It is a week of historical memories and, therefore, an important time for American social and cultural reflection.
I still remember clearly where I was when John F. Kennedy was murdered. I was a 17 year old E-1 at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. On that cold November day we returned from artillery field exercises prematurely; all activities had been cancelled upon hearing the news that our Commander In Chief had been gunned down. We were given the rest of the day off to hang out around a TV set watching the Oswald-Ruby events unfold.
Such remembrances are usually written about in the fall on significant anniversaries of Kennedy's assassination but this year, with the special emphasis on Martin Luther King, many other things come to my mind out of season.
While my three year Army service was just beginning in 1963, I had been home for quite a while and was working as a staff writer for The Fresno Guide in California when King was killed. A short time later when Robert Kennedy was gunned down a lot of us wondered aloud at what our world was turning into. Martin, Bobby and John; it seemed to us at the time that we were in the midst of a chaotic fall into anarchy.
Now in retrospect I realize that in the short span of five years America had lost its innocence. The drawbridge leading to Camelot had been rolled up and the wonderful life that it had promised had been shunted into exile, not only surrounded by a formidable moat but by an overgrowth of briars and brambles as well.
Lyndon Johnson tried to keep things on path but the times and his ability to respond to them were just not the right combination. We were hopelessly mired in Vietnam and Johnson was pulled into the quicksand against his will.
Johnson had also alienated Southern Democrats with his push for Civil Rights legislation and Richard M. Nixon, along with his Republican cronies, took advantage of the falling out along racial lines in his subsequent claiming of the presidency. When the evils of Nixon produced the Jimmy Carter Administration, Republicans knew it was only a temporary setback.
Ronald Reagan revitalized the Southern Democrats with his code words and convinced them that it was important that they vote against their own financial interests in order to save their social standing. Then, with voodoo economics in full force, Reagan looted the Social Security system in order to obscure a mind-blowing deficit that lived on into the first George Bush Administration and is further amplified today under the Bush baby.
In the forum section of the May 2008 edition of Playboy, Eric Alterman presents some fascinating information. Since 1960 the federal deficit has averaged $131 billion under Republican presidents, while Democrats have kept it at about $30 billion; on average a Republican year sees the deficit grow by $36 billion, while under Democrats it shrinks by $25 billion. National debt has increased more than $200 billion a year under Republican presidents and less than $100 billion a year under Democrats.
The top 0.1 percent of Americans, who earn more than $10 million a year, pay a lesser share of their income in taxes than those who make between $100,000 and $200,000. Meanwhile, the average CEO of a 500 company took home $13.5 million in total compensation in 2005, a year in which the top one percent of Americans earned nearly 22 percent of all income.
Republicans, who claim to hold dear the concept of smaller government, invariably make the government bigger and bigger. Like the bad guys in Nottingham they steal from the poor and give to the rich.
It isn't that hard to figure out that, historically speaking, it is past time for the vast majority of Americans to stop listening to the tales of petty, artificial, divisiveness. The thing that a mother in the hood and a redneck in a southern mountain town have in common is that neither one of them owns stock in Halliburton and neither one has health insurance for their children.
It is time for the majority of Americans to vote in favor of their own financial interest. It is time to clear away the brush and lower the drawbridge of hope.