A Tale Of Two Parties.

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
~Ronald Reagan

Walls Work.

I suppose one could be forgiven for looking at the Reagan quote and the snipped Tweet and thinking these were people from two different parties. Or at least, perhaps, different ideologies?

Walls work?

I suppose that's why the East Bloc and the Soviet Union still stand, with the Iron Curtain as resolute as ever, isn't it? Why Ronald Reagan went down being known for failed arms control policies and the Iran-Contra scandal, and was replaced by the ineffectual Michael Dukakis in 1989, and why I spent eighteen months in the mid-1990's serving overseas duty as an Air Force Security Policeman at Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland, protecting a flight line full of USAF F-15C Eagle jet fighters and USN P-3C Orions on long, cold watches and then cracked under the pressure of the isolation and the hard, intense mission. Ever since, I've been spending my days collecting my small disability percentage, working a decent factory job, and raising a family as a middle of the road conservative Baptist and Republican, right?

Wrong. And it doesn't even make for an interesting alternate history.

Anybody with a brain in their head and the attention span God gave the common domestic Ferret knows what happened 30 years ago this weekend. Myself, I watched the Wall come down live on TV as a teenager just a few weeks from my sixteenth birthday and even then I knew life was on some level going to be considerably more complicated than the bipolar world I'd lived in so far. It was a good time to be a young conservative, and quite frankly I for one unabashedly welcomed the possibility of a world broader and filled with more possibilities than the number of options I'd been given thus far. Perhaps more to the point, we won. Our values and our firmly-held principles and our belief in democracy and freedom and individual choice won.

You couldn't be a Republican and not hear those words and the sentiment behind them all throughout the entire 1990's.

I'm so old I remember when Republicans didn't just end up on the winning team, by honest means, but we were the goddamned team captain and everybody knew it.

I've lived my life since that weekend 30 years ago mostly doing things because I wanted to do them, and being glad that I wasn't constantly living 30 minutes from the potential of nuclear war. Considering that I spent half my life around strategic targets (and only three years or so of that voluntarily) stuff like that matters. The fact that I've lived my life not having to worry about getting blown up because two groups of assholes that I never met couldn't get along has never been all that far from my awareness.

Try talking to a German, or somebody from a former East Bloc country or Soviet "Republic" who is old enough to remember what it was like, and you'll have a new appreciation for all the stuff we take for granted. An awful lot of Republican fears about socialism are actually misplaced fear of Soviet Communism and the shitty standard of living most people under it endured.

Anybody who lived under it and wasn't an ethnic Russian of a certain social class is glad that it is gone. More to the point those people appreciate the possibilities that life not controlled by centralized bureaucrats offers.

Myself? I fucked a girl that was from Latvia when I was in college. Who I got to screw when I was 27 was not who I imagined I'd get to screw when I was 15. I lived to find out differently, and I appreciate that, too. I've messed up a lot more than I haven't, since, but ya know it was kind of a fun ride.

I lived to see a time when an Ilyushin Il-78 Midas was not so much an enemy aircraft, but a thing of interest on the flight line at K.I. Sawyer, and in fact the only large jet aircraft on the flight line and you could just drive by and check it out with naught but a wave from the sheriff's deputy watching the thing, because the BUFF's that used to be there  and the Security Forces troops that guarded them  are long gone and the base reverted to its original intended use as a municipal airport, because the Cold War ended.

Because Walls. Don't. Work.

I lived yet longer, instead, to see a time where Conservatives, and Republicans, embrace the possibility of life controlled by Dictators and centralized bureaucracies and guns in every household and tanks in the streets and kids in cages so long as they think the Dictator is their guy, and there are no firmly-held values, and democracy and freedom and individual choice either don't exist to them, or are only any good when they're the only ones that get to have it.

I lived to wonder just what the hell the first three quarters of my life was even for, and to question my entire purpose for all of that time.

Why?

Because what remains of the Republican Party has come to hate and fear their fellow Americans more than they feared seeing Soviet troops shooting it out with German Bundeswehr and US Army troops in the streets of Frankfurt and Munich.

Because what remains of conservatism fears "Happy Holidays" more than they fear inbound bandits on the radar screens at Dulles or JFK or Otis ANGB or Wurtsmith AFB, and they fear "Happy Hanukkah" or "As-Salaam Alaykum" or even "OK Boomer" more than they would cringe at the sound of screaming jet engines on afterburner overhead and the wail of air-raid sirens in the distance. And far too many of them value this fear more than their own lives. As much as 30% of Americans are basically not salvageable at a societal level, instead requiring somebody who they respect but who might have slightly different beliefs to be their fucking therapist for years to get them to come around to...I don't know, basic humanity?

I'll never get it. But then I found it easier and less emotionally exhausting to be able to shrug and walk away, or to fall back on the fact that minding my own business was a central tenet of the conservatism I was taught.

These fucking idiots seem to think that other people even having their beliefs, customs, rights, etc. let alone having them openly acknowledged and even catered to (most often by the sacred Free Market itself!) as somehow detracting from their own. Somehow Christmas isn't Christmas if it might involve somebody buying the Muslim girl next door a leopard-print Hijab. Never mind that Muslims believe in Jesus just as much as Christians do, but in a different way.

