocking degree and, although the "tomorrow you die" part was never uttered aloud, it hovered fretfully above us nonetheless. The jams began to be kicked out with a vengeance.
The Beatles wanted to hold our hand...and, by golly, they did for a beautiful brief time as kids grew their hair, sharpened their social consciousness, turned on tuned in and dropped all the way out. Social change was in the air. Kennedy's death provided the impetus for real, viable Civil Rights legislation, a true moral and spiritual victory over entrenched, institutionalized bigotry. The war in Vietnam, linked as it was to Communist boogeymen, dampened spirits but could not quell the desperate youthquake that threatened the nation's very foundations. Students died on college campuses protesting that filthy, unwinnable conflict so eerily reminiscent of today's Oil War in Iraq. Something was going on and, as Bob Dylan astutely pointed out, Mr. Jones didn't have clue one. The nightmare Republican Convention of 1968 seemed almost pre-ordained, given the jitters of the Establishment. Straight people, terrified by the actions of their own children, caused a certified monster to be elected in November. Richard Milhous Nixon was inaugurated and the Golden Age came screaming to a stop. Little did we know that the following summer's Woodstock Music and Arts Fair was nothing more than the death rattle of not only the youth movement, but of liberalism as a whole.
Tricky Dick was despicable, an amoral and execrable thug; that fact is no longer open to debate if it ever was. A puffed-up preening little paranoid, he hated everyone and feared everything. Remember the tape system that he had installed with microphones all over the White House? We're talking toys in the attic here, gang; woodworm in the headboard. To make matters even worse, he considered himself above the law, especially after his re-election in 1972. THIS is what renders his participation in the Watergate affair and its subsesquent exposure such delicious cosmic Karma; the blighter had it coming from the dark day of his birth. Here was a man so crooked he had to have servants help him screw his pants on in the morning. Need I mention that he was the only president IN HISTORY to be forced to resign his office?
As bad as he was, however--and he befouled not only his own nest, but OUR nest!--Ronald Ray-Gun made him look like a choir boy. With Daddybush in the co-pilot's chair and doing the actual driving, that administration raised corruption to a form of high art while they wrought truly astonishing levels of iniquity, transgression and malfeasance. Be sure to remind the dittohead in your face that there were something like 250 of Ronnie's appointees, staff and cheap-labor conservative hangers-on who had to quit, were fired, resigned, were arrested, indicted and/or convicted for legal infractions or violations of the ethics code. (Tom DeLay's role models, I feel certain.) Attorney General Edwin Meese alone, the highest legal officer in the land, faced four DIFFERENT special prosecutors before resigning in ignominy. The pungent irony here is that these were the "law and order" guys; it had been an actual plank in the party platform! Yeah, they'd be tough on street crime, all right...unless that street happened to be Wall Street. Remember the savings & loan collapse? You should: All taxpayers helped with the bailout. (And by the way, a young Neil Bush was involved in that one all the way up to his nasty little neck.) How about the junk bond and insider trading scandals? Oh, those greedweasels were stealing full-time with both hands.
Meanwhile in the southern part of our hemisphere, Bad Actor and his gangsters were establishing an out-and-out terrorist beachhead. In 1981, he launched a covert war against Nicaragua, whose government he ignorantly termed "Marxist." (Do you begin to understand what's making Venezuela's Hugo Chavez so antsy these days?) He financed, armed and trained a band of berserkers known as the Contras. Since that time, documents have come to light that these Contras--who WERE terrorists--targeted schools, health clinics, public utilities and public transportation. Over 900 Nicaraguan government officials and 8000 civilians died at their hands. A Congressional intelligence report outlined their atrocities saying that "groups of Nicaraguan citizens were burned, dismembered, blinded and beheaded" by these barbarians whom oblivious Ronnie dubbed 'freedom fighters." We mined Nicaragua's harbors and blew up several of their largest fuel depots. These facts must NEVER be forgotten, nor should they ever be separated from the context of the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11/01. It's terrorism, plain and simple.
Congress was so disgusted that it summarily cut all funding for the "freedom fighters." Through Daddybush's former CIA connections, though, the administration raised cash by selling arms to Iran--then, as now, officially an enemy of ours--and aided the Contras in illicit drug shipments to US-based dealer/distributors. All of this depravity was laid bare and exhaustively documented in a series of hard-hitting newspaper articles by the late, great Gary Webb. (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/october96/crack_contra_11-1.html) This was the "Iran-Contra Affair" and the Gipper, along with some of his co-conspiritors, really should have been impeached over it. When Nicaragua finally hollered 'uncle' and voted in a US-supported government, we picked up our bat and ball and went home...leaving their economy and infrastructure in shambles, a state which continues to this day.
