The technology of death vs. life

The New Neo Posted on by

I was watching a feature on CNN today that mentioned that terrorist bombers make a special effort to have their explosives go off in an enclosed space because it maximizes the carnage. Thus, today’s London subway bombers may have timed their bombs to detonate not only on the subway, but also while the trains were in a tunnel.

The report described some studies from Israel, a country which has experienced more of these terrorist events than anyone else (with Iraq no doubt taking a close second). Apparently, the Israelis have found that one of the advantages of having security guards posted at the entrance to nearly every public place is that bombers who are spotted by guards are often forced to set off their explosives prematurely, in an open rather than a closed area. In this way the guards often sacrifice their own lives to prevent more people from dying.

That’s certainly heroic under any definition of the word. I am amazed at how many people are willing to take on such a task. As much as the existence of suicide bombers depresses me and makes me wonder about the future of humanity, the presence of guards–as well as those volunteering for police duty in Iraq–reassures me.

In the first few months after 9/11, and during the later escalation of bombings in Israel as the intifada heated up, as well as the Madrid bombings, I often wondered what a nation can do to deal with such awful possibilities. In this country, we’ve been remiss about the need to have more checkpoints and guards, because we are loathe to surrender our freedom. In addition, over the nearly four years since 9/11, we’ve been lulled into what may be a false sense of security by the relative calm here.

I’ve heard the argument that security guards won’t do much anyway, because then the bombers will just seek out different targets and use other methods, such as blowing themselves up on a city street. And while that is no doubt true, today’s CNN piece reminded me that the presence of guards would still be likely to make it more difficult for bombers to kill the maximum number of people possible.

War and violence have historically been limited by technology, and as technology advances, the opportunities to kill advance. This has always been true, and defenses against weapons have always lagged behind the invention of the weaponry itself. For example, suicide bombings on a subway would not have been possible but for the invention of lightweight explosives–in the olden days, the sheer volume of explosives necessary would have made it impossible to carry enough on one’s person to do widespread damage.

We are still scrambling to figure out the proper response. I doubt it will be a single technology, and it won’t happen overnight. History tells us that human ingenuity coupled with human rage dictates that new technologies of destruction will be developed and used, and that we will always be scrambling to defend ourselves against them. So far, the forces of humanity and preservation have prevailed, but it hasn’t been easy, and the death toll has been high, particularly in the 20th century. So far, the 21st seems to be continuing the trend.

Thoughts on the terrorist strike in London

The New Neo Posted on by

Some disjointed thoughts from me on the abominable bombings in London, which were timed for rush hour to maximize the loss of innocent life:

Dennis Ross on Fox News just now. He expressed something that many of us have been thinking for some time now, but that one rarely hears a diplomat say (this is not an exact quote from him, but it is more or less what he said):

The War on Terror is a misnomer. Terror is just a method. This is really a war on Islamic fanaticism.

And Tony Blair used a word I’d been thinking of: barbarians–the type of word that just a few years ago I would have thought to be as archaic as the historic barbarians themselves. Blair looked angry, too, in his statement, a restrained but white-hot clenched-teeth sort of fury: The purpose of terrorism is just that–to terrorize–and we will not be terrorized.

Ross also mentioned another thing I’d been thinking about, that attacks such as these in London are paradoxical for Al Qaeda. They want to show us they are still active and determined to strike with impunity and great viciousness. On the other hand, attacks such as this on the civilian population, designed to cause a “Spain effect” (appeasement and withdrawal), can instead cause some who would otherwise sympathize with the terrorists and/or make excuses for them to harden their hearts and their resolve against them. Let’s hope for the latter from the Brits, who certainly showed a great deal of grit in the past when faced with the Blitz.

I am glad that there doesn’t seem to have been any of this “maybe it’s the IRA” business that would have paralleled what initially happened in Spain and that caused a backlash there in some of the populace against the government. This present attack had all the earmarks of Al Qaeda from the beginning. Unfortunately, from bitter repetition, we now know only too well what those earmarks are.

The terrible stunned and traumatized look on the faces of the bloodied survivors of the bombing also brings back 9/11 memories.
It seems an amazing coincidence to me that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in London today for the bombing. Who better to address Londoners and to empathize with how they feel right now? Watching him speak brings back for me those first days after 9/11, when he showed previously unguessed-at fortitude and leadership.

For more, Norm Geras offers a guide to local news on the subject of the London bombings.

Political change: unidirectional?

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Hitchens made some interesting statements in this interview (via Seekerblog).