Because what remains of conservatism, functionally, fears social change and tax increases on the rich more than it fears an instant sunrise in the cold Northern Michigan night as Soviet SS-18 warheads reduce K.I. Sawyer and Wurtsmith Air Force Bases (not to mention Detroit, and Los Angeles and New York and dozens of other places around the country) to radioactive wind-borne ash.

Their fear of death is overwhelming, because far too many of these people don't believe in God and never did. But it goddamned pales next to their cowardly, gutless, ravening fear of change, even if that change is simply them being treated the same way as everybody else is. Even if that change is something as simple as a Black President or a Nike commercial in Arabic featuring a Muslim girl on a skateboard or that some rich guy might go to prison for actively betraying our country.

They fear the same complex and multilateral world that I, as a teenage conservative 30 years ago, reveled in the possibility of.  They fear that their son might screw some girl from Nigeria while he's away at the University, even though there's an excellent chance that she's just as much of a Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal as they are and he is, even though it might just be shared faith in Christ in a secular environment  that brought the two of them together in the first place. Even that much difference or social change scares the hell out of far too many of these people, and liars like Rush Limbaugh have been stoking that fear damn near since Reagan left office. And they love that fear so much that they throw away everything they ever believed in, for an asshole loser like Donald Trump.

Hell, I found out as a forum admin years later, that to lots of Evangelicals and Pentecostals, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union simply wasn't real, they conspiracy-theorized their way out of it, or at least out of acknowledging it. And to this day, if you try to point out to them that there are people who believe the same way as they do in places like Estonia...they'll look at you like you're from Mars.

They simply threw away one of the greatest geopolitical developments in the late 20th century, simply because it didn't fit their fearful world-view.

In so doing, they threw away a lot more.

Including, mind you, everything that Reagan ever stood for, except maybe the racism that the Gipper managed to mostly suppress or talk around in public.

And fundamentally, what they want to do is impose that fear on the rest of us, because to fearful crowd-followers there is no greater sin than not being afraid. They think that somebody saying "As-Salaam Alaykum" or "Happy Holidays" to them is somehow something something Gazpacho going to take their Jesus away.

Never mind that these same people spent decades worshiping the godless Ayn Rand, only to cast her away and bow before Donald Trump.

Not that these people have faith in God, or Jesus, or any such thing. Their "Christianity" is nothing more than a tribal superstition or something to beat others about the head with. They want to reduce the Cross of Christ to nothing more than a leering tribal mask at the edge of the camp, or worse turn it into a flaming lawn ornament, with its message not "Come to me all who are heavy-laden and I will give you rest" but "GO AWAY! GO AWAY! FUCK YOU, I'VE GOT MINE!" And what's worse is that they don't even see how much of a perversion or a tragedy that is.

They'd rather throw America away than have to acknowledge that there have always been liberals or Muslim Americans or other people celebrating their own holidays or trans people or...whatever.

And what's actually worse is that they're reaching the point where throwing themselves away, the last Banzai-charge of the Old White Brigade, is apparently something that's on their mind. I watched the video of Jeff Sessions declaring his run for his old Senate seat the other day. I watched him praise and swear fealty to a man who did nothing but belittle and insult him and did it enough that it actually bothered others who knew of it. He never even mentioned the office he is seeking.

I'll tell you what I was taught. If somebody belittles and insults you, you sure don't flatter them or praise them or swear loyalty to them. You fight back or you get away, or both.

If you work for somebody and they treat you like that, according to what I was taught, it's time to start looking for another job. And if a person who acts like that fires you? You march your ass down to the unemployment office and file, and you consider getting a lawyer and getting stuff around for a hostile work environment lawsuit or bringing the bastard up on charges.

Having a backbone is a basic life skill that I was taught by conservatives. Not being afraid, being able to do things like have a sincere religious faith, to mind my own business, and to not get offended at the differences between people...are things that I was taught by people who were very often deeply and passionately Christian and conservative and Republican.

Fun fact: Out of those people who taught me this stuff, most of those who are still alive are Democrats by now, or at least voting that way, even if they still believe all the same things...because of Trump.

The story of going from  "Tear Down This Wall!" to "Walls Work" is not the story of two different political parties, but of one.

The arc of Republicans going from despising the Soviet Union to seeking to emulate it and acting at the behest of those who were its agents and their leader openly wishing live on CNN that he could go to Moscow and sit at the right hand of a former KGB agent has taken Republicans a mere 30 years.

And it is to everyone's misfortune that this is so. One has to wonder if, given another 30 years, they will be reduced to gathering in moldering basements and sewer tunnels to worship the devil?

I spent over half my life so far actively participating in this fall from grace. From "Character Counts" to "LOL nothing matters" has been a long, slow slide.

I feel like I either didn't fight hard enough for actual values before they ran me out, or I switched sides too late to make a difference. Maybe everything was fucked by the time I came of age, and maybe I just didn't see it.

And for that, either way, I am sorry.

But we can't spend too much time wondering how they came to be this, we have to do something about it.

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