Toto, we’re not in California anymore

So, I’m driving through western Nebraska, listening to the early 90’s song “What is Love?” (Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more) doing the head bobbing thing from Saturday Night Live, and the upbeat female dj comes on to say “bringing you the best hits from the Reagan era.” You just wouldn’t hear that in California. Politically, we remember it not for the relentless optimism and nobility with which he saw our country, but with how far his actions fell from that idyllic vision. In many ways we still have very real reminders of how far his policies fell short of his vision as both Governor and President. While Governor he cut funding for mental institutions causing many of them to close down and send mental patients into the street. It is not a long walk you need to take in the Tenderloin to know that we still haven’t fixed the problem. While President, the courting of Saddam Hussein, the illicit and illegal arms trafficking to Iran, the closeness to a number of oppressive and autocratic governments in Latin American can’t help but betray the nobility of purpose he so effectively communicated to the country. Foreign policy is a complex network of relationships, and the reality of brokering among the international stage is that you have to deal with some awful dictators, but the reality is that cold war politics of the international powers ignored what was best for the country and set many of them back decades because of our intervention. We have the refugees to prove it. He left us in economic ruin for the sake of huge tax cuts for the rich. I don’t say this to condemn Reagan, only to diffuse the idyllic glare his specter still emits. It is unfair to our own sense of history and what we can learn from it to pretend that he gracefully ended the cold war, and united the country around a vision. Because it wasn’t like that, and his conflicted legacy doesn’t belong in my 80’s head-bobbing parties.

On my way into Utah, I was listening to the radio in the Salt Lake City Area. An ad came on to celebrate Toys for Tots 60-year anniversary and encourage people to give toys for children who might not otherwise get them. It was a fairly standard Toys for Tots commercial, talking about lighting up a child’s Christmas, and encouraging people to give a toy. But the end jumped out at me. Someone somewhere felt compelled to provide justification for giving a needy child a toy. The end of the commercial ended with something like “Your toy will help a young child grow up into a responsible productive, patriotic citizen.” Wow. It is a sad day when we can’t even feel compassionate to poor kids without justifying it to ourselves that this child will be more likely to subscribe to the value set that I currently subscribe to. It just strikes me as a very conditional and disingenuous compassion they are appealing to.