Here’s Hitchens describing an experience he had while in Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War, at a time when he positively hated George Bush Sr.:

I was bouncing around in a jeep with some Kurdish guerillas at that point. And on my side of the windshield, there was a big laminated picture of George H. W. Bush. And I said to them, “Look, comrades, do you have to do this? For one thing, I can’t see out of my side of the windshield. But for another, I know quite a few reporters in this area and might run into one of them at any moment. And I don’t want them seeing me in a jeep that has this guy’s image on it. So do you have to?” And they said, quite soberly and solemnly to me, “No, we think we should have this picture because we think, without him, we would all be dead, and all our families would be dead, too.” And from what I’d seen by then in that region, I thought, that’s basically morally true. I don’t have a reply to that. I don’t have a glib one and I don’t have a sound one. It’s true. So at that point my criticism of the war became this: that it had not been a regime-change war, that the slogans of liberty and justice that had been used to mobilize it had not been honored. But if they had been, I would have been in favor of it. It’s a narrow but deep crevasse to cross, and once you’ve crossed it, I’ll tell you this, you can’t go back over it again. You can’t find yourself on the other side of it. Some of you may be in transition across this crevasse yourselves or be thinking about it. I warn you: don’t cross over if you have any intention of going back, because you can’t.

He is speaking of a specific position regarding the justification for the Gulf War, but I think he is also speaking generally of political change and political changers.

It does appear, for the most part, to be a one-way street (except for Churchill, who famously said “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat”). It’s certainly not a path that’s commonly traversed–one of the major topics of my “change” series is how difficult the negotiation over that crevasse can be. But, once crossed, that path seems ordinarily to go in one direction only (hint: it’s the same way we read, left to right).

Why is this? Those on the right would say it’s because the position of the right is more grounded in facts, logic, and experience, and that of the left on hopes and dreams and wishes. The former tend to be the province of maturity, the latter of youth. The former can overrule the latter more easily than vice versa.

It’s an oversimplification, no doubt, but I think it has a certain validity nevertheless.

Sluggish

The New Neo Posted on by

This spring/summer so far has been unseasonably wet. Although ordinarily we’re not troubled too much by them, the other day while I was doing some gardening one of these lovelies crossed my path:


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The photo doesn’t really do it justice. There was the largeness of the thing, combined with its more-than-generous quotient of glistening slime, not to mention my surprise at seeing it sashaying around right out there in the open.

My immediate response was to want to kill it. I knew it was going to be feasting on plants I would rather it not eat. But since we don’t have that many slugs ordinarily here, I’d never gone about killing one before.

It quickly occurred to me that there seems to be a top limit on the size of the sort of thing I’m willing to squish with my foot, and that limit had definitely been reached long before we hit “slug” on the ladder of the animal kingdom. The same thing is true with flying creatures–I can do mosquitoes and flies, but I balk at those large moths.

My Japanese beetle routine, which involves plopping them into a jar of alcohol, didn’t feel adaptable to something this large, either. Pouring salt on it and watching it shrivel seemed like a bad prospect, too, as well as the trouble involved in the disposing of the corpse. So I watched it slink on by and did nothing.

Looking it up, I see that the suggested solutions are varied, but none seem ideal. Here is the best description I’ve found that explores the available recommended and non-recommended methods for offing a slug:

Now, how to kill the little buggers. The beer-in-the-tuna-can method has never been at all effective for me. The slugs hang over the edge and sip at the beer, but very few have ever fallen in. (They do seem quite partial to beer, however.) As for salt, some say it is extremely cruel, a feature that undoubtedly makes it more attractive to many. But the main disadvantage is this: if you salt or otherwise chemically attack slugs, they dump all their slime in their death throes–years’ worth at once! The stuff is ineradicable and you are stuck with a yard full of repulsive silvery slime globules.

I once entered the yard of a neighbor and found eight or ten slugs, impaled on a shish kebab skewer, writhing upright in her garden. “A deterrent,” she muttered darkly when I questioned her about this grisly spectacle.

Geese and skunks alone among members of the animal kingdom are said to eat slugs, and some keep them for this purpose. To my thinking, the spectacle is too revolting to endure.

My husband, to prove himself manly, has used the following method: he picks them up with his bare hands (geeklike behavior, in my opinion), and when they roll up in a ball (the burnt sienna-and-orange variety that plague my yard change shape from banana to papaya when attacked), he hurls them out into the street. Then he runs back and forth over them with the car. Charming behavior which I hope was not genetically transmitted to my children.

