08-09-2022, 09:49 AM
(08-04-2022, 09:25 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:I shall now attempt a paragraph by paragraph response:(08-03-2022, 11:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Agree with all, except for letting Reagan off the hook. He did the same thing to AIDS as Trump did with covid. He instituted neoliberalism which has led to our current plight: climate breakdown, severe inequality, police assaults, rampant gun violence, you name it, it can all be put at the doorstep of the corrupt Ronald Reagan. He was an extremist, not a moderate. Trump is just Reagan with a bit of economic nationalism added, and racism TRUMPeted instead of just alluded to. Trump has taken Reagan's neoliberal assault on the environment to an extreme.
Flawed as Reagan was, he was much more rational than Donald Trump. He was a standing joke for environmentalists of the time for seeing trees solely as lumber and paper. Unpleasant as it may be to admit, he was in the mainstream at the time on homosexuality, still believing that most gays fit the pattern of child-molesting "chicken-hawks", people definitely to be avoided if one is a boy. guess what? Forty years later the child-molesting pervs are even more marginalized, as the homosexuals in fully-adult relationships have become the mainstream. Reagan was also a more adept politician.
Yes, he was a nightmare for the poor; he had come to the believe that Corporate America was the engine of economic progress without which social progress (which he defined as consumerism) was impossible. He was the bête noir of environmentalists who saw trees as more than lumber and paper. America is not what it was in the 1980's. The shopping-mall "culture" that peaked when Reagan was President no longer excites us. Let's not forget his attitude toward organized labor. By current standards, Reagan was the front-man for the trend of increasing disparities of economic results with the intensification of poverty as a norm. Reagan believed as did Corporate America in jobs -- just in not paying people adequately to live on those. The corporate solutions to inadequate pay on the jobs was for people to work two such jobs, which makes one as much a consumer but more a toiler.
Trump is Reagan's faults on steroids with none of the rationality, including the ability to back off when one sees dissent. Trump loves to hear people express grief and pain when hurt, and he turns up the pain-creating stimulus when he hears or sees such. Trump is a sadistic sociopath. He is far less astute than Reagan. He can never back down hen facts contradict him. He is responsive to only the anti-scientific, superstitious part of the American populace that got him elected.
The big problem with AIDS was that gays were still pariahs in much of America. The popular view was that they were "chicken-hawks" who exploited boys. The loudest ones of the 1970's were the NAMbLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association. The majority of homosexuals were men who could love men but not women... well, I can accept that. There but for the Grace of God go I, but if I were gay I would certainly never mess with boys. Gays had to change their behavior if they were to not be ravaged, and many caught on. Use a condom and develop monogamy... and stay away from street drugs. Medical transmission was easier to stop after people found that people were contracting AIDS from recklessly-discarded needles, skin grafts, and blood transfusions. Medical personnel changed their ways fast. The slowest to get the message were users of injectable drugs such as heroin. Many such people are prostitutes, obvious vectors of AIDS.
People had to change their ways to avoid getting a deadly disease. COVID-19 isn't AIDS, but much that medical science and public health have learned from AIDS has been applied to COVID-19, even if the methods of transmission are quite different. The hardest part was to compel people to do things that reduce the spread. None of it was easy, but that had to be done before the more definitive prevention was available (the vaccine). Trump failed to debunk the COVID-19 "truthers" who offered everything other than a rational response. Trump somehow felt their pain about wearing masks, frequent hand-washing, sanitary wiping, amd avoiding mass activities. Who says that reality is easy to deal with? That is all that we have.
I used Reagan in full knowledge of his faults -- and his ability to get a coherent message across. That difference is enough to suggest how horrid Trump was as President.
P1: I don't know if any of you follow Thom Hartmann's program which can be heard on a handful of progressive-minded radio stations and also on YouTube, but he has often laid so many of our current problems, including the rise of Trump, squarely at Reagan's feet. You can find many clips on YT that pertain to this. His busting of the unions in 1981 proved to be in many minds including my own, the requiem for middle class prosperity as it had come to be known. By 1987 we had a greater homeless problem than at any time since the Great Depression. In addition to the lumber and paper comment, he was also credited with declaring ketchup to be a vegetable.
P2: Regarding RWR's attitude on jobs, there was a story I read in which the so-called Paycheck to Paycheck crowd often has to work two jobs for the same pay that one job once provided. They are for the most part a luckless lot, stuck in place, with very little room for escape save for some stroke of luck such as a lottery win. They were labeled Generation LIMBO. All caps because, from the information given I was able to create the perfect acronym. Lower Income Mostly Beyond Overhaul.
P3: I thought about the steroids remark a few time, but you are the first I have actually heard use it. Perhaps fitting because it was during the Reagan years when Trump first hit the cultural landscape as a celebrity real estate developer. One time I did actually talk with a woman who had met him along with his recently deceased first wife. She was of the opinion that he was easier to talk with than she was.
P4: The AIDS scare definitely slammed the brakes on the sexual revolution, and not long after what was labeled the cocooning movement set in where one-time partiers were spending weekend night at home watching movies on their VCRs (now obsolete) and eating, say, takeout teriyaki. Demand for takeout food exploded some three decades before the convenience obsession went even further with home delivery now being nearly everywhere. Seems to me though that Americans tend to be homebodies during three out of the four turnings, that only during an Awakening is the sanctity of home and hearth seriously challenged.
P5: There is still much debate as to whether the mass lockdowns which decimated many if not most businesses for a period of several months was the way to go. Much of the residue remains despite a somewhat return to normalcy. People going out to eat again, etc. Thought not quite a return to previous congestion levels.