Before this post is deleted for sacrilege- sorry Markos, there is a point here- I thought perhaps to offer some insight to those who, I dunno, are X amount of years younger than me. For if one wishes to understand the Trump vote, one has to understand the shifts of the sands of time. Be advised and be happy: this will take but a few paragraphs. Yet be advised and be gloomy: this is real.
So why the portrait of classic Democrat enemy number one, Ronald Reagan? Well.. once upon a time, when I was born (1960)- the population of the USA was approximately of 90% European extraction. In cities across the country, we Irish would give the Italians shit and got the same back at us; together we dissed the Poles (within the Catholic communities) and the Jews, hey, they were there to play first violin or solve advanced mathematical equations and such. The heartland consisted of Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes etc, busy feeding our maws. Elsewhere was WASP territory. As for the other minorities, well, y’know, the less said the better. Although everybody digged Motown and Kyu Sakamoto (“As I Walk”, a forlorn love song forever stupidly translated as “Sukiyaki”, thin slices of beef), these were the spices that perked up the main course, never the main course itself.
Yet after Vietnam, Watergate and Jimmy Carter’s serial Debbie downers, things were in an awful state. So who better than Ronald Reagan, self-made man from Tampico, Illinois, son of the New Deal, to reinvigorate the flagging manhood of America? And it worked: Tom Cruise got famous going to the Danger Zone, Grenada and Panama got liberated (¡de nada!) and, in the crowning achievement of the resuscitated Empire Republic, Saddam got stomped.
Fast forward to today and all is changed. The old certainties are gone, and no ‘native’ can feel, by dint of being born American, that the higher rungs on the ladder are automatically within reach based on effort. Now, one is cast in the maelstrom together with the H1Bs in competition with ‘real’ jobs left after Ross Perot’s “great sucking sound”. Apparently. You would think some might rejoice in this most American of all virtues, competition, but alas no. There is as much enthusiasm for job competition as there is among the Fortune 500 companies for corporate competition.
Yet memory persists. And as in all human cultures, the ‘Golden Age’, real or otherwise, mocks us. And in a particularly American phrasing, we have Fitzgerald’s words at the end of the Great Gatsby:
“It eluded us then, but that's no matter- to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And one fine morning----”
Indeed. But it would seem that Trump’s voters have tired waiting for that fine morning.
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