Perhaps I should just hope we return to our normal amount of rain.

Left vs. right: mistaken vs. evil?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I want to recommend this post by Clive Davis. He quotes Roger Scruton as saying that those on the left consider those on the right to be evil, whereas the right considers those on the left to be merely mistaken.

I think that, as a generalization, this holds up fairly well. But there is no question that there are numerous exceptions. There is a vocal segment on the right that considers the left to be evil. Recall the group that thought Clinton had murdered Vince Foster, for example, and you need look no further.

Scruton writes that, ” if I can persuade [those on the left] that I’m not evil, I find it a very useful thing.” I recall a similar effort at persuasion on my part. It worked with some of my friends and relatives, but didn’t work with others. But I resent, and still resent, their idea that any supporter of a hawkish or conservative cause should automatically be regarded as “evil until proven not-evil.” This was a revelation to me, and not a pleasant one.

Davis’s post goes on to quote writer Nick Cohen as crediting (or blaming?) his own change of heart on certain topics to having read Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism. (Hmm, perhaps that’s next on my list.) Here’s Cohen on the subject of changing one’s mind:

I didn’t see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry ‘Eureka!’ If I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’ He convinced me I’d wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I’d written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies.

I consider it highly ironic that, in his autobiography Radical Son, David Horowitz fingers none other than that very same Paul Berman as having been one of his most most vicious attackers when Horowitz underwent his own neocon conversion (I plan to say more about this topic in a subsequent post). Life is an interesting journey, is it not?

Report on the Fourth

The New Neo Posted on by

How was my Fourth of July? Just fine, thanks.

To begin with, the weather, which had been fairly vile for weeks, turned magnificent for the entire weekend. Unless your goal was to swim (which mine wasn’t), it was perfection itself. Of course, being a few degrees too cool for ideal swimming has never stopped most New Englanders from doing so–there were plenty of people at the local beaches.

I did the classic things: went to the family party of some friends of mine (pool, barbecued chicken, homemade apple and strawberry-rhubarb pies, all ages from the very elderly through one-year-olds). I brought along my ninety-one-year-old mother, and I wish I’d brought a camera, too, to photograph her extremely red-white-and-blue outfit. At night, I watched a half-hour long show of fireworks over the ocean with a crowd of onlookers including other friends of mine, their grown children, and their two absolutely adorable grandkids, who were delighted to hold a series of small sparklers in their careful little hands.

How about you?

Comet Wars

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but this story fired my imagination. It is the stuff of which science fiction movies are made.

My first reaction was sheer awe. But my second reaction was, “Hmmm, I guess Star Wars wasn’t such a completely ridiculous idea after all.” And in this case, I’m not talking about the movie.

Before I get a million, “You’ve got to be kidding, you idiot!” comments, let me just say that I Googled “Star Wars Reagan” and came up with about a million hits, the first twenty of which I checked out, and all were totally negative about the program. The technical and financial problems seem, to say the least, formidable (although I wouldn’t consider Frances Fitzgerald to be an objective judge of this particular situation).

The purpose of this post is merely to state that I wonder whether the comet probe success has any relevance to the task of missile interception.

Already, though, Star Wars hasn’t been a total loss. See this for the story. Since the BBC said it, you know it must be true; they wouldn’t be giving the program credit for anything if it hadn’t been fully earned.

Liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[The following is a post I wrote back in April, but it seems appropriate for the Fourth, too, so I’m repeating it.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York.

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a prepoderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced from what it must be at my house, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyachinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in 1965, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on every visit. So, what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth, restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me–I used to see it almost every day when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

The New Yorker wishes us a very happy Fourth of July

The New Neo Posted on by

In my recent “change” post I mentioned in passing that I still read the New Yorker, despite my disagreement with almost everything political in it.

I wrestle with the fact that I continue to support them by subscribing, but I can’t seem to break away (am I an enabler?). Every time I think it’s all over between us, they come up with something wonderful like Adam Gopnik’s “Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli” (no link on the Web, unfortunately) or this article about Bronson Alcott, by Geraldine Brooks.

I’ve just begun reading my latest issue, and already I’m angry. The date of the magazine is July 4, and the cover is entitled, “Party of One,” featuring a very glum and lonely Uncle Sam, sitting at a party table in front of a “Happy Birthday” cake festooned with candles. Ah, yes, back to the old “unilateralism” meme–although in this case Uncle Sam seems more shunned than shunning. He appears to have invited some guests–after all, there are place-settings on the table–but they are all no-shows. At any rate, for whatever reason, he’s all alone, and on his birthday, too.

