[MD] Dynamic Development at all costs?

[Platt Holden]

Chris,

That conservative Presidents were freely elected by the American people in
7 of 10 elections over the past 36 years suggests that Krimel's version of 
history and the presidents who served might be slightly unbalanced.

Regards,
Platt 
.  



> Chris,
> 
> I get the idea that your vision of a "right winger" is a bit different than
> what it is over here. Left and right have meaning only with reference to a
> center and what the Great Satan Raygun did in this country was radically
> shift the center to the right. Prior to Raygun people like today's FOX news
> and AM talkshow creeps were considered fringe crazies. Raygun legitimized
> them. As you know any historical analysis is incomplete but I can think of
> several things that allowed this to occur.
> 
> In his autobiography Bill Clinton identifies one of them as the civil rights
> movement. While it finally made Americans face the consequences of our
> fundamental belief that ALL men are created equal; it produced a huge
> Dynamic shift. And that shift had negative consequences as well as positive
> ones. Since democrats were seen in the South as pushing the changes; all the
> blue states in the South became red states. In my state the Republican party
> was so weak that even into the 70s they didn't even have primary elections.
> Now they run the place. 
> 
> Perhaps a bigger factor was the Cold War which is where a lot of Platt's
> rhetoric comes from. In second grade I remember being told what evil people
> the Chinese communists were because they tortured people who didn't toe the
> party line by sticking chopsticks in their ears. Also what evil people the
> Russians were because they censored scientific research that did not conform
> to the party dogma. What I took from this is that torture and censorship are
> evil and that people who do it are evil. When I look around today what I see
> is the communists are gone but we are censoring free thought and torturing
> people.
> 
> This was a time when there was a real and present threat of nuclear war
> every single day. Paranoia over the red menace resulted in concrete changes
> in the US political system. Fear of the rise of a communist or socialist
> political party resulted in changes to ballot access laws. This insures, to
> this day, that political parties other than the two in power have almost no
> chance of getting started, much less taking getting elected.
> 
> Yet another factor was assassination. The Kennedys and King provided sources
> of inspiration and moral leadership and the vacuum they left behind was
> never really filled. Johnson was one of the most politically effective
> presidents in US history but he was not likable or charismatic enough to
> actually move the hearts as well as the minds of the people.
> 
> >From the assassinations of the 60s and the radical changes of civil rights
> to the defeat of our military in Vietnam to the political trauma of
> Watergate the US currently suffers from a kind of collective PTS. We just
> want it all to stop and be static for a while.
> 
> Raygun was a kind of dream come true. He was what Baulldriad might call a
> simulation of a president. Not a real president but a hyperreal president.
> An actor playing the part of a president so that the simulation no longer
> had reference to the real at all. It has become its own justification. His
> thinking was so simplistic, he took us all back to a kind of fantasy
> "Pleasantville" were everything was black and white and Mrs. Cleaver always
> wore pearls at diner time.
> 
> There was not shortage of oil, no complexity to the economy, no race
> problems, no pollution; just a bunch of bureaucrats making life tough for
> good honest folk trying to make a living. 
> 
> So when Raygun was once asked, "How can an actor become president?" His
> answer was, "How can a president not be an actor?" The simulation has become
> the reality. That transformation is complete. An AWOL drunken cokehead can
> recreate himself as a war hero more valiant that decorated veterans and
> former POWs. It is no longer truth that matters. No longer reality that
> counts. It is the appearance of reality and the simulation of truth that
> count.
> 
> But maybe reality has more substance in your world.