Mourning in America: The Reagan Years Were Enough to Make You Cry [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

Ronald Reagan did not become president on a platform of optimism or hope. In 1980, he sent George W. Bush to arrange a deal with the Iranians to keep the hostages until after the November elections. We knew about this at the time, because the president of Iran told the world about it shortly after he went into exile. This served to increase Americans' sense of despair. Recall how bad we felt when George W. Bush stole the 2000 election? That is how we felt when Reagan stole the 1980 election. Our highest national office had been hijacked, and there was nothing we could do about it. The only news network that would report the story was PBS.

Ronald Reagan had the help of the corporate media. ABC’s Nightline, the progenitor of the 24 hour news network, ran the headline “America held hostage” night after night, while host Ted Koppel (who would later remark, ironically, that “ABC is a pimple on the elephant’s behind”) reminded America that its saintly president Jimmy Carter was a wimp when it came to military action of the John Wayne-scorched earth variety. If Jimmy Carter could not keep a handful of embassy employees safe, how could he protect us from the nuclear bombs that the Soviet Union was sending our way? Seeing the news media become a paid political advocate for one party shattered more of our illusions. That lead to more despair.

Ronald Reagan ran an old fashioned Republican all fear all the time campaign. And administration. In the early 1980s, we literally lived in terror that each day would be our last. Movies featured end of the world scenarios. We watched Jane Alexander watch her world die around her. None of us expected to make it to the year 2000. The crazies who had stolen control of our government were bound and determined to build an arsenal capable of making Armageddon a reality. Every day could be our last. As the android Roy said in Ridley Scott’s futuristic film Blade Runner “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.”

Drugs, sex and rock &roll became a way to escape from the constant anxiety and the terror that there was no tomorrow---until the AIDS epidemic struck. Too bad that the Reagan administration did nothing in the early days of the AIDS crisis when the spread of the disease might have been checked.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/08/EDG777163F1.DTL

A significant source of Reagan's support came from the newly identified religious right and the Moral Majority, a political-action group founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. AIDS became the tool, and gay men the target, for the politics of fear, hate and discrimination. Falwell said "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals." Reagan's communications director Pat Buchanan argued that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men."

And so, Reagan waited years, until well into his second term to address the crisis. This would be a fitting place to mourn for those who died unnecessarily of HIV infection, because Ronald Reagan decided that it was politically expedient to let gay men suffer God’s wrath. And while we are at it, we can weep for the way that the progress in gay rights made in the 1970s was rolled back, because people feared this new disease which they did not understand and about which the federal government did nothing to reassure them. And cry for the nation’s blood supply which was tainted, leading to the deaths of hemophiliacs and surgical patients and premature infants and then intravenous drug users and now the current epidemic among women---especially Black, Hispanic and Native American women. We owe all of this to Ronald Reagan, because he decided that the best policy was to let the virus go unchecked so that it could infect as many gay men as possible.

While we are mourning, do not forget the lives that were ruined by crack cocaine, the new, more addicting form of the old favorite. Gary Webb attempted to tell the world that the Reagan-Bush administration was protecting cocaine importers whom it called allies in the war on communism in Central America.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/october96/crack_contra_11-1.html

The newly partisan news media squashed this story. The LAPD came close to busting these pushers, who had found a way to create a steady clientele with the creation of crack. However, the same illegal methods that made them lose the OJ Simpson case cost them their case against the CIA’s operatives.

Ironically, one of the most devastating effects of the crack cocaine epidemic was the way that the Reagan administration used it as the foundation of their War on Drugs aka their War on Black Folks . Here is an interesting document in which the author speculates that the crack baby epidemic was exaggerated to increase the perceived criminality of crack cocaine users, in order to justify two tiered sentencing and the changes in policy which made punishment rather than treatment the standard of care for users.

http://www.utmb.edu/addiction/Birth%20of%20the%20Crack%20Baby.pdf

The author points out that the War on Drugs has caused a White majority prison population to shift to a minority dominant prison population ( 49% Black, 27% Latino) and has increased the size of the U.S. prison population by ten times. Black account for 74% of all prison sentences for possession. Crack cocaine carries stiffer sentences than other drug charges, and 88% of those in jail for crack cocaine offenses are Black. (It should be noted that wealth disparity increases the health risk of the impoverished group. Health effects include increased anxiety, depression, violence including family violence, drug and alcohol use and depression. So, Reagan economic policies encouraged drug use among the people whom they were targeting for political oppression.)

