- Sep 6, 2000
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Hey leftistas, you might want to have a chat with your "liberal media" colleagues and ask for your money back.
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[Story excerpt)
...tarting with the way he broke the air-traffic controllers' strike in 1981, an augury of things to come from which the labor movement never recovered, Reagan certainly demolished the American left?what passes for the left, anyway. Since repeating "what passes for the left" strikes me as tiresome, I'll abbreviate it: WPFL. As you may recall, under veteran station manager Jesse Jackson, WPFL switched to an oldies format soon after the Great Communicator took office, and has remained too much on the defensive to come up with a new songlist since. Instead, in one of the great through-the-looking-glass paradoxes of Reaganism, "progressives" have become, in practical terms, reactionaries?cluckingly trying to protect this or that milestone (equal opportunity, Roe v. Wade), against a right wing that's singing "If I Had a Hammer?Oh, Wait: I Do." Meanwhile, so-called conservatives have been on a quarter-century radical spree, zestily pursuing their own version of "If it feels good, do it." From inside-trader Michael Milken to Oliver "What Constitution?" North, the worst disgrace to a Marine Corps uniform since Lee Harvey Oswald hung his up, to describe the Reagan era as any sort of rebuke to permissiveness is pure folly.
Even so, what most WPFL subscribers probably remain too hidebound to see?much less acknowledge?is that, as a cultural construct, Reaganism had beauty. Even if you knew better, it was seductive. The best description, or possibly just evidence, I know is the oddly forgotten Talking Heads song "Road to Nowhere," from 1985's Americana-flavored Little Creatures. A hymn that evolves into a march tune and then a full-on cattle drive, complete with "Hah!"s and get-along-little-doggie percussion, it's one of David Byrne's most insinuatingly phrased preacher rips, with imagery swiped straight from the Gipper himself: "There's a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it's all right." Even as the odyssey the listener is being asked to sign up for turns flagrantly nuts?"Maybe you wonder where you are/I don't care"?the song's eerily dissociated exuberance inveigles you; you still want to join. If it's an anti-Reagan song at all?and with Byrne, who ever knows??it's anti-Reagan in the same sense that "Heroin" is anti-shooting up.
Story link
[Story excerpt)
...
Even so, what most WPFL subscribers probably remain too hidebound to see?much less acknowledge?is that, as a cultural construct, Reaganism had beauty. Even if you knew better, it was seductive. The best description, or possibly just evidence, I know is the oddly forgotten Talking Heads song "Road to Nowhere," from 1985's Americana-flavored Little Creatures. A hymn that evolves into a march tune and then a full-on cattle drive, complete with "Hah!"s and get-along-little-doggie percussion, it's one of David Byrne's most insinuatingly phrased preacher rips, with imagery swiped straight from the Gipper himself: "There's a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it's all right." Even as the odyssey the listener is being asked to sign up for turns flagrantly nuts?"Maybe you wonder where you are/I don't care"?the song's eerily dissociated exuberance inveigles you; you still want to join. If it's an anti-Reagan song at all?and with Byrne, who ever knows??it's anti-Reagan in the same sense that "Heroin" is anti-shooting up.
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