When I was young, I used to wish that I’d been born in 1947 so that I could have experienced the tumultuous '60s myself. I imagined a twenty-something me in a paisley mini dress with frizzy hair and smooth words leading a generation in its fight against war and corrupt politicians (conflating the early '70s into my vision) to a soundtrack of Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi, and Janice. I wanted exciting times. And then it happened. I got my wish. Except that it turns out that the transgressions of our self-serving leaders appear far uglier than those of past villains when witnessed contemporaneously and as a grown-up.
It all started with Trump’s campaign announcement. No, wait, it all started with Trump’s battle against President Obama’s "citizenship." Hold on, it all started with the 2010 midterm success of the Tea Party…or the Tea Party’s war against Obamacare. Maybe we need to go back further, to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America and his iron-fist rule over congressional Republicans. Although, there was the 1993 battle against Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health-care-reform campaign, not to mention about a hundred other battles waged against her in a greater war that’s opening shots were aimed at her hairband and her use of her own last name. Then again, President Ronald Reagan is the one who made “government” a bad word and brought us the “gag rule.” Of course, revelations about the Vietnam War’s grossly inflated body counts and false optimism did a number on our trust in government, too
But really, it all started with Richard Milhous Nixon, an unimpressive politician who was carried to the presidency by an American public reeling from civil rights protests and spurned integration, the Vietnam War, Vietnam War protests, a steep rise in crime, creeping poverty, and a cultural revolution that brought sex, hallucinogens, and wild music to the sleeping masses. Nixon wasn’t pretty, but he was going to bring law and order to a messy world. He was going to make “it” all go away. Until he made it worse. And he got caught breaking the law and covering it up. And the people lost faith in government. And Reagan capitalized on that. The Heritage Foundation and Moral Majority had already started their work creating a Republican Party that could withstand a shrinking constituency. And Gingrich rose to power and started changing the way the House of Representatives did business, tactics that were eventually adopted by the Senate. And moderate Republicans began to get voted out of office while the Tea Party complained that the GOP was not draconian enough. The NRA rose in power, fueling Tea Party candidacies. Political shows started covering Trump’s political nonsense, eventually seizing Birtherism and making it their own until they snapped up Trump and he made them his own.
And here we are. Babies in cages and airless vans, hate speech and violence raging from the top down, voting rights trampled indiscriminately by Republican state officeholders and the GOP generally, women’s reproductive freedoms and gender freedoms severely eroded, regressive tax cuts growing an already bulging national debt and deficit, the inexplicable use of tariffs against friends and foes alike, pervasive and unprecedented corruption, NATO and worldwide democratic alliances under siege, treason at the highest levels, and nuclear codes in the hands of a narcissistic and largely ignorant president. I wanted exciting times, and that is what I got. In case wishes are horses, apologies for the wishes of a naïve kid.