Beware of Rats - Really Big Rats

[Jack Sprat]

In November 1980, a former Union activist who fashioned a career as a successful screen actor, used his familiarity as a Conservative convert to begin dismantling the greatest middle class ever built, under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt. The great American middle class, created by FDR's concept of utilizing the strength of government to reign in corporate greed in a time of depression, put Americans to work in building a powerful infrastructure and combining government and private sectors to arm the Allies in a World War against the Axis. In the years following, suburban America was populated by baby-boomers and young families who could anticipate a brighter future than any of their ancestors preceding them.

Enter the Big RAT Reagan, stage right: Reagan capitalized from a draw-down economic period immediately following the Vietnam war and a frenzy of white resentment that Democrats were now including blacks into that great middle-class structure. By the late 70s, all regions of the country felt the pinch of high interest rates, generated by inflation that did not exclude a spike in fuel costs as it would now, and a growing resentment over the strains of a newly integrated school system and society. The populist message of Reagan that portrayed the Government as the Cause of their woes, led many to cross the Great Divide and become "Reagan Democrats". These former Democrats, who had enjoyed the benefits of the FDR New Deal policies and Union solidarity, became a part of the Conservative machine that was designed to destroy them and the lives of their children, as well. Even some Labor organizations endorsed the Big Rat and soon learned that they had sealed their own fatal death at his hands. There are no doubt, some great beneficiaries of Reagan's great war on the middle-class that has empowered corporations with unbridled wealth, due to complete deregulation of any governmental restraints to reign in the always internal greed that is part of their being. But, there is also a pitiful, angry and deranged vestige of those former Reagan Democrats who lost all the prosperity and self-assuredness that their former lives as "FDR's New Deal Democrats" enjoyed. Their union jobs gone, their children and grandchildren facing an uncertain future of career choices, their savings exhausted by catastrophic college costs or hospital bills, these former Reagan Democrats have only their scars of racism left. Although the Johnson edicts of mandatory busing to achieve racial quotas aggravated a strain in a newly integrated society, the progressive move to equality was long overdue. So, the resentful majority of those resentful Reaganites not only resigned their own fate to the undoing of the last vestiges of the "Greatest middle-class in history", they also turned out the lights on the future promise of their children and grandchildren. They have allowed it to be destroyed, rather than share it with another ethnic group of Americans. It should make them cry. But, it has only made them what is now known as "embittered Republicans."

This is how I viewed history unfold in my lifetime and how I relate the story of the Biggest Rat in history to the Republican sheep in my family.

[flying rabbit]

1. ...

:applause:

[superkia]

2. Gotta watch those damn actors. (Fred Thompson)

[HCE SuiGeneris]

3. I have to agree with the first response

:applause:

Very well said.

[pretzel4gore]

4. you're right, but reagan wasn't really popular...

i often think that dubia dubia 2 almost never happened- the upper classes in england, the usa and much of europe agreed with hitler and fascism and hohummed while the Spanish Republic, for example, was destroyed by the 'vast rightwing conspiracy'....had hitler not been so grasping, so goddam greedy, the fascist victory evolving today would have taken place back in the late 30's....dubia dubia 2 would not have happened had stupid hitler not literally forced the 'allies' to declare war on him, and the holocaust? what holocaust? all the talk about 'death camps' and military buildups and schemes to control the world via brute force would have been denied, memory holed, just like that. As it was, the upper classes nearly got caught playing footsie with the nazis anyway- Edward, duke of windsor, Prescott bush, charles lindberg were just 3 nazi sympathisers whose names became known! The true story of the complicity of our ruling elite with the fascists isn't known as it is; imagine if they had allied themselves with hitler, and discovered the holocaust when the millions were already dead! The story they tell us would have, ahem, focused on the good things instead of the bad (and the out-of-control liberal media would not have been around to create confusion etc, obviously).

"Babbitt" was published in 1926. In the 1960 Penguin edition afterword, here's the ending:

" The drift of our commercial culture in the forty years since ‘Babbitt’ appeared suggests that Sinclair Lewis did little to alter it, perhaps, but he was the first novelist to tell us explicitly into what stupid, and finally devastating social damnation we were drifting. Have we landed?
Mark Schorer, University of California 1961 afterword to ‘Babbitt’ "

George dubia bush is just the logical conclusion of something depraved about our culture, and MAYBE it's time we face up to it. Reagan was not elected in 1980-too many people despise everything reagan stands for, and only by fixing the polls could a rightwing sychophant like reagan get any votes at all. Anyone who, back in 1970, or in 1980, or in 1990, or today, who thinks reagan was a power politician who 'represented' a constituent (rather then playact the repub leader etc) probably gives reagan too much credit, imho

[Raster]

5. raygun WAS the great communicator...reading lines written for him, specifically in that role..

The best role ronnie ever played was "President of the United States."

Wake up America!:kick: