Things Are Better Now Than They Were in the '80s

I feel that things are better now than they were in the '80s and '90s, in spite of how grim the picture sometimes appears.

I won't deny that I find little to like in the Bush II regime. Dick Cheney scares the crap out of me, and without even going into whether there was any truth to the initial excuses for "Operation Iraqi Freedom," I firmly believe that this war was an incredible strategic and economic blunder. I'm really disgusted that my kid and potential grandkids will in all likelihood still be paying off the debts it incurred, long after I'm dead. However, the Reagan and Bush I regimes were worse.

Things are not pretty now, but it's nothing all that different than what I've been seeing as long as I can remember. My younger brother was born during the Cuban missile crisis; I grew up during the Vietnam/Cold-War era, and I spent most of my grade-school years believing that the world could blow up at any time. The image of the My Lai massacre in the centerfold of life magazine haunts me even now.

When I think of my childhood, teens, and twenties, the following lyrics from Some of my views are selfishly based on my own interests, and those of my economic class and societal subculture. Whose politics are ultimately not based on these interests?Civil War by Guns 'n Roses come to mind:

D'you wear a black armband
When they shot the man
Who said "Peace could last forever"
And in my first memories
They shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see

The final line describes something that happened to all of us who drifted into the hopeless and nihilistic counterculture of the late 70s and the 80s. The song, which found the airwaves in 1991, at the end of the Bush I regime describes a "Civil War," the war that Ron and Nancy Reagan, and all their rich sponsors had declared, enlisting the help of the Home Audience, the gullible hand-wringing suburban parents who fear whatever they've been told to fear by the experts.

Bush scares the crap out of me too, but at least he's been going after external enemies. Ron and Nancy Reagan were coming after us! They declared a "culture of intolerance" to drug use, which in fact was a culture of intolerance for anyone who was even slightly out of line; leftists and liberal, gays and lesbians, feminists, unwed mothers (yes, they attacked women and children with their social policies) blacks, poor whites, the elderly; really anyone who didn't quite fit in to their peculiar and self-contradictory vision for America.

The "Reagan Revolution" made cynical promises. "Getting big government out of our lives" was one of them. The government became bigger, nastier, more intrusive, and more in debt than it had ever been before, during the Reagan-Bush years.

To be sure, deregulation of business took place, and the upper economic strata of America became even wealthier. This was of little comfort to those of us who remained in the underclass.

Meanwhile, the government's entitlement to control and regulate our private lives kept growing. The "War on Drugs" became so vicious that even Milton Friedman, an economist responsible for much of the Reagan era economic reforms and the resulting disasters, would say years later, as Bill Clinton continued with the Reagan-Bush policies that "There's no Justice in the War on Drugs."(New York Times, January 11th, 1998)

While the Reagan and Bush administrations had used some of the libertarian economic theories of Milton Friedman to justify their pursuit of inverse class-war, they ignored his social and cultural assertions of libertarian theory. The promise of "smaller government" never materialized. Spending and deficits increased, and the ability of the government to intrude into our private lives, our homes and property, and ultimately into our own bodies increased, as the government increased its spending.

The far left, driven to despair and terrorism made some final attempts at what they then termed "small group military actions," and after some small and short-lived successes, were crushed with a cold efficiency by the highly developed machinery of federal law enforcement and its vast resources.

As prison populations exploded, and government spending on prison building reached unprecedented levels due to the influx of drug offenders into the criminal justice system, a strange thing happened. Marijuana became not necessarily scarce, but a good bit more expensive, and heroin and cocaine became cheaper and more plentiful. I remember in 1980, and ounce of coke (real coke in the 70 to 80% pure range) cost 2100 to 2300 dollars by the time it made it to DC from Miami. By the mid 80s, product of this same quality could be had for 900 to 1000 per ounce, and sometimes less. Now coke goes for 450 to 600 per ounce.

Thank you Ron, Nancy, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. for all that cheap cocaine; at least y'all did that much right. Of course, aside from some incriminating phrases in Oliver North's personal notes, and books by disgruntled DEA agents, there really isn't much in the way of good solid evidence of CIA complicity in drug trafficking. Well of course there isn't, they're the frickin' CIA! That's what they do, secret stuff; they've have been trained not to get caught.

There are other things that I've seen with my own eyes over 28 years ago, which in my mind constitute hard evidence. I still am afraid to say much about it, but put it this way: people on the streets of DC died as the result of armed conflicts on the other side of the planet.

