|
|
I initially never intended to make much mention of Ronald Reagan in this article, but since he reappeared in the news while I was writing it, this time as a corpse, it suddenly dawned on me how inseparable he was from the decade I’m primarily addressing here. Under Reagan’s presidency, America saw the rise of a virulent strain of conservativism, one that ultimately “destroyed America’s sense of reality,” in the words of political commentator Tom Carson. “Facts are stupid things,” President Reagan once said, although no one is quite sure whether this was before or after the Alzheimer’s kicked in. It was in the early days of Reagan that the homeless began to appear in growing numbers on the streets of American cities, an early sign of the slow process of turning over the functions of the federal government to companies through such ideas as privatization. Reagan practically initiated the concept of turning social welfare over to charitable foundations. All of this was accomplished with the glue of anti-Communism, a shared bond that tied otherwise quarreling factions together—the libertarian-minded Republicans, the anti-feminist crusaders, the Christian fundamentalists. It was during this decade that the divisions between rich and poor, white and black, straight and gay, seemed to grow. Crack-cocaine suddenly started appearing in poor black ghettos. A new virus called AIDS raged, destroying numerous lives, while President Reagan remained silent on the topic throughout the course of his presidency. People started talking about “family values.” Children were obliged to take “drug abuse resistance education” classes in school, where they were taught about the evils and dangers of smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, and engaging in premarital sex (homosexuality, of course, was never mentioned.) All of this, of course, attests to the greatness of Reagan and his Moral Majority, who were indeed the genesis of the current Bush administration.
|