But inside the issue there are far bigger problems than on the outside, although I’ve only gotten as far as the very first piece, the initial “The Talk of the Town” article. It’s written by editor-in-chief David Remnick, and in it he criticizes Edward Klein’s execrable gossip-mongering hatchet job on Hilary Clinton, “The Truth About Hilary,” a book which appears to consist mainly of rumors that she knows lesbians and is sexually cold.

My disagreement is not with Remnick’s critique of Klein’s book. The difficulty comes later. First, there is this passage, which is fine:

In better times, in a better world, the shoddiness of [Klein’s book’s] reporting and the vulgarity of its writing would place it safely beyond discussion. In our own time and place, though, such books are not only published but sell in the hundreds of thousands, and their toxicity has a habit of further poisoning the political groundwater.

“Such books;” indeed–for example, the recent abomination on the Bush family, written by Kitty Kelley. Remnick, to his credit, and despite his own Bush-hatred, does manage to make very brief mention of Kelley’s book, calling it a “trash biography.”

There are certainly many others of the genre from which to choose, including–it turns out–that of the New Yorker’s very own Seymour Hersh, who wrote the trash biography The Dark Side of Camelot back in 1997. It’s a good parallel to the Klein book, because of its concentration on the sex life of its subject, and its heavy use of anonymous sources (something of a trademark for Mr. Hersh).

But no, Remnick doesn’t mention it–although I can’t say I actually expected Remnick to critique the trash written by one of his own writers.

But what book does Mr. Remnick see fit to mention right after the above quote, as a parallel to “The Truth About Hillary?” Let’s see:

…further poisoning the political groundwater. In the last election cycle, the Kerry campaign was slow to recognize the importance of the Swift Boat slander, and, by the time it did, the damage could not be undone.

So, a book containing not a single sexual innuendo or anonymous source is compared with one composed of nothing but. A book that is written by a group of men who served heroically in Vietnam, all of whom go on the record to make their allegations up front and have plenty of documentation to back up their claims, is compared to a shadowy bunch of sexual insinuations. I strongly suspect that Remnick has not even read Unfit for Command, a tightly reasoned book that actually reads a great deal like a legal affidavit.

Maybe the Fourth of July isn’t the best time to read the New Yorker.

The lesser of two evils: responsibility

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section of my Reagan post, an interesting question came up. How responsible are politicians (or, as they used to be called, statesmen–now we’d have to say “statespeople” instead) for the consequences of their actions? Are they responsible for all of them? Should they be able to have foreseen everything?

Of course not–but how much foresight is it reasonable to require of them? How much is humanly possible? And do we understand that there are no actions one can take in the political realm that don’t have some negative consequences?

Commenter “Huan” had the following excellent point to make: people are responsible for their actions, but “the lines of guilt only go so far”–otherwise the arguments will resemble “butterfly wing flutter causing a hurricane bizarro world” absurdities.

That’s a pretty good description of some of the arguments I’ve heard from the left that attribute every evil on earth to the actions of the United States. Although the entire science of ethics is an attempt to make the best and most moral decisions knowing that, in the real world, a perfect decision is not possible, sometimes it seems to me as though the left is dedicated to ignoring that obvious fact (except, of course, on the not-so-rare occasions when they themselves have been the ones making the decisions with the terrible consequences).

(Huan’s “butterfly wing flutter” is a reference, by the way, to chaos theory, which states that there are always unpredictable results to any event.)

I read a story a while back that brought the point home to me that no one can know the ultimate effects of their (or anyone’s) actions. I read it so long ago that I don’t remember the book, so I can’t offer a link, but the author was talking about an incident in Hitler’s early adulthood:

During Hitler’s “struggling artist” days he went through a period in which he was down and out. He wanted desperately to be a painter, but was twice refused entrance by the Academy of Arts in Vienna. He even stayed for a time in a shelter for the homeless. At one point, he became desperately ill and was in fact near death, but was found by a kindly couple who took him in and nursed him back to health.

So here we have three acts that might have changed the course of history. If only the Academy had thought better of his art, he might have finished out his life as a journeyman painter. If the homeless shelter hadn’t fed and housed him, would he have survived? And of course that kindly Good Samaritan couple, the protagonists of the story that grabbed my attention–did they later have reason to regret their well-intentioned act? In one version, I think the couple even may have been Jewish–which makes me think the story was apocryphal. But no matter–true or not, it illustrates a point.

