2003: Reaganomics

Yes, today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Reaganism, the plague borne to us by that "grinning huckster for the avaricious," Ronald Wilson Reagan. There are deft debunkings of Reagan-the-myth all over the Web today. I offer this modest followup to my own obituary for Reaganism's earthly vessel. As I mentioned, my article on "Why the Right Hates America" generated a great deal of correspondence, some of which still trickles in. The email below was part of an exchange with one of the factually challenged interlocutors:

As Dutch himself said, "facts are stupid things." Republicans like to toss around the fact that Congressional spending outpaced Reagan's budget proposals by an average of $2.8 billion a year. That in itself is pretty trivial in the context of adding two trillion to the national debt (three trillion if you count the elected President Bush's term).

But this is a particularly stupid fact. Leave aside the fact that the Republicans controlled the Senate for six of Reagan's eight years in office. Leave aside the fact that he never once submitted a balanced budget to the Congress. Leave aside the fact that he could have vetoed any spending bill he thought was too profligate.

No, what's really stupid about this fact is that if the Congress had actually passed all eight of Reagan's budgets exactly as written, spending would have been even higher - by another 30 billion!

The reason this is true lies in the way budget proposals are written. In order to estimate non-discretionary spending (like unemployment insurance, welfare spending, cost-of-living increases, etc.) the OMB has to make certain assumptions. But Reagan's budget directors deliberately made completely unrealistic projections about what unemployment, inflation, growth, etc., would be. That way they could turn around and blame the Congress for spending more than Reagan had asked!

Which, of course, they're still doing.

2003: Steve Earle in Tucson

Word is that Mr. Earle is at work on a collaboration with T-Bone Burnett for his next album. When he tours behind it, you want to make sure to check that out. And to learn more, go thither and yon.

A few years back, Mr. Earle was going through a kind of a quiet period. He did a wonderful bluegrass album, The Mountain, with the Del McCoury Band, and took some time off to write a play and a book of short stories. After a time he decided it was time to break out the electric guitar and rock out again. His new girlfriend, who'd only known the quiet Steve, asked him why he wanted to do a thing like that. Because, he said, it makes my dick hard.

Well, he must have had a hell of a boner last night. The wife and I made one of our too-infrequent pilgrimages to the church of the electric guitar, and Pastor Steve delivered one hell of a sermon. He promised that he would play "a lot of songs" and he kept that promise, departing at midnight after a good two or three dozen selections from his songbook. It's not that he didn't play any quiet songs; there were a few, and he played every single track off of the new album, loud or not. But by the time he left for the pre-encore break, he had just fired off seven or eight blistering white-hot, uptempo numbers in a row, any one of which was enough to get the crowd on their feet.

Song after brilliant song, his roadies kept handing him an endless supply of acoustic, solid body and hollow body guitars, plus mandolins, banjos, ukeleles, and the occasional harmonica. His young hotshot guitarist spat out blazing leads and the nimble bass player took full advantage of the tall Marshall stacks. Steve had his baby brother on the drums and his oldest son on keyboards and damned if we all didn't feel right at home.

He dropped off little political diatribes every once in a while, predicting that if we thought 2002 was a weird year, we ain't seen nothing yet. He referred to a history book he'd been reading about the period just before the Civil War, and then urged us to remember that no mater what side we end up on, we shouldn't let anybody tell us "that it's unpatriotic or un-American to question fuckin' anything." Loud roar.

Many long, sustained roars brought him back for two sets of encores, culminating with the Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today" (which he recorded with Ani diFranco for the Steal This Movie soundtrack) and finally, the Youngbloods' "Get Together," "a song I've been doing as long as I've had a guitar, and it's never made more sense to me than today."

He left, vowing to return to Tucson, a city he'd visited but never gigged in. Tucson rarely sees the likes of him, so we hope he'll keep the promise. Maybe we'll all end up in the same internment camp.

2003: Why the Right Hates America

This article is probably my most popular ever. I still get email about it. Originally posted at CounterPunch in February of 2003, it's been reposted far and wide. Looking at it today, it seems like it only scratches the surface. It's almost quaint, the level of America-hatred displayed by right-wingers a mere eight years ago.

As a leftist, I'm getting just a bit weary of hearing how much I "hate America." Ever since the big you-know what in late 2001, that little zinger has been the comeback of choice for any objections to US foreign policy. Don't like our new wars? Gee, you must really hate this country.

