I was born in 1969 shortly after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. My earliest political memory is the funeral of Harry S Truman at the end of 1972. I don’t remember anything else political until Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. My father’s anger was so raw that I never forgot it, and I never once considered becoming a Republican.
Sometimes I feel like I am living through an alternate universe where Richard Nixon was never forced to resign, or where the Ford administration never came to an end. It’s almost like the Democrats never had a crushing midterm election in 1974, like Jimmy Carter was never elected President, and legislation banning secret campaign financing and illegal domestic surveillance was never signed into law.
Looking at the present situation, it looks increasingly like the Huston Plan has gone into effect. I look around and see G. Gordon Liddy and Tex Colson on the radio, John Dean and Pat Buchanan on the television. I see Donald Rumsfeld is still the Secretary of Defense, and Dick Cheney has moved up from Chief-of-Staff to leader of the free world. And if I temporarily wake up from my nightmare and realize that is not really 1975, I sometimes think it is 1986. When I see Iran-Contra figures like John Poindexter, Michael Ledeen, Richard Armitage, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, John Negroponte, and Oliver North either holding positions of public trust or positions of public prestige…I simply have a hard time believing my eyes.
All my life the same cast of characters has been involved in wrecking the peace, hyping the threats, violating our rights, and increasing our national debt while increasing our military budgets.
I don’t know how we lost the battle. I don’t know how we got back here from there. Sometimes is seems like all the years combine and melt into a dream. Maybe it’s true:
It all rolls into one
and nothing comes for free
There’s nothing you can hold
for very long
It amazes me that all our work has failed to prevent this. But I don’t know what else to do but roll up my sleeves, like Sisyphus, shrug, and start pushing this damn rock back up this damn hill.
