On the reel
“If you did the right thing, you could make it in America,” said President Barack Obama during his jobs address to congress Sept. 8.
Truthfully, that ideal was diminishing nearly half a century ago and withered away completely when Reaganomics led the nation out of stagflation and into recession.
It took years for Reaganomics to get its fifteen minutes of fame. As the nation waited Reagan held fast through metaphors about two boys: one an optimist and one a pessimist – the pessimist could never be satisfied while the optimist was satisfied enough to keep on digging through his back yard dirt believing, “There’s gotta be a pony in there somewhere.”
No politician has resorted to this tactic since. But Americans needed optimism for an ideology that couldn’t quite work. It can be argued that, for better or worse, Reagan’s most lasting legacies were those that contradicted his rightist stances; like meeting with leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein.
Yet more and more the Republican primary is looking like Reagan-off 2012 to prove who can be the best Reaganite, all claiming, “I can dismantle da gov’ment the best!”
Despite the fact that Argentines have been sloughing off on this same principle of claiming the throne by falsifying ideological lineage since the ‘60s, each year rubbing some varnish off the man who spawned these professional gimmicks, Righties right here in America continue to forget history.
By all rights at least Peronistas have in Juan Domingo Peron a far more significant leader to diminish than the lefty-scared-republican president Ronald Reagan who as president of the Screen Actors Guild was at most moderate until the actors went on strike and big government threatened to hit them with communist charges.
The show must go on and it did. Reagan was trapped between a rock and a hard place. He renounced any communist association on behalf of the Guild and his conservatism grew incrementally with each day that followed. Cinderella found his niche in opposing big government.
If only the incendiary comments above could be stricken from the record or at least judged as means to an end better than sleeping and waking to hunger caused by federal paralysis. If only they could be eye opening. No one is perfect.
“Because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours,” Ronald Reagan.
There are too many parallels between Reagan and Obama for all to be mentioned here. But two are their charisma behind a microphone and their successes abroad. By the way they both have horrid fiscal records.
The truth is that Reaganomics never worked for more than a handful of years and thus far neither has anything Obama has done. As virtually every president since Reagan has had to deal with economic strife finding a remedy to inflation, job loss and taxes versus tariffs can’t be easy – but it must be clear after thirty years that no one party has all the answers.
“There is, in America, a greatness and a tremendous heritage of idealism which is a reservoir of strength and goodness. It is ours if we will but tap it. And, because of this – because that greatness is there – there is need in America today for a reaffirmation of that goodness and a reformation of our greatness,” Ronald Reagan.
For those who still keep framed photos of Reagan above there mantels good news is America’s Peronistas are not likely to die out, but neither will those academics the theorists too stuck in Marxism’s ultimate ambiguity to see it playing out here, right here, today.
Perhaps it is about time we all, as Americans, look beyond the gloss of our partisan perspectives on history and find those retrievable pieces from which we can build a better future: one in which the political circus has been cast aside.
Please email jerichos.339@gmail.com with comments/suggestions for future articles
