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Next Left Notes Is A News Magazine Devoted To Direct Action
By Eric Bagai
On my sixty-fourth birthday I find that Ronald Reagan has affected my
life much more than any other president I've voted for or against. My
apologies if I sound obsessed or hysterical. I am. But not very much,
considering.
Everybody has their bogeyman, and mine is Ronald Reagan. He was an
incredibly scary governor, setting the UC system against the students,
building vastly over-large and semi-secret detention centers and gloating
and hinting about who would inhabit them, polishing up the tools of unfunded
mandates, and using the catch-phrases of liberal aspiration and hope to
promote the destruction of the social safety net. He turned the Kennedy's
concern for the least of capable of us into a program that turned all but the
wealthiest of the mentally handicapped on the streets, and in doing so he
single-handedly made homelessness a national issue and prisons a national
obsession.
When he announced his candidacy for president his popularity depressed me so
much that I applied for Landed Immigrant status in Canada. I was convinced
that he would win two terms and then be made king. But Canada had enough
American academics, thank you, so I stayed and became even more active,
working with CISPES, SCITCA, Pledge of Resistance, and others against our
rape of Central and South America, and the destruction of my own country.
I never thought Alzheimer's could be a blessing. It would have been more
just, more tragically appropriate, if it had been AIDS -- the preventable
disease he could never bring himself to name in public, and because of his
silence he was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of
Americans. He is the reason why more than three million will die of that
disease this year alone.
Reagan's ascendancy paralleled the far right's emphasis on long-term
planning to shape and control American thought in all political parties and
among all economic classes, through the media, through the language, through
the cultivation of pundits, and through well-funded think tanks and
foundations. His Eleventh Commandment (thou shalt not criticize the right)
not only created a united front across the spectrum of conservatism, it also
allowed the most obsessive and crazed among them to escape the natural
limits and filters of caution, reason, and moderation. This is why Straus
was not laughed out of academia and forgotten, why the Bell Curve was
swallowed whole and still used as a basis for social legislation, and why we
continue to fund Israel's oppression of Palestine.
We did not get to this place by accident.
George W. Bush uses the tools and techniques that Reagan pioneered. And the
crazies that make up Bush's apocalyptic-obsessed administration could only
have gained power in a party that considered it bad manners (because of
Reagan's 11th Commandment) to indulge in self-criticism or doubt. Bush's
legacy will always be tainted by the crazies who crafted (one hopes) the
downfall of their own empire, and possibly (oh, hope!) started the downfall
of the American Empire. I never really wanted one anyway.
The legacy of Ronald Reagan has no such flaws. It is pure and encysted in
the glittering, diamond-hard love of the fascist hopefuls he served. It is
their beacon and hope for the future, and young fascists will forever be
fascinated by its brilliance. It will live long after the bastard becomes
the worm shit I always thought he was.
Eric Bagai
June 10, 2004
Eric Bagai is a longtime peace activist and organizer of
The Mourning Project
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