Obviously, these acts are somewhat different than the decisions a politician faces when deciding whether to support the lesser of two evils. Feeding the homeless, nursing the ill–surely, these are unambiguously good acts, and we would never want people to stop performing them. But, like the flutter of those butterfly wings, we can’t ignore the fact that even unequivocably moral acts can have terrible consequences. However, we cannot hold the people committing those acts responsible for all those consequences–even though, if they were to learn of those consequences, they themselves might feel terribly guilty.

Politicians make decisions constantly, and must bear the consequences. But, in judging the degree of their responsibility, we need to be cognizant of what they knew at the time, what could have been reasonably predicted as consequences–and, most especially, what were the available alternatives, and what were the likely consequences of not acting.

That’s an awful lot to chew on. It’s far easier to make facile criticisms that assume the 20/20 perfection of hindsight.

One of the best writers on the scene–and yes, a neocon, although certainly not a neo-neocon–is Charles Krauthammer. He recently wrote a highly recommended article (hat tip: Dr. Sanity). It features, among many other things, an excellent discussion of the “lesser of two evils” dilemma. If you have a moment, please take a look.

From military draft to all-volunteer force: some history

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently came across an article on the history of the all-volunteer military. I found it fascinating, and so I thought I’d call your attention to it.

Prior to reading it, if you’d asked me to sketch the history of how the draft ended and the volunteer military began, I would have said something like this, “The antiwar sentiment that grew during the Vietnam War fed a growing anger and discontent in the American public about the draft. With the policy of Vietnamization, the US profile in Vietnam was much reduced, so that by 1973 Nixon and Congress were able to do the popular thing and end the draft.”

I would still imagine that this scenario played some role in the draft’s end, although the article doesn’t go into it. And, as part of the Nixon library website, there’s no doubt that the piece is inclined to put Nixon in the best light possible.

One of the most interesting points the article makes is that proposals for an all-volunteer military were floated seriously way back in the Fifties:

…the end of the draft was proposed by Adlai Stevenson during his campaign for President in 1956. President Eisenhower earlier had called for universal military service as a substitute for haphazard conscription. Neither approach drew strong support.

But the calls for the end of the draft were not a Democratic monopoly; both sides got into the act. As a matter of fact, it appears that support for the all-volunteer Army was somewhat more a Republican than a Democratic thing (a fact which is open to different interpretations, depending on what one thinks of the Republican Party). Barry Goldwater made it part of his campaign in 1964, something I certainly don’t recall.

Other names that are very familiar come up in connection with this story: …Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan veered from the field of economics to argue support for the end of the draft.

And look at this: A very vocal volunteer force supporter was a young congressman from Illinois, Don Rumsfeld. Now, there’s consistency for you.

Rumsfeld’s anti-draft activities occurred at the beginning of Nixon’s first term. I was surprised to learn that Nixon had made the all-volunteer Army proposal a part of his 1968 Presidential campaign. It makes me wonder why more of the young men subject to the draft didn’t vote for Nixon as a result; perhaps they thought that Dick was just being Tricky. But Nixon continued to pursue the idea quite early in his Presidency, and was consistent in supporting it strongly, sometimes against quite a bit of opposition–including opposition from the Pentagon and many Republicans.

There is evidence that if Watergate had come any earlier, the legislation to end the draft might have fallen by the wayside:

Even with major public debate and a strong White House lobbying and public relations campaign, it took until mid-1973,almost eight months after Nixon’s 1972 reelection, for Congress to end selective service. With Watergate looming more and more on the scene and Nixon’s strength with congress diminishing, the draft might still be in effect had it not been approved at that time.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Reagan and me

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s “change” post, commenter “someone” asked what I thought of Reagan at the time of his Presidency.

I had thought to go into that topic in the body of the “change” post, but it was already so long I decided to skip it. But, on second thought, it might be interesting to describe my reaction to Reagan during those years, because I think there may be a few clues there as to my later “conversion.”

In the comments section, TmjUtah wrote:

“If Neo was getting her external political input from TV, the NY Times, and the New Yorker, just what kind of perceptions could she have had of Reagan?

Amiable, homophobic, trigger happy, washed up actor managed by dark cabals of corporate masters and Jesus freaks might come pretty close to the mark – but I may be presuming too much here.

Well, actually, TmjUtah is at least half right. I definitely believed (and still believe, to tell you the truth) the “amiable” and “washed-up actor” part. As for the rest, my reaction was more complex.

