This is an excerpt from my published memoir of my career as a commercial artist, Fiddling Whilst Rome Burns. The action picks up in 1980 when I am fourteen, at a seminal moment in my life when I simultaneously discovered the works of horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft and the terrifying consequences of American conservatism, the author of so much suffering in this country during the last 35 years. To put it mildly, it was an unusual political awakening. Far from wanting to give Reagan credit for anything, nonetheless the devil must have his due: Ronnie's policies were responsible for turning me into a fierce, lifelong liberal.
In the meantime, I began to sketch the terrors that lurked within Lovecraft's shadowy cosmos of madness and death. But there were other terrors, other echoes of ringing madness haunting America at this time. And those terrors didn't come in the guise of shambling inter-dimensional monsters with tentacles growing out of their heads. They came, as they almost always do, in the form of our own species, in the guise of well-tailored politicians with quicksilver tongues guided by dull minds and dangerous ideologies.
In this specific instance, they came in a slit-eyed, Brylcreemed, pompadoured, lizard-faced Republican who was the former governor of California. Ronald Wilson Reagan crawled into the Oval Office in January 1981 and wasted no time dropping the 70% income tax for the wealthiest down to 27%. (Prior to Lyndon B. Johnson it had remained at 91% for forty years). Within a few years the quality of life for the vast majority of Americans began to fissure.
Oh yes, this spin-doctored Dr. FeelGood was just the pill to get America back on her feet in no time alright! What this Born Again quack actually did was sell out his middle-class patient, butcher up the body politic while it was still alive and screaming and then sell off the fresh, twitching meat to his corporate buddies for a brisk profit. The gaslight of propaganda hardly acted like chloroform for the patient. He felt everything, every agonizing moment. And when the American middle-class received the bill for services rendered it was with a swift kick in the ass and a bum's rush out the tradesman's entrance: heavy deregulation, taxpayer-subsidized corporate pollution, union-busting, severe cuts in social services to the poor, elderly and disabled. And when the jobs started leaving these shores, he encouraged Americans to maintain their standard of living by taking on credit card debt, thus pushing them further into the clutches of Corporate America.
The Gipper spouted off the slogan, "Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem," and then spent the rest of his term proving his point. Not satisfied with having laid waste to the future of a whole state, he carried this legacy with him to the White House where he proceeded to dismantle our education system on a national level and to redouble the efforts of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, to destroy PBS, that bastion of communism. In effect, the Republican Party had not only put out a contract on Comrade Big Bird, but also early childhood learning itself. Higher education also received a hatchet job when he initiated devastating cuts to college student aid. The aftershock of this can still be evidenced in the crushing burden of college debt carried by students thirty years later.
Diverting funds earmarked for domestic spending into our bloated, ever-expanding defense budget, his agenda to keep defense contractors rolling in the green also provided his welfare queen corporate cronies with a fresh supply of weak minds and strong backs that would translate into cheap, non-unionized labor. (After all, such is the bedrock upon which many a great robber baron's fortune has been built.) Our children couldn't do long division or compete in the global marketplace, but Reagan's former corporate sponsor, General Electric ("We Bring Good Things to Blight!"), one of our country's biggest defense contractors, made massive windfall profits during the Cold War . . . . and repaid Uncle Sam’s munificence by defrauding the Pentagon multiple times. Besides, should these corporations need engineers and physicists tomorrow, they could always be outsourced cheaply from candidates overseas and to hell with issues of national security. (After all, greed is a language spoken fluently by all peoples of all nations. It respects not truth, honor nor loyalty. It betrays everything except its own prerogatives.) Thus besieged, the citadel walls of Academe began to tumble and down with it came America’s future. American education: just another miracle of The Market.
Corporate America was becoming the single most important constituency of our politicians, their viewpoint the only policy and their needs the sole priority. Like so many rolls of toilet paper or bottles of beer, the American people became a disposable, recycled commodity, to be cosseted and manipulated during election time and then abandoned and ignored for the rest of a party hack's term limit or until needed again for the next election cycle.