Ah, but that wasn't the GOP's first dealings with Iran, was it? Remember the "October Surprise" that allowed Bad Actor to snatch the presidency from Jimmy Carter? Remind your local wingnut that this was, by definition, treason...a word that they so dearly love to pin on anyone to the left of Attila the Hun. (Consortium News has a splendid series of recent articles about this event, one of which may be found here: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/russianreport1980.html. Robert Parry is THE MAN.) And, before we depart sunny Central America, let's pause for a moment of silence for the SEVENTY THOUSAND PLUS victims of the death squads of El Salvador who--just for laughs, mind you--raped and killed nuns. Another classically slimy CIA undertaking. John Negroponte and Eliot Abrams, now with brand new offices and huge salaries in our current administration, can tell you anything you want to know about these sicko maggots: They headed up the op. The right needs to be forced to confront its roots.
Yep, Ronnie was a real piece of work. His noxious presidency measurably increased the disparity between rich and poor. (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/pp/05133/504149.stm) It marked the first time that discouraged workers began to be tracked by state unemployment bureaus, I'll bet it was during this time that you first heard the term 'homelessness.' The Census Bureau found it necessary to create a whole new economic category: The working poor. Big Ron's draconian upward redistribution of wealth took place even as he gutted programs for jobs, housing, health and education. When he slashed the school lunch program, he declared that ketchup would suffice as a vegetable for poor kids...make sure they remember THAT one! All pretense at social progress was put aside and the assault on the Middle Class escalated into a full-blown shooting war. Corporate welfare was the order of the day for CEO's...but deserving working Americans only got the shaft. His far-reaching anti-union policies decreased opportunities for labor to improve its lot. He made sure you were working harder...for less money. That is, if you could even FIND a job. Social programs were ruthlessly de-funded or eliminated altogether and that fine liberal legacy of public eduction ran headlong into the cheap-labor conservatives' ideological constipation.
(DIGRESSION: Our schools used to be the envy of every other nation. Graduates of our educational system invented the computer, the PC, the transistor, the integrated circuit, the microchip. They split atoms and designed particle accelerators that have uncovered ever smaller nuclear building blocks. They made breakthroughs that allowed us to walk on the surface of the moon. They enabled the dawning of the Information Age. Our schools were the best in the world. Were. Public education, you see, somehow equates with 'socialism' in the cheap-labor conservatives' loathsome worldview. (And not one on them has been able to tell me specifically what's so terrible about socialism...but that's another diary.) Nonetheless, they set out, shortly after its inception, to destroy it, deliberately and with malice aforethought. Oh, not all at once...which would be too clear an indication of their underlying agenda; they began with stealthy decreases in funding. Now we have buildings that are crumbling down around our students, school systems without adequate facilities or up-to-date textbooks, and teachers who are shamefully underpaid. GOoPers at state and local levels have been eroding education for decades with proposals like block grants and those vile vouchers that are nothing but a sly return to segregation...and racism is a staunch Republican fundamental. Make them acknowledge this fact.
Suppose, just for a moment, that we had 95% functional literacy in this country with correspondingly high graduation rates. It's a foregone conclusion that vast numbers of those graduates would go on to college or qualify for specialized technical training. But when everyone is properly educated, who's going to clean the public toilets? Who'll volunteer to ride the back of the garbage truck? Too many smarts make people less susceptible to exploitation by the elite lords and masters: Corporate feudalism doesn't stand a chance! This cannot be permitted, or course.
Then there's that racism I mentioned just above. Point out that your average dittohead wannabes, budding privates and corporals in the Republican swarm, don't particularly care to have their very special offspring competing with those uppity "brown children" for a limited number of university admissions. They have zero interest, on an intensely personal level, in furthering universal education that actually works...and they've been doing a bang-up job of sabotage for a long, long time. Force them to fess up.
End of digression. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.)
We cannot leave the Reagan years without at least mentioning the insidious encroachment upon our civil liberties that began under the pretext of his bogus War on Drugs. Now, 20 years later, and with more drugs on the streets than ever before, we can see what a flimflam THAT was. It laid the foundation, however, for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and, naturally, the Patriot Act. (If you want to freak yourself out sometime, just look up the powers that FEMA can claim ON ITS OWN VOLITION during a crisis or emergency. I promise you won't believe it.)
It was a horrid, blighted eight years under Ol' Ronnie. (Some disgruntled Christians even tried to claim that Ronald Wilson Reagan--six letters in each name--was the Anti-Christ, 666 himself. Ha.) You are supposed to do better than your parents did; it's part of the American Dream. But wasn't it around that time that you began to get the sneaking suspicion that your children weren't going to be better off than you are? Or...weren't even going to be AS well off?
Now just stop reading this for a moment and take a good look around you. See how cheapened and coarsened and degraded we have become? Consider the fact that out of the last 37 years, 25 of them have been under Republican presidents. WHOSE FAULT WOULD YOU SAY IT IS THAT WE FIND OURSELVES IN THESE CIRCIMSTANCES? Hmmm?
