None Dare Call it Treason

Ronald Reagon died earlier this week and today I awake to censure for not respecting his death enough. The media is pouncing on anyone with the gall to suggest that Reagon was not a full-fledged saint, under the guise of respect for the dead. They are peddling the notion that all of our countrymen, whether you liked Reagon or not, should be thankful for his service (as if our distaste was based on some personal vendetta). But its absurdly pretentious to say its not about whether you liked Reagan or not. Of course it is. For example, I can tell that most of the media does. It takes no more than a 4th grade education to notice the fundamental difference between the weeklong eulogizing of Reagan and the quick sweeping-over of the death of Nixon. Not because one served their country less than the other, but because Reagan has become a mythological figure in the eyes of the conservative movement in this country -the man who took the government from all those whiney, spineless liberals and handed it back to the free-market - and Nixon, well, was Nixon.

Unfortunately, I don't beleive we owe anything to Reagan, he served at our displeasure, not vice versa. A Nicaraquan immigrant whose parents were murdered by contra forces that Reagan shuffled money to, a father who saw his son taken by AIDS while Reagan dutifully ignored the epidemic or any other citizen of the U.S. who felt the negative impact of greater disparities in wealth and drastic cutbacks of basic social programs during his years do not owe a goddamn thing to Reagan except his or her well-earned indignation. The Presidency of the United States is a serious fucking job, one that affects in some way virtually every living being on the planet. That makes it a spectacular burden and responsibility. Many people, myself included, believe that Reagan not only negelected that responsibility, he bent it over and raped it in the ass. If Reagan wanted universal praise for his public service following his death, he should have sought to use that service to the benefit of a much larger group of people than he did.

The vast majority of the criticism I see and hear regarding the presidency of Reagan is in response to glorified versions (if not outright lies) of his Presidency. Those have to be answered with reality, whether Nancy likes to hear it or not. As we speak, Republicans are attempting to rename as many airports as possible in Reagan's name, put him on the dime and/or 100 bill, and add his graven image to Mt. Rushmore. Lack of criticism, for fear of being disrespectful, is the only lubrication these assholes need. Now is the time when conservatives will attempt to memorialize Reagan's legacy for all posterity, our silence will do no more than allow history to be rewritten to serve their purposes and undermine ours. Contrary to what many think, history can be a second in the making and people still die every day as a result of Reagan's myopic policies. We don't have the fucking time to wait decades to debate their merits.

I excoriated Reaganism when Reagan was President, after he left office and all this week. Unfortunately, the 12 years of his and Bush I's Presidency (and every day since then) fell far short of enough time to resolve those compliants.

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." George Bernard Shaw

Fiscal Conservatism

I have grown so powerfully annoyed with every straight-faced, strong-jawed politically reasonable Democratic nominee vainly claiming the paradoxical title of "social liberal, fiscal conservative." I would venture that the two descriptions are mutually exclusive (based on my understanding of the phrase, fiscally conservative). That is, they favor (i) a nearly "flat-tax" (because it's "fair", at least, based upon the grade-school understanding of the notion), (ii) minimal spending on educational and social programs and (iii) corporate subsidies (read welfare for the rich - because baby-Jesus knows we have to protect our biggest businesses so that the benefits trickle-down to the underlings, notwithstanding the direct conflict with free-market capitalism). The problem with those policies, other than their apparent disconnect from good economic theory, is that they make social-liberalism necessarily impossible. The problem is that poverty, and its repercussions: crime, disease, starvation, etc., is already a tax on the entire society, but one, which, by definition, weighs heaviest on the poor. Thus, social taxation is already regressive, and fiscal-conservatism exists only to exacerbate it. This is anything but socially liberal; it’s atavistic and socially irresponsible. How can generally well-educated people ignore basic logic, or history for that matter, which has confirmed, if there was ever any doubt, that growing disparities in economic well-being simply cannot last and will have to be confronted one way or the other. In the prescient words of Rage Against the Machine: "hungry people won't stay hungry for long!"

Conservatives (fiscally or otherwise) have always been behind politically (its the natural outcome of conservatism), and they will continue to be. In fact, I think history can be simply defined as the proving of conservatives wrong, their ideology slowing giving way to the realities of progress. It’s just a matter of time and circumstance. Progressives, not ironically, come up with progressive ideas, conservatives bitch and moan about how things were different/better when they were young, how it's just not fair, charge us with utopist naivete, and then a century later fold and pretend they were on board the whole time. Just imagine if you could describe our current government to some fiscally conservative Republicans from the turn of the 20th century (i.e. McKinley), he would think we were all socialists. Describe our new national education program ("Leave no middle-class white kid behind"), nationalized prescription-drug bill ("Leave no voting senior citizen behind"), or our national faith-based programs ("Leave no potential convert to Christianity behind"), and George W. Bush would seem like Leon Trotsky.

Presidentially speaking, I think Kucinich is far and away the best candidate. However, he's shackled by his reasonableness, and will be relegated to the role of primer for future real-liberals (he's the Adlai Stevenson of the early 21st century). The rest of them (Sharpton and Brown excluded) are all just water-downed conservatives. Dean's a little better than the rest, but not much. The wrestling scream was the best thing I have seen out of him so far. That being said, any of them would be an indescribably vast improvement on the current administration, and will likely have my reluctant vote.