What follows is a rough draft of the first part of an longer essay I am writing, which in turn is part of an attempted series of essays (my goal is three) on coming of age and living the past quarter century under the rule of the Republicans. Again, this is a first draft, very rough, and I welcome all sorts of constructive criticism.
In November, 1989, I was in the midst of a personal crisis, the details of which are unimportant and far too private to relate. Suffice it to say that I was on the verge of what was euphemistically called “a nervous breakdown”, and leave it at that, shall we? Even in the midst of my own neurotic problems, however, like much the rest of the world, I took a breather one evening, sitting in a living room in Richford, NY, and watched Tom Brokaw standing in front of jubilant crowds celebrating the end of the physical division of the city of Berlin. It was a sight that was, up until that moment, quite literally outside the scope of my own imagination. Up until the day before, anyone doing what members of that crowd were doing - standing on the wall, climbing over it from one side of the city to the other, walking past the East German border guards without giving a single piece of identification - would have been shot. The next day brought even more unimagined triumphs as citizens, both east and west, took any tool at hand large enough to effect damage and whole pieces of the Berlin Wall tumbled down.
The highlight of a year historian John Lukacs called an anna mirabilis, the collapse of East German communism, followed swiftly by its demise in Czechoslovakia and Romania under less pleasant circumstances, as well as the voluntary abdication of Bulgaria’s communists, left much of the rest of the world both confounded by the changes wrought in a few short months and marveling at the possibilities now open not just to the newly freed subjects of Central Europe, but to much of the western world. The demise of the Soviet Union two years later was, in many ways, anti-climactic, almost pre-determined even as the tensions during those few days of the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev seemed unbearable.
I well remember New Year’s Eve, 1990. I had just finished my first semester at Wesley Theological Seminary, was still trying to figure out why I had gone there and what I would do once my sojourn there was over, and was generally quite happy to be living in our nation’s capital. Back home at my parents’ house in Waverly, NY, I sat and watched Leonard Bernstein conduct a huge combined choir and orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, fulfilling a promise he had made to do so once Germany was reunited. I still marvel at the fact that Bernstein managed to do so without the benefit of a score. Like a much shorter, much less celebrated song would declare in a few months’ time, we were watching the world wake up from history, with real revolutions happening all around us, offering us possibilities we couldn’t even have dreamed before.
That day not only marked the end of a decade, the celebration of the reunification of a great nation, and the realization (at least for me) that the events of the previous couple years were indeed real. It also marked the end of a strange sojourn in our collective life. The 1980's had begun in a haze of confusion, fear, and increasing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan exploited the fears of an American public hit by rampant Soviet adventurism (from Angola to Afghanistan) as well as domestic disquiet (the specter we are seeing once again called “stagflation”, high interest rates combined with higher than normal rates of inflation) and defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Reagan won barely fifty percent of the popular vote, yet he managed to win enough states to have his victory declared not just a near landslide, but revolutionary as well.
The next few years were a strange time. A recession that was in fact the deepest economic down-turn since the 1930's, with double-digit unemployment, the deindustrialization of much of the American industrial heartland stretching across the Great Lakes and in to the northeast, and a fundamental shift in American tax policy from progressive to regressive taxation combined with exploding military budgets to create budgetary shortfalls unheard of in American history outside a time of declared war all seemed surreal. We were indeed living in the midst of history, yet we did not recognize it for what it was. It was traumatic in a way that only real historical events are. The pace of social change in the United States had ever seemed so fast, so ineluctable. The few things we thought we could hold on to no longer seemed stable.
Yet Reagan and the Republican Party promised an anchor for troubled times. Using a rhetoric both familiar yet unprecedented in its starkness, we were offered the possibility of national greatness once again. We were offered the consolations of a set of religious beliefs at once comforting and aggressive in their declaration of who was in and who was out. We were given the opportunity to face the challenge of seemingly reinvigorated Soviet Union, perhaps not on European soil, but closer to him in the unknown backyard of Central America. We had allies in this fight as well; Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, Pres. Suharto in Indonesia, Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire were all defenders of freedom, even though their own governing records were a bit lax in this category, and each existed as a wholly owned subsidiary either of the United States or one industrial conglomerate or another.
The contradictions and questions we faced as a nation throughout the 1980's were rarely addressed openly. When such questions did arise, when the factual and rhetorical inconsistencies became too pronounced to ignore, we were often told that these were either the distortions of a class of persons resentful of their loss of power (the Democratic Party) or fellow-travelers, out-and-out sympathizers with our ideological adversaries (the American Left). Often portrayed as a network of interlocking affinities among academia, journalists, and free-lance intellectuals, we were given the opportunity to not so much fear as pity these last remaining survivors from a by-gone era - the 1960's - when radical ideas and political action seemed on the verge of changing the American political landscape. As Stephen King has noted, however, his generation had the opportunity to change the world, and settled for QVC instead. The actual size and relative toothlessness of the American political and cultural left at any time has been small. In the 1980's, it was on life support.
Coming of age during the years of High Reaganism, studying politics and history in college at a time when there was this strange separation between real history both as it was practiced and lived, and politics as the struggle for power on the national level, was an experience I know cannot be repeated. Even a cursory glance at some of the events of the years 1983, when I entered Alfred University as a freshman political science student, and 1987 when I graduated with a piece of paper that was worth quite a bit less than the debt I had incurred earning it leaves one breathless as the strangeness of it all. Whether it was the mining of the harbors of Nicaragua, funding death squads in El Salvador, the invasion and subsequent retreat from Lebanon after a devastating terrorist attack, two attacks upon Libya including a direct assault upon its President, Moamar Qadafi, the invasion of Grenada (in which more military medals were passed out than there were actual participants), and of course the Iran-Contra affair, perhaps the most convoluted conspiracy in the history of the United States - all of these events seemed like watersheds, points of reference for future generations seeking to understand the times through which we lived.
