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 heard on All Things Considered the other day that some Congressional Republicans were planning to approve allocation for a monument in the middle of the increasingly crowded Mall for Ronald Reagan, for whom numerous government buildings (including Washington's National Airport) in Virginia and in California have already been named.
There's already an expressway named after him in Illinois. Now there's even talk of putting him on the ten-dollar bill.
That has got to be one of the gayest ideas I've ever come across. I reckon I shouldn't be too surprised since this is the same country where even the likes of Richard Nixon could get rehabilitated as an elder statesman in the eyes of the public. Conservative ideologues need heroes to worship, and he fits the bill.
Unlike the Democrats who can always always fall back on the visionary presidential leadership of Roosevelt and Kennedy, Republicans have to resort on someone as empty-headed as Reagan as a means to fortify their legacy with a figure the public can still remember. In terms of this monument business, would anybody trust politicians, let alone Republican leaders, with anything to do with aesthetics and architecture? Remember James Watt and his opposition to Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam memorial? I personally cannot name one architect or designer who was/is politically conservative. Not only would building a monument between the Capitol and Lincoln Memorial become an inevitable aesthetic and architectural disaster (as if the recent approval of the Albert Speer-inspired WWII memorial weren't enough), but it would also be an insult to anyone who believes in the U.S. Constitution, human rights, protecting the environment, economic justice, and human decency in general. It's hard to think of another president in recent memory who had done more harm to the nation than Reagan.
What's next, new monuments for other bloodthirsty Cold War relics (all of whose regimes were supported by his administration or his staff) such as Pinochet, Bautista, Somoza, Noriega, the Shah, Marcos, Savimbi, Mobuto, or perhaps all the leaders of the Apartheid regime? Most of those scary dictators would not have been in power without American backing, many of them militarily and financially upheld and defended by the Reagan administration. His atrocities were not just limited to the thousands who have been tortured and killed in Central America and abroad, but they were also directed at all the poor, sick, old, and the most underprivileged members of society here at home. His administration's taxation policies have tipped American society's slide toward irrevocable income inequality.
Let's take a step back and think about the proposed monument itself. Wasting public resources to glorify a former leader such as Reagan would be a blatant act of hypocrisy.
All the pathetic Republican rhetoric about "tax-and-spend liberals" is a myth considering that they feel perfectly alright to fund stuff like the politically-motivated Whitewater independent counsel investigations (which turned out to be the most expensive witch hunt ever), nuclear weapons, SDI, corporate welfare, and those infamous Defense department toilet seats from the 1980s.
Not surprisingly, Reagan more than doubled the national debt during his two administrations while turning America from the greatest creditor nation in the world to the biggest debtor.
The Republicans would gladly spend public funds for all the wrong reasons. Needless to say, the 1980s were a dark, dark time for America.
The "Reagan Revolution" waged a war against the disenfranchised and the meek, and it thoroughly fucked-up America and the lives of millions around the world. Remember and considering the following:
Iran-Contra makes Clinton's (or perhaps even Nixon's) mistakes seem negligible.
What's all the fuss over blowjobs when the Reagan administration was actually trading arms with our sworn enemies to fund dirty wars forged by thugs and death squads in Nicaragua?
In the name of fighting communism in the postwar period, the U.S. (admittedly under Democratic administrations as well) pursued a policy of systematic destabilisation and destruction of numerous struggling and worthy governments from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to Grenada. Daring to defy American hegemony, large land owners, and corporate interests, those governments were trying to build a semblance of justice and economic equality for their people. Those governments were never really given a chance to build their fledgling democracies before Americans crush them along with thousands, perhaps even millions, of innocent civilians. Too many people were imprisoned, tortured, and killed directly as a result of U.S. foreign policy. This intensified during the Reagan administration. I wasn't sure whom he referred to when he kept using the term "evil empire."
The installation and support of too many dictators, death squads, drug dealers, and thugs in the Third World, all in the name of fighting communism. Remember the ghastly wars in El Salvador and Guatemala?
Remember the Mujahadeen religious fanatics, whom Reagan famously called "freedom fighters"? Look what happened to Afghanistan.
The national security apparatus and the C.I.A. were truly out of control during this period.
They were fighting very dirty wars and conducting covert operations everywhere, and Iran-Contra was inevitable.