Here's where you nail the flying monkeys to the wall. They are so fond of the myth that we are the greatest nation on Earth or, as I've also heard, the greatest nation in history. Well, it's necessary for them to perpetuate this falsehood so we don't start to blame THEM, their ruinous policies and their toxic presidents. Yes, we used to be the greatest country in the world. No longer. And I've got the proof. The Index of Social Progress, released by the Fifth International Conference of the International Society for Life Quality Studies ranks 163 world nations. We aren't first. Denmark holds that distinction. As a matter of fact, we aren't even in the top 25! How do you like THOSE apples? We're 27th, which puts us at the approximate level of Poland and Slovenia. The Society has determined that chronic poverty is the greatest threat to our social progress, since 33 million Americans--12 million of them children!--are poor. That's well over 10% of us. Contrary to popular perception, the majority of the poor in this country are members of established family households who work full-time and are white. NO OTHER economically advantaged nation tolerates such a level of poverty. Don't that make you feel special? Factors impeding social progress include slow economic growth, increasing unemployment, insecure access to adequate healthcare and deteriorating schools. (See DIGRESSION) Doggone if that doesn't encompass just about the whole Raw Deal Republican strategy! These telling statistics put the lie to any disingenuous rhetoric about an 'Ownership Society,' eh? What that phrase REALLY means is that everybody's on their own. (Bush Health Plan: Don't get sick...)
Twenty-five years--and counting!--of GOP presidents with their myopic debt and deficit policies, their obsequious corporate worship and their callous disregard for average Americans have depressed the standard of living and the quality of life here. It's as simple as that. It's ALL their fault, open and shut case, period, end of report. The top ten nations, according to the Index, are Denmark, Sweden, Norway Finland, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Iceland, Italy and Belgium. Clearly, Europe and Scandinavia have set their own priorities; they have the good sense not to be indifferent to human suffering. They have chosen universal healthcare, generous retirement plans, less commercialized and more robust elections, far less extremes of wealth and poverty, less militarism. Much of the world sees this as a more attractive model than Dick Cheney's Dark Ages. So do I. Yes, America is slightly richer, (See "If America Is Richer, Why Are Its Families So Much Less Secure?" by Peter G Gosselin, L.A. Times, 10/10/04) but more than 80% of Western Europeans live better than we do because our wealth is inordinately concentrated at the top. (See "Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind" by David Cay Johnston, New York Times, 6/5/05) In Europe, they are healthier. They live longer. I'll bet they're happier, too. The United States and South Africa, says the Index, are the only two developed countries that do not provide healthcare for all their citizens. Excuse me? South Africa a "developed country?" Since when? At any rate, this is the company that the Rip Off Republicans are forcing us to keep.
This depressing scenario is further confirmed by the recent United Nations Human Development Index report which reveals that, among wealthy countries, America has the HIGHEST infant mortality rate, (Higher than Cuba. CUBA!!) the HIGHEST teen birth rate, (So much for that abstinence-only sex education) the HIGHEST child abuse rate, the HIGHEST child injury death rate and the GREATEST in-country gaps in mortality rates. Of the 25 wealthiest nations, only TWO have an average lower life expectancy than we do and we have the HIGHEST probability at birth of not reaching age 60. America's healthcare, if judged by any standards other than how much we spend on it and the rate of profitability of our leading drug manufacturers, stinks on ice. This cannot be over-emphasized.
On the world stage, we are no longer even a major player, much less top dog, thanks to the efforts of the reactionary right. Europe surpassed us in the mid-1990's as the largest producer of scientific literature. Foreign applications to our graduate schools fell 28% last year...and foreign enrollment at ALL levels dropped for the first time in three decades...but increased greatly in Europe and China. (Again, see DIGRESSION.) As noted in Forbes Magazine's March 9th issue, the US dropped from first place--which was taken over by Singapore--to fifth place, behind Iceland, Finland and Denmark in information technology competitiveness. That tell you something?
Sixty one of the 140 biggest companies in the Global Fortune 500 rankings are European, 50 are American. In the recent Global Finance survey of the world's 50 best companies, all but ONE were European. In engineering and construction, three of the top five companies are European...and the other two are Japanese. Not a single American firm is among the top nine.
This, then, is how you converse with conservatives: Bludgeon them over the head with the results of their policies. Rub their noses in the failures and shortcomings of conservatism. Make them understand that right-wing ideology is, at its odious core, obsolete, veneniferous and counter productive...when it is not outright fallacious. The fact is, Democrats are better at hitting GOP economic goals than Republicans are. Don't believe me? They'll HATE this!
It Democrats can find the wherewithal to make these scoundrels run against the dismal record of their own sorry accomplishments for the last four decades, I daresay that they'll never win an election ever again, anywhere.
Except maybe Kansas...