with their backs to the sun...they see only their shadows.
What is the sunlight to them, but a caster of shadows?
... all things move in half embrace; the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which they would escape...
But you who walk facing the Sun, what can hold you?"
(very loosely quoted from Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)
copyright paul kane 2007 all rights reserved
If you asked ten people "what was the key transitional moment in recent history", you would surely get ten different answers. For me, it was the transition from Carter to Reagan, because of the different visions of community that they expressed/represented. Reagan called his age of misrule "Morning in America", But I see it as a time when America turned its back on the Sun, by which I mean, faith in Community.
I'd like to compare Carter's "Malaise" speech with Reagan's first inaugural address. In just over a year and a half, the change in attitude embodied in the two speeches is striking. Carter's speech is eerily prescient. On point after point, he forsaw key issues lying ahead for America. One passage particularly stands out for this:
... For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
...
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.
... Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.
http://www.pbs.org/...
Except for the bit about worker productivity (which has steadily risen since Carter's speech), these comments could almost be from a speech given today!
Reagan too was prescient: this comment of his turned out to be a good description of his legacy:
... we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.
http://www.bartleby.com/...
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More important than the irony (I'm trying to put it a nice way) of the different sorts of prescience they seemed to have, was the different visions they expressed about the relationship between the people and government.
Carter asks:
Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?
It's a question we are still asking. Carter goes on:
...It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper -- deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as president I need your help. So I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America.
I invited to Camp David people from almost every segment of our society -- business and labor, teachers and preachers, governors, mayors, and private citizens. And then I left Camp David to listen to other Americans, men and women like you.
Isn't that quite a bit different from our Reagan-worshipping WH Boy in the Bubble?!
Another difference: after 911, W urged us to shop. Carter had a different idea.
...In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
Carter lays a challenge before us:
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
my emphasis
Carter tells us that our sense of community is our greatest strength. It can give us the determination to face changes that frighten us and challenge us, such as the need to change our relationship with energy use and resources.
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Reagan's rebuttal to Carter is stark.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem... here, in this land, we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. ... It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.
my emphasis
Reagan brushes aside the nuance Carter saw in the relationship between government and the people. Government must stand aside. The individual is paramount. Communal concerns are the province of church and voluntary organizations (nevermind that no organization can be said to represent the whole community the way government can).
...You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter—and they are on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They are individuals and families whose taxes support the Government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet but deep. Their values sustain our national life.
Reagan envisions government as an entity separate from the people:
it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.
The strangest moment of the speech, as well as one of the most ironic, in terms of how much Reagan enlarged the federal government, is this one:
It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.
While I can see the argument, especially today, that government has become estranged from the consent of the people, I can't see how that could be an issue of size!! How big should government be? As big as it needs to be to do what the people want it and need it to do.
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Between those two speeches, a seismic shift took place. Carter sought to inspire a communal spirit, expressed (not soley) through government, to empower needed changes in society. Reagan sought to atomize the idea of community into a clouds of individual initiatives and voluntary organizations, emphasizing, as he ended his speech, military power and sacrifice as the unifying role played by government, the unifying symbol offered by government.
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Reagan's decade became known as the "me" decade, the decade in which selfishness was recognized as the sovereign principle of public life, however much lip service, or even devotional commitment, might be paid to charity and other expressions of communal concern in the private sphere. Ever since that decade, the theories of the Friedmans and Thatchers, of Wall Street princes and of Multinational corporations, of Cold Warriors and Neocons have held sway and Carter has become known as the ex-president who is good with a hammer.
Such bullish voices loudly claim to be voices of Optimism, but they are really the contrary. They live in fear and cannot bear opposition. Do workers seek to unionize? They must be struck down. Do nations seek to control their own resources, do they hesitate to "open" their economies? There must be coups. Are there complaints about inequality and lack of fairness? They must be savaged as attacks on liberty. Is there competition? It must be put out of business, or bought out.
When we turn our back on the most basic fact of human life, community, our interconnectedness, everyone becomes a potential enemy or ally (a difference primarily of strategy).
Reagan describes a politely Hobbesian world:
To those neighbors and allies who share our freedom, we will strengthen our historic ties and assure them of our support and firm commitment. We will match loyalty with loyalty. We will strive for mutually beneficial relations. We will not use our friendship to impose on their sovereignty, for our own sovereignty is not for sale.
As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it—now or ever.
Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of never having to use that strength.
Or as Bush put it, more bluntly, 'you are either for us or against us'.
But how can that really be? However opposed people may appear, they, we are ultimately all swimming in the same pool! What affects one affects all. As Gibran puts it:
You are the way and the wayfarers.
We are the ones on the path AND we build the path, whether it be a path of conflict or a path of peace.
Recognizing that connection ultimately brought peace with the Soviet Union. It wasn't Reagan's thundering and bravado that did it. But Bush seems fixated on the thundering and bravado, the harsh words and the military interventions that Reagan seemed to fling about so casually.
In response to 911, the entire world seemed to come to our side, seemed to feel as though its capital city had been struck. But somehow, in the face of that overwhelming support, we convinced ourselves, or allowed Bush to convince us, that the world was full of enemies. We became so suspicious that we turned on some our best allies, because they tried to warn us against our Iraq folly. Our idea of reaching out to the Islamic world seemed to be typified by the carrot and stick choice we gave Pakistan: help us and get paid or we'll bomb you.
Even now, when we talk about Iraq we talk about fear. If we pull out, terrible things will happen. Aren't terrible things happening now? And don't we see that the surrounding countries have a stake in seeing peace return to Iraq?
We fear to take on the energy challenge outlined so long ago by Carter because we think our competitors might get an edge. We are afraid of a more rational health care system, because some vested interests might lose money. We are afraid of fairer globalization, because it might cost Multinationals money aand they contribute to campaigns and could pull out more jobs, faster. We are drowning in fear. But we call it optimism.
Reagan taught us that.