Friends on the right, you wound us. If we didn't love America, why would we spend so much time and energy on bake sales and discussion groups and lecture series and petition drives and demonstrations to make it a better place? I mean, there may be some parts of Dallas we're not too keen on, and personally, you couldn't pay me enough to live in Phoenix, but on the whole, sure, love that America. Friendly people, nice beaches, great forests, er, what's left of them.

Of course, the relationship is just a bit more complicated than that. We love America kind of like we might love a dear friend or relative who's drinking too much and putting his health in danger, or messing up his home life. We're kind of embarrassed and more than a little bit worried for good old America. But that doesn't mean we don't love her. Hey, we're family!

You know, it occurs to me that when rightwingers can't come up with a better argument than "you hate America," they might actually be projecting. After all, who was it that said that the 9/11 attacks allowed, quote, "the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve"? It wasn't any leftist, that's for sure. It was that jolly old moral majoritarian, the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The right can't stand American culture. Rock & roll swept the planet, helped bring down the Berlin wall, inspired everyone with its free-spirited, rebellious American energy. Who fought it every step of the way? The right, that's who. Same goes for hip-hop, another great American export, subject of Congressional inquisitions. And don't even get me started on Hollywood. Billions of people love our movies, but the right acts like the whole movie industry is the last refuge of Stalinism.

The right hates our heroes, too. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making a holiday to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King, who helped us try to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction. And some of them still grumble, as Ronald Reagan did, that he was some kind of "communist." Still others, like John Ashcroft, express nostalgia for the Confederacy's fight to maintain slavery as a noble cause.

Come to think of it, the right hates our constitution, too, except for the Second Amendment, and maybe the Eleventh, now that the Rehnquist Court has rewritten it to mean "Congress shall pass no law that we don't like." But the First, the Fourth, the Fifth, and um, the Sixth, and the Eighth, and pretty much the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are right out the window these days. Damn shame, too, if you ask me. Plus the right is still itching to overturn old decisions like Miranda and Bakke and Roe, if not Griswald. Some of them aren't too crazy about Brown v. Board, either, if you know what I mean.

And it's obvious by now that the right wing really, really hates democracy. If you even bring up the word, they go on about how the Founding Fathers made a republic, not a democracy. Well, sure, but they also wrote in the parts about blacks being three-fifths of a person, and only land-owning males being able to vote. Some of those cool old amendments moved us closer to actual democracy, at least for a while there. Now the rightwingers on the Supreme Court have made it clear that we have no actual right to vote, let alone have the votes counted if it's inconvenient for their candidate.

And the election of 2000 isn't the only one stolen by the right. In 1968, and again in 1980, the right-wing candidates, as private citizens, interfered with foreign-policy negotiations of the US government in order to (successfully) gain electoral advantage. Come to think of it, they did that again in 2000, advising the Israelis to drag their feet in the Camp David talks. But I guess they can get away with that, since they love America more than us pesky leftists.

But if the right loves America so much, why do they keep subsidizing the corporations that foul our air, despoil our coasts, and clear-cut our forests? Just how patriotic is the Bush administration's new rule that allows mining companies to shear off the tops of our purple-mountain'd majesty and dump them into our streams? Don't you think we could express our love of country a little better by tightening up those fuel economy standards, instead of squeezing the Middle East for more fuel for our Hummers?

Now that reminds me. Why does the right keep making so many enemies for our country? You know, like overthrowing elected governments in Iran and Chile and so on, or backing torture-happy juntas in Turkey and Pakistan, or paying for proxy terrorists in Nicaragua and Angola, or subsidizing the occupation of East Timor and the West Bank. Didn't the left keep saying, "Um, excuse us, if we keep supporting violence and terrorism abroad, it might come back to haunt us"? And we're the unpatriotic ones?

Oh, but that's where we got started here. Any time we criticize US foreign policy, we're making excuses for the terrorists. I guess it's inconceivable that the left could love America enough to want us to stop making new enemies. Well, okay, America. If invading Iraq doesn't work out as nicely as planned, you might give us a call. We still have a few ideas, and, gosh, we just love ya to pieces. Write sometime! After all, who gave you votes for women and blacks, and the weekend, and overtime, and retirement pay, and family leave? Your old pals on the left. God love ya.