The 80s were interesting and ugly times, filled with hatred and fear. To be defined as "the enemy," and to be shown "zero tolerance" by the nominal leaders of one's own land is not an experience easily forgotten.

Somewhere along the line, as did others with some residual leftist views, I mistakenly began to blame all of this on the Republican Party. As the Bush I regime reached its final days, and George Bush Sr. ran for a second term, I decided to vote for the first and only time in my life. I registered as a Libertarian, but when the time to decide came, I voted for Bill Clinton, on the basis of "well at least he's not Bush."

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."(-The Who)

During 90s, as Clinton enthusiastically continued the social and economic agenda of his republican predecessors, I found my way into the American Gulag. Like millions of others, by that time the experience of pure despair and alienation, and the reality that war had been declared on me drove me to abandon hope, reason and even the smallest pretense of morality. "If it's war they want, it's war they shall have," I said. The rest is a matter of public record.

While I spent my time in the American Gulag, Clinton laid the groundwork for the post 9-11 assaults on the United States Constitution

I watched the 9-11 attacks from prison. It was spectacular, leaving me grief-stricken and angry, but not particularly with a sense of shock rooted in a belief that the world had changed in some drastic and irreversible way. I remember seeing some pretty New York woman, fashionably dressed and appearing to be in her early thirties asking a question. As the FOX camera's recorded, she tearfully pleaded "What kind of a word are we living in?" (I momentarily wished I was there to ask her "Geez ,lady; you've been alive more than thirty years now and you still don't know the answer to that one?")

9-11 was just another manifestation of the same world I'd been living in and watching all along, observing every act of terror and absurdity by authority, since the age of 4. Some people tried even to paint the twin-towers atrocity as "anarchy" and from this premise asserted that it was time for us to all pull together behind authority. But aside from using the secondary and apolitical definition of anarchy, ie chaos and violence, 9-11 was an act of authority, organized and executed by a highly authoritarian structure, trying to reestablish a theocracy, a male dominated and feudalistic system of government. The point was to again establish religious authority as the ultimate authority.

I was released from Gulag America into a peculiar world, filled with cameras in the streets and malls, and a profusion of security guards, homeland security agents, ICE agents, and more regular police officers than ever. It's very easy to go to jail now, not just for ex-cons like me, but for anyone. An estimated 400 people a year are jailed in the city of Denver on the average, for bogus warrants, cases of mistaken identity that have resulted from the explosion in online identity theft, and simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. During my first year out of prison, I spent 25 days in the county jail on a bogus warrant myself.

Now we are at war, against an enemy that knows no national boundaries, considers martyrdom desirable, and has no really concrete demands other than the destruction of America and modernist western culture in general. These enemies cannot even be said to exist exclusively among the extreme Islamic religious right; some fundamentalist Christian preachers in America have as much said that bin-Laden and his associates are doing God's work.

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before-(G 'n R)

In spite of all this, I somehow feel less paranoid than during the days of Ron and Nancy's civil war. The enemy again for now consists of "them," out there somewhere, and oh yeah, people who "aren't supposed to be here," people I like, ride the bus with, work with, people who are my neighbors, but they did break the law by coming here. They have children to feed, old folks to send money to back home, and while some of the music they listen to gets on my nerves, I know what it is like to be hated and hunted, and can't find much in the way of resentment in my heart towards these folks. You know who I mean. Still, I'm glad that for now, it's "them," and not me. Not that I do drugs anymore, but who will the next group of hate objects be? How long until they get around to the Jews again? Until that time comes, I guess I can relax.

Look at the shoes your filling
Look at the blood we're spilling
Look at the world we're killing
The way we've always done before
Look in the doubt we've wallowed
Look at the leaders we've followed
Look at the lies we've swallowed
And I don't want to hear no more-(G 'n R)

I cling to shreds of hope, Yes Barack Obama is a politician,and a mainstream one at that, but there is something about him, a sincerity and appearance of honest `and peaceful intentions that I can't remember ever having seen in any presidential candidate before now.

I don't need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain't that fresh
And I don't need your civil war
I don't need your civil war
I don't need your civil war
Your power hungry sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain't that fresh
I don't need your civil war
I don't need one more war-(G 'n R)

Things are better now than they were during the "Days of Guns 'n Roses," and I'll "Use my Illusion."

References:

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98/n351/a03.html

Complete Lyricswww.lyricsdepot.com/guns-n-roses/civil-war.html