The Reagan Decade
Published January 14, 1990 in North Shore Sunday.
For liberals
in the 80s, the decade seemed to take a century to end. What a beating we took. 80s liberals played Roberto Duran to Ronald
Reagan's Sugar Ray Leonard, and long before the decade was over, Reagan had us
whimpering No mas. It was pathetic.
What was
it like to be a liberal in the 80s?
Well, if
you were a liberal in the 80s, everyone you argued with sounded like Morton
Downey, Jr.
Liberals
in the 80s were like Bill Buckner letting an easy grounder bounce through his
legs while the other side kept rounding the bases.
It was
like being in a crowded theater watching a movie and laughing at all the wrong
parts.
80s
liberals championed the protection of endangered species mainly because
liberals, as a group, were one of them.
If you
ever stood in a ballpark singing "God Bless America" while everybody
else sang the National Anthem, you know too well what it was like to be a
liberal in the 80s.
Liberals
who survived the 80s tell chilling tales of horrible nightmares, like the one
where youthful idealists of the 80s shout slogans such as:
And then
there is the nightmare where an 80s-style Martin Luther King is holding
thousands spellbound: "I have a
dream today – I have a dream that one day all men will be judged not by the
color of their skin, but by the content of their investment portfolios." Yes, if
you were a believer in the L-word during the Greed Decade, you know what it's
like to bang your head against a wall. Being a
liberal in the 80s was like running in a crowded Boston Marathon – in the wrong
direction. It was
like being a child nerd with no one to play with. Or like
Rodney Dangerfield and Bob Uecker rolled into one. Or like
the sole outsider on an inside joke. If you
were foolhardy enough to be an 80s liberal, your favorite song is probably B.B.
King's The Thrill is Gone. It
probably is not Madonna's Material Girl. 80s
liberals felt as isolated as the character in The Day After who, in the
aftermath of atomic war, tried to find fellow survivors by broadcasting Is
there anybody out there...anybody at all? The phrase
"stuck in the 60s" made more than a few 80s liberals want to rethink
their credo on nonviolence. Old-time
liberals remember the good old days when the government was so bad at political
assassinations that its comical attempts seemed aimed at making the intended
target laugh himself to death – like the exploding cigar and poisoned pen schemes
that we cooked up to get Fidel Castro. In the
80s, however, assassinations were disguised as military operations. The military simply obliterated everyone and
everything in and around the target's location. If you were a liberal in the 80s, you had a hard time
understanding why nobody but you had a problem with this. Being a
liberal in the 80s meant feeling off balance, out of step, and incomplete, like
McCartney without Lennon, Clemens without Hurst, or Perrier without a twist. But one
thing is for sure – if you were a liberal in good standing from 1980 through
1989, you are neither a sunshine soldier nor a summer patriot. If nothing
else, being a liberal in the 80s was like waiting for Godot. Liberals hoped for a leader who never showed
up. Instead, this is the list of
presidential pretenders that 80s liberals had to choose from:
So
good-bye and good riddance to the bad old days of the 80s. 1990 is going to be the dawning of the
Liberal Decade. I just know it. But I
do have one question: Is there anybody out there...anybody at all?