Reagan’s first term occurred during the years when my son was very small, and I was, quite simply put, intensely sleep-deprived. He was a wonderful kid (my son, not Reagan), but he was a terrible, terrible sleeper. So my already-depleted store of energy for politics was practically nil at the time–I was in a sort of survival mode. I could pay considerably more attention during Reagan’s second term, although not as much attention as I should have.

I can tell you, though, that even then, I formed my own opinions rather than march in lockstep with the Times or the other publications. However, as TmjUtah rightly points out, those press organs were the conduits by which I received my information, and the information was therefore dominated by some fairly intense criticism of Reagan. But there were some facts in there, too, and I mulled those over as best I could. In addition, I had my own personal perceptions of Reagan from the few speeches (or excerpts of speeches) and press conferences I managed to see.

I felt, on a personal level, that Reagan was extremely opaque–that is, I couldn’t read him. His speeches seemed to me to be very polished performances, but I couldn’t decide whether he was sincere, or whether the avuncular actor was the person I was seeing. I felt (rightly or wrongly) that it was the latter. But I wasn’t sure.

The same with his intelligence. As with my later perception of George W. Bush (I’ll get to that in a subsequent “change” post), Reagan didn’t seem stupid to me. He was coherent, for example. I felt I couldn’t tell whether he actually was stupid, as so many asserted, and was being fed lines that he was reading with a certain corniness component, or whether he was actually quite bright. Remember the old Saturday Night Live sketch that presented Reagan as a doddering old fool in public, and then, once the press and visitors were away, he turned into a sharp-as-a-tack taskmaster to his staff, quick and on-target with every utterance? It was a joke, all right, and I laughed uproariously, but one of the reasons I laughed so hard was that I wondered whether it was true.

In terms of Reagan’s actual policies–again, I wasn’t paying strict attention, but I certainly got the general idea. And here’s where it gets really interesting. I mainly kept my mouth shut about it in polite company, but I didn’t see what was so awful about Reagan’s foreign policy. What was perceived by others as his bellicosity and simplisme didn’t seem so out of place to me. After all, the Soviet Union had been guilty of many crimes, disarmament wasn’t going to be achieved in a world that still had conflicts, and so on and so forth. I kept my mouth shut partly because I didn’t have the courage of my convictions–they were barely even “convictions,” but more like hazy perceptions. I figured I wasn’t really knowledgeable, like those journalists and other experts who were saying he was a doofus and in particular that his foreign policy was going to lead to this or that terrible event (remember, this was before the fall of the Soviet Union, so the “experts” were still expert to me).

Something in my gut didn’t buy what they were saying. But I figured maybe I just didn’t know enough. I still self-identified as a liberal Democrat, and in the elections of 1984 and 1988 I voted for the Democratic candidates without a moment’s hesitation. One reason was that I wasn’t keen on Reagan’s domestic policies, especially his economic ones. I was not on firm ground here, either (those of you who read this blog regularly are familiar with my extreme shakiness on economics), but I was with George Bush Senior on characterizing trickle-down economics as voodoo economics. More to the point, I personally perceived the gap between the rich and the poor, or even the middle-class (where I found myself) growing by leaps and bounds. Many of my own friends pulled away from the pack and became super-rich during this decade, while just as many (who hadn’t had financial problems previously) started to struggle economically. I also didn’t agree with his conservative judicial appointments.

Was I enthusiastic about Mondale or Dukakis? Who could be? Perhaps their wives; certainly not me! But, lukewarm though I might be about their inspirational qualities, they were the Democratic candidates, I was a Democrat, and I thought they would be better than Reagan and then Bush senior. Did I think deeply about it? No, for the aforementioned reasons. If you had suggested to me at the time that I might have, or should have, voted for the Republican candidates, I would have thought you were stark raving mad.

So, perhaps I was already somewhat of a neocon after all, and didn’t know it: socially and domestically liberal, more hawkish in the foreign arena. I’d never even heard the term “neocon” at the time, although I did know there were “Reagan Democrats.” But I was not one of them.

I think I am an example of the strength of party affiliation. Most people need a much greater jolt than I received during the 80s, and much more time and energy to reflect on the situation than I was able to give to it, to actually abandon their party affiliation, if it had been strong previously. And mine had been very strong indeed.

9/11 provided that much much greater jolt and motivation. I also had more time and more energy, as well as (and this is especially important) new and different sources of information that were easily accessibile to me.

But that’s the story I will tell in subsequent installments of my “change” series. Please tune in.