Republicans like to boast that Reagan led them to victory against the Soviet bloc in the Cold War.
However, the protesters that gathered in the former GDR and other Eastern European nations in 1989 weren't chanting the names of Reagan or Bush.
Instead, they were often chanting, "Gorby! Gorby!" That was what was heard as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. They weren't chanting Reagan's name.
Just like the students that gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing during Mikhail Gorbachev's arrival there, many demonstrators were inspired by the Soviet leader's policy of perestroika.
The frightening build-up of nuclear weapons and the military led to enormous deficits.
The fear of humanity being immediately incinerated was actually there throughout the Reagan years.
Trickle down, "voodoo" economics. The rich got richer, and the poorer got poorer. American society got increasingly polarised economically, and it hasn't really recovered since.
An enormous number of people, many of them sick or with mental disabilities, ended up on city streets.
Social programmes were gutted as the increasing number of poor people got poorer.
Great Society institutions like job training, welfare, and even public broadcasting were attacked.
Reagan era was synonymous with rampant greed and corruption. Remember the S & L scandal?
Initiated the perverse, costly, and ultimately useless drug war which has turned America into a prison state.
This is one of the biggest outrages of postwar America.
Ironically, the Reagan administration, through C.I.A. and the national security apparatus, have been known to deal with and support drug dealers and unsavoury arms runners, such as Manuel Noriega and other Latin American henchmen, in order to combat the perceived threat of communism at any cost.
The fact that many C.I.A. operatives who were supplying the Contras and other death squads were flying narcotics back to America constituted a form of outrage and hypocrisy that's beyond comprehension.
While the Administration was indoctrinating the nation against the evils of drugs on one hand, it was destroying urban neighbouhoods by supplying them with drugs on the other.
Perhaps an even greater outrage was the silence and complicity of the mainstream broadcast media.
Even though most of us already knew that the C.I.A. was running drugs in the 1980s, when the agency finally admitted to these operations in the mid 1990s, most of the mainstream broadcast media networks chose to ignore this acknowledgement.
Where were the pundits then?
If the America media was doing its duty, shouldn't numerous heads in Washington have been rolled by now? Where's the big political upheaval?
Reagan dismantled Carter's innovative and largely responsible energy programme.
Unfortuantely, now we're dependent upon foreign oil more than ever. Hadn't we learned anything from the energy crises of the 1970s? We probably wouldn't even have to deal with the Gulf War if we had learned our lesson and developed responsible and sustainable energy sources.
Reagan administration weakened enforcement of antitrust legislation in many sectors of the economy.
It even encouraged the consolidation of mega-corporations in industries such as agriculture and meatpacking, thereby destroying small farms and ranches (and along with them their relatively more ecologically sound farming practices).
Reagan administration, as well as the Bush administration, were decidedly against American consumers in every respect, and they encouraged corporate abuse to run rampant.
For instance, in the sectors of food and agriculture industries, these administrations slashed federal spending on public health measures.
At the same time, according to Eric Schlosser writing in Fast Food Nation, they staffed the USDA "with officials far more interested in government deregulation than in food safety.
The USDA became largely indistinguishable from the industries it was meant to police," since it was being headed by leaders and executives from corporate agriculture.
This scenario was repeated in countless other sectors of the economy.
Reagan administration was determined to destroy the labour movement in America, beginning with the breaking of the air traffic controllers strike. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was gutted, and America retreated back to the 19th century in terms of work safety in some industries.
Reagan did virtually nothing as thousands of Americans died from a new epidemic called AIDS.
Reagan administration essentially raped America's natural environment during its years in office.
Appointing someone like James Watt as Interior Secretary is like sending Goebbels to protect the Jews.
William Bennett as Education Secretary? How much more screwed up could a society get?
I guess it would be having someone like Edwin Meese as Attorney General.
Republicans like to boast that Reagan ended the Cold War? What?! I'd like to think that Mikhail Gorbachev had more to do with it. Who was the Nobel Laureate? I think maybe we should build a monument for him (off the Mall, of course) instead.
Reagan thought trees were bad for air quality, and that ketchup could be considered a vegetable.
 orry to state the obvious, but this monument business represents the fact that partisan hypocrisy is alive and well in America.
22 September 2000
(with revision in February 2005)
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