Thanks to the free-market ministrations of this grandfatherly Dr. Herbert West, America was transformed over the next thirty years from a healthy, prosperous society into a horde of ill-educated, debt-addicted, minimum-wage zombies wandering around in a land devastated by 11.5 % unemployment. While Nancy Reagan was preaching the virtues of “Just Saying No to Drugs”, Ronnie, his Secretary of the Treasury, Donald Regan and the high priest of market fundamentalism, Milton Friedman, (like some latter-day Alberich from Wagner’s opera, Das Rhinegold ) were pushing an even more addictive one: greed. Then again, what did you expect from a mean-spirited, dimwitted ideologue who suffered from terminal dandruff and senile dementia, who left America's foreign and domestic policy up to his wife's astrologer? “Morning in America” is what!
Götterdämmerung for the American middle-class was more like it. Things got worse. Much worse. The breaking of the Air Traffic Controller's Strike. The 1982 Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act which directly led to the Savings and Loan Crash. The Iran-Contra Affair, where Colonel Oliver North and the C.I.A. neglected to take heed of Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug public service announcement and backed the Contras who funded their operations with cocaine smuggling to the U.S. Black Monday. Two million Americans homeless. And then came The Gipper's infamous "Evil Empire" speech which nearly brought our country to the brink of nuclear confrontation with the former Soviet Union, mere years away from its imminent collapse. And then there was our wholly unwarranted and illegal invasion of the island nation of Grenada in 1983. For weeks afterwards I was singing my own unique version of the lyrics from Shall We Dance?: “You say GreNAYda. I say GreNAHda. Let’s call the whole thing off!” Some smart-assed kid spoofing George and Ira Gershwin to score a political point was the least of America’s worries in the 1980s.
The spoliation of the America Dream had begun in earnest, Social Darwinism began its big revival and a New Gilded Age was minted. What would have been considered grounds for impeachment in a former era was now considered just Business As Usual. Alan "Easy Credit Al" Greenspan - a failed economic consultant who worshiped Ayn Rand with a cult-like devotion - was installed as the Federal Reserve's chief through his Washington party-circuit connections. Lobbyists freely practiced their craft as carbide-tipped proctology with a smile. The wealthiest paleo-conservative mummies - a demographic mainly obsessed with their golf handicaps, swollen prostate glands and conspiracy theories about how the Jews controlled the Federal Reserve - strolled away from the 1980s unscathed by most of this turmoil. It was the advent of a new, predatory era, the era of Vampire Capitalism. America's free fall was now gaining momentum . . . .
After a fifty year hiatus, jackals stalked and vultures circled Wall Street once more. The abstract phrase, "The Market" gained public currency as a convenient, all-purpose absolution and rationalization for the crimes of capitalism. Greed levels went toxic and buried the needle in the red, generating a moral vacuum that eroded civil rights and enshrined the ethos of profit over people as a national imperative. It sapped economic vitality, erased ethical boundaries, obliterated national sovereignty and accelerated the already alarming rate of decline in this country. (What didn't you understand about Rising-Tide-Raises-All-Yachts Trickle-Down Economics? Didn't you go to Sunday School? This is God's Divine Law as handed down from on High . . . . or from the desk of his chief-of-staff, Donald Regan. Never mind, it all equates with the same thing in G.O.P. legend. Let Adam Smith's Invisible Hand administer the spanking you deserve for questioning the Natural Order. Now, pull up your pants, stop whining and tighten your belt so that your social betters can loosen theirs. This New World Order civics lesson has been brought to you courtesy of the Republican Party.) Quite a life-affirming, Norman Rockwell canvas America has painted for itself, wouldn't you agree?
The legacy of Reagan would not find its fullest expression until the turn of the 21st century. In the meantime, its imminent threat lay dormant, a lurker at the threshold of American life. The milquetoast debacle of Pappy Bush's administration was just around the corner, a deceptively mild warm-up for the swaggering, butch horrors yet to be unleashed under George II's Reign of Error ten years later. Today, Ronnie looks like a softcore pinko compared to the policies of his modern counterparts in the Republican Party. This tells you volumes about the grim trajectory of American domestic policy in the last thirty years.
And should you think that the Republicans were the only culprits subverting America's economic might, one need only to be reminded of Bill Clinton's record. Under his watch, N.A.F.T.A., the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 were enacted. In 1994, Slick Willy gave a huge bailout to the failing Mexican banking system with American treasury funds because it threatened his cronies on Wall Street. Finally, in 1999 the last prudent bulwark separating the high-risk investment houses from the savings banks was torn down when the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was repealed to allow Traveler's Group and Citicorp to legally merge. In a sleazy end run, deregulation now delivered the piggy bank back into the grasp of the gambling casino like it had been during the Roaring Twenties - only this time the deal was sweetened because the money was F.D.I.C. insured. Free market capitalists were now free to take their risks with other people's money and shuffle back whining to Big Government for a taxpayer-subsidized hand-out if they'd lost at the roulette table. That's not the definition of a Master of the Universe - that's a sociopathic crybaby.
