What’s Up with Airport Amnesia?

God bless wireless Internet connections. Because I need to vent to somebody about my current predicament as I wait for my connecting flight out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and -- since all of the somebodies in my immediate vicinity seem to be wearing gator-skin boots and/or “United We Stand” tees -- I’ve decided that the more favorable, less-likely-to-whoop-my-ass candidate is you.

What I’d like to vent about is this: Several hours ago, I was standing in an enormous security screening line at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, reading a very good book entitled -- rather fortuitously -- Resisting Reagan: the U.S. Central America Peace Movement. Out of the blue, a slender woman waiting behind me gave my shoulder a tap. “I hope you know, girl,” she said, “that Ronald Reagan is the best leader our country’s ever had.”

Hmmm...I paused for a second. I seriously contemplated looking this complete stranger in the eye and reciting the paragraph she had just interrupted, the one in which the author recounts a particularly haunting practice of the Reagan-funded, U.S.-trained military forces in El Salvador during the mid-80s:

“They take an entire family from their home, and the next day the bodies are found strung up in the outskirts of the town with their faces tied together, as if kissing each other... Disfigured bodies began to appear with signs that read, ‘Merry Christmas, people. We are ridding you of terrorists.’ ... By 1985, right-wing death squads alone had murdered more than forty thousand Salvadorans.”

But I figured this might be inappropriate security line banter. And I was too genuinely tongue-tied to articulate how I feel about a president who funneled $9.5 billion annually into supporting these unthinkable death squads; into training the Nicaraguan Contras to gouge out the eyes and genitals of community leaders who were sympathetic to “the enemy”; and into fortifying a genocidal regime in Guatemala that destroyed over 440 villages and slaughtered more than 100,000 indigenous people.

So I just smiled and said, “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”

And now, I’m eating a Cinnabon here in the airport in Houston, and my loss for words is starting to catch up with me. Of course, I’m already feeling pretty annoyed that the cheapest way I can get to Leon, Mexico for a conference about feminist perspectives on globalization is by flying through RONALD REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT AND GEORGE BUSH INTERCONTINENTAL AIRPORT. But this is further compounded by the realization that my own speechlessness about Reagan’s unforgivable role in Central America reflects a much larger, collective inability of today's social justice movements to combat national amnesia about the Great Communicator’s true legacy. Even more abstractly, it reminds me of our failure to hold U.S. presidencies accountable for their often-problematic interventions around the globe--from the fincas of El Salvador to the trenches of Iraq to the militarized ghettoes here at home.

I can think of no other explanation for why a man with such an unsettling human rights record could have a national airport named after him, and then go on to win the Discovery Channel’s “Greatest American” contest over candidates like Ben Franklin and Martin Luther King.

Folks, we’re getting our butts whipped in the battle over communal memory, over the definition of historical “facts.”

And so, I’m writing you not only for the sake of catharsis, but also to pledge that I won’t stop searching for the right words to address all future Reagan-lionizing airport companions until I can fly from Delores Huerta National Airport to Emma Goldman Internationalism Airport.

History may be written by the victors, but let’s hope it can also be revised by frustrated bloggers and others who are willing to almost miss their planes in order to set the record straight.