This period during the Reagan and Bush presidencies presented not only a “retreat from racial justice” but also a period where the nation’s anti-black discourse was actually refocused into a nebulous anti-crime rhetoric. Such rhetoric was reinforced by deindustrialization and its impact on Blacks, a rising income inequality between the upper and working classes, a prevailing discourse of racialized welfare stereotypes, as well as dramatized media responses to the burgeoning trend of crack use. The result was that the image of the criminal was further associated with the inner city, street crime of poor, i.e. Black areas.

The conservatives who backed Reagan-Bush no doubt consider the War on Black Folks one of their greatest victories. In the 1970s, who could have conceived that in 1988, the photograph of an African-American male would frighten voters into selecting the Republican candidate? “Not in this country!” people would have said. “We have gotten over that kind of racism!”

Can we have a moment of silence for the Black civil rights movement, that so many worked so long and so hard for and which was set back deliberately by the combined weight of the federal government, including the U.S. Justice Department, Congress, Court system, news and entertainment media in the 1980s? They did not kill it, because you can never kill the human spirit, but Reagan did irreparable harm to individual men and women who should have benefited from the sacrifices of their parents.

Reagan was no friend of the women’s movement, either.

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1866

As this author points out, in addition to burying the ERA, discouraging action on sexual discrimination claims and drying up family planning money, Reagan attacked the working mother---which meant he attacked the nation’s children.

Reagan also publicly insulted single mothers raising children with the help of federal assistance by calling them "welfare queens," thus setting the stage for the dramatic retrenchment of aid to families headed by women. At the same time, Reagan refused to raise the minimum wage and instilled in the national psyche a belief that higher wages for the lowest level workers cost jobs.

snip

Then, as now, the largest group of minimum wage workers was adult women. Translation: more women and their children in poverty, more women holding two low-paying jobs to make ends meet and less food on the table, period. Well, all except catsup, which Reagan tried to have declared a vegetable as he cut school lunch programs.

Even textbook fascist countries praise women for struggling to feed their children. A nation that can openly hate its mothers, forcing them and their children to live in poverty through some kind of twisted puritanical belief that this is God’s rightful punishment is inhumane in the extreme.

This is not change. This is what Ann Coulter talks about when she says that she wants Jewish people to be “perfected”.

Right now, we should be crying for all those whom the Religious Right tried to “perfect” out of existence in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration, while Nancy Reagan ran her pretty little Pepsi Generation Morning in America campaign in 1984, like a Busby Berkley musical designed to make people forget about what was going on behind the cardboard cutout backdrop. It was Springtime for Hitler and Germany , except without the laughter.

When today’s Democrats praise the Reagan administration, they ignore the memories of the men, women and children who paid the price for being too poor or the wrong color or the wrong faith or gay. This kind of selective history is wrong. It forgets the working class and makes heroes of the tyrants, calling them “leaders” and dubbing their lies “visionary messages”.
Morning in America was a lie. A lie worthy of George Orwell’s 1984 . Anyone who seeks to perpetuate that lie in order to court voters is doing the people of this country a great disservice.

Here is some advice that even the Religious Right should be able to understand.

"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." I Cor. xiii. 11.

Democratic candidates, you do America no favors in letting them cling to their illusions. You may win a few votes with a song and dance promising happiness over the rainbow, but that voter will end up dissatisfied and anxious to try a new product next time, if he or she does not grow up (politically speaking) to the reality of the struggle by a small, wealth owning class to keep the rest of us poor and powerless. Real Morning in America will come when people wake up, not when they are lulled to sleep with more of the same old pretty campaign jingles.



PS The next time the Democrats are debating and the moderators ask a question about high death rates of young Black men from gun violence, rather than pandering to the NRA vote, try talking about the effect that income disparity has on death from homicide. A few ago a study found that a young African-American man in Harlem had a lower life expectancy than a young man in Bangladesh who was equally poor. The difference between the two? In Harlem, wealth disparity---knowing that you are poor and kept that way through oppression in a land of plenty---causes stress, anxiety, despair, anger, depression, suicidal tendencies and can lead to aggressive acts. If the same young man felt that he was valued by his society, he might not be so quick to put his future at risk.