Thanks to Bill Clinton, they could now exercise that option for infantilized nanny state largesse while propping up the illusion that they were still the big, swinging dicks of the financial markets. In many regards, it was his cynical actions that precipitated the economic collapse of 2007. In the meantime, the term "market distortion" was dismissed as a bogeyman concocted by pinko alarmists weaned on Keynsian drivel. After all, the economy was firing with all cylinders. A well-placed minority were getting obscenely wealthier. Who cared if their wealth was acquired through the moral and economic impoverishment of the majority? But what of the highly-touted ethos of "personal responsibility"? That was for the chumps at the bottom of society's greased pole, not the élites who achieved their high position standing on the backs of the disadvantaged.
History was gearing up to repeat itself for a nastier encore presentation of the Great Depression. The stage was now set for the sheep to get sheared again and the wolves to exit the resulting slaughterfest even richer than before. The Twenties may have roared, but they went out with a bleat and a whimper and so the same would be said for the final decade of the American Century.
But I’m getting ahead of my story . . . .
My family and I were amongst the millions of other Americans who endured severe financial hardship during the 1980s. It was during this decade that the illusion of middle-class prosperity was finally revealed as a receding pipe dream swept away on a wind current that eventually gathered force and grew into the present crisis, a perfect storm the likes of which has not been seen in eighty years.
Other shifts in the national wind made its presence felt. Severe cutbacks in domestic spending for mental institutions meant that their charges were turned out, lost and alone, to die in the gutter. The results were seen and felt even in my obscure corner of the country. There was one paranoid schizophrenic who loitered on the steps of the Oak Lawn Public Library and hurled a barrage of incoherent insults at patrons as they entered or exited. People turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to Reagan's barbarism and said to themselves that all men weren't created equal and that the inalienable rights of some did matter more than others. For those who didn't tally in the accounting ledger of this grand, noble scheme, the message was clear: get the fuck out of the way and go home to Jesus - quickly, quietly and without an embarrassing public display to mark your passing or to call attention to our national hypocrisy. After all, this is a Christian nation of the highest free market principles. "Shining City Upon a Hill", my ass. John Winthrop would have wept had he seen how his soaring words had been hijacked and subverted by Reagan three hundred years later.
These assaults on the social contract and our quality of life were transforming our country psychologically into something loathsome and unrecognizable. America was breaking free from the chrysalis of the post-World War II prosperity era not as something elegant and proud, but as something uncouth and callused and brutal. The proof came in the pudding when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Reagan. The announcement was made on our school's intercom system during my English class. I was stunned by my classmate's reaction: they erupted into laughter and wild, enthusiastic applause, which enraged my teacher. Compare this reaction to the one less than twenty years earlier when J.F.K. was shot and you'll have no doubt about the dark path in which America was headed.
So, the roosters came home to roost once again. The stark irony of a psychopath shooting a politician responsible for cutting off funding to mental health services while expanding access to guns was acute and largely missed by the American public. However, my classmate's laughter didn't come from a knowing sense of poetic justice, but out of a sadism nurtured by the same dynamics that made this cruel farce possible. Oh, there I go again . . . .
To give the devil his due, Ronnie was responsible for my political awakening. The direction our country was headed did not fill me with confidence about my future and issues about my place in it began to nag me. Liberalism's stance is inherently anti-vice, while conservatism's is staunchly pro - selfishness, pride and avarice being the cornerstones of their ideology. The Left's progressive worldview is humane and more or less utopian, whilst the Right appeals to that which is basest in human nature, regressive and provably dystopian, which is why it embraces the status quo. How to reconcile my liberal beliefs while operating in a world dominated by a brutal obsession with money and power? How to avoid compromising my values while achieving and maintaining a good standard of living? And - perhaps more urgently - without signs of material success, how was I ever expected to lose my virginity? My answer to these conundra was to open my pie-hole again and dive back into the only natural habitat I’ve ever felt completely at home in: hot water.