Letter 2 America for February 28, 2014

Dear America,

You may remember Mikhail Gorbachev, who was president of the Soviet Union when it was dissolved in 1991.  Gorbachev ascended to power during the Reagan administration, and at that time, he met with Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland regarding disarmament, and at home, he instituted two policies, Perestroika and Glasnost, which were intended to bring about gradual change within the Soviet Union toward the end of personal freedom and government restructuring with openness and elimination of the solitary control of the communist party.  During the Reykjavik conference, Gorbachev actually proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons, but Reagan, the great advocate of peace not through diplomacy but through strength, declined with the now famous phrase "disarm, but verify," and later he admonished Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" as he dramatically postured for the world in Berlin.  Well, the Berlin Wall did come down shortly thereafter and Gorbachev was replaced during a peaceful coup by Boris Yeltsin, a notorious lush and buffoon who led what the USSR became--the Confederation of Independent States--through a period of delirium and chaos until he died, eventually leading to the ascendancy of Vlad the Putin, who is as notorious as Yeltsin was, but for his fascism-like intermingling of business and corrupt governance leading to the formation of an all-powerful oligarchy of obscenely wealthy cronies who enjoy immunity from law and order as well as unassailable power of a most unseemly kind.  In my opinion, the fire that the world has now jumped into from the frying pan of Gorbachev's evolving form of governance was kindled by Reagan's cowboy-like repudiations of Gorbachev and his efforts as too little too late.

What we have to show for the bravado and peremptory self-righteousness of the Reagan administration and its brand of conservatism is the situation in Ukraine and Crimea today, where corrupt government and governors enriched themselves to the extent that their policies were guided by personal greed sufficient to galvanize a nation against them to the extent that the president of Ukraine had to flee the country or risk his life staying.  It all stems from the impatience of Ronald Reagan, who could have been Gorbachev's patron on the world stage and fostered his attempts to gradually wean the Soviet Union from monolithic communism, which in reality was nothing but totalitarianism masquerading as communism, and thus join the free world as a force for democracy and self-determination.  But Reagan had to play the tough guy in Reykjavik and Berlin and humiliate Gorbachev at home, thus ensuring that his grasp on power would be undermined and the current third-world governing mentality would supplant what might have been: a Soviet Union that would be a force for good in the world instead of the bastion of corruption, both political and moral, that it has become.  We have the Republican Party--as afflicted then as now by a conservative, reactionary fringe--to thank.  If they had just bothered to think about the fact that it wasn't communism that they loathed but totalitarianism, they might have eschewed the dogmatic hounding of a Soviet leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, which efforts have now amounted to naught thanks to xenophobia and irrational fear of the apocryphal "Red Menace."  In a nutshell, we now have Vladimir Putin and his erstwhile minion in Ukraine, deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, because of the Republicans' international penis envy.  What used to be the Soviet Bloc is now the Russian Mafia, and I would argue that neither the Russian people nor any of the rest of the population of the former Soviet Union...nor the rest of the world for that matter...is better off for it.

Of course, no one on the right will ever admit that Saint Ronnie did anything wrong.  He has gone from being the president with the roughly 30% popularity rating when he left office to being the patron saint of conservatives for the most part while being dead.  And his adorers conveniently forget that Reagan believed, and even said during a presidential debate, that Social Security never added a penny to the national debt.  They don't remember that he was pushed into taking the bully pulpit against Gorbachev by people in his own party who thought he was too weak and liberal.  They don't remember the fourteen tax increases that he signed after signing the tax cuts that he self-servingly referred to as a "new American Revolution" that was supposed to revitalize and liberate the nation, but rather led to the greatest disparity of wealth between labor and capital since the Great Depression.  The irony of drafting Reagan as the inspiration for the new conservatism is palpable, but it is lost on Republicans.

We owe Ronald Reagan a great deal, but since he is dead, we can't give him what he deserves.  Instead, he is beatified by a party with a short memory committed to expediency rather than realism and truth, which won't produce the ignominy that he deserves in my opinion.  But what frustrates me most is that Republicans seem poised...at least in the opinions of most political talking heads...to gain power in The House, and perhaps even take over The Senate.  Why the American people can't see the truth when there is so much of it plaguing them I will never understand.  Be that as it may, I think we should encourage all conservatives to write in the name of their patron saint on their ballots.  He can't do us any more harm from where he is, and that is preferable to the harm that the Republicans will do if they succeed.

Your friend,

Mike