"It is one of the ironies of the Age of Reagan that it produced a great economy almost despite Reagan."

In fact, the "great economy" of the Reagan Era was based on superficial indicators alone. More perceptive students had begun to feel quite uneasy at the accumulating signs that the American economy was eroding from below, as it gave itself completely over to consumption, financed consumption and government with debt, and became steadily less competitive against nations that it had itself resurrected from ruin only a few decades before.

Of course, back then we still had a long way to fall. But that would have been the time to realize that we were falling. Instead, Reagan and the Republicans had their one genuinely pivotal insight: the way to keep American voters happy was to blind them to the reality of American decline.That became the Republican party's historic mission, one that it has doggedly carried out right down to yesterday's presidential smirk. The con job isn't working any more, of course--Americans are now scared, with good reason--but it sure had a good run. Too bad it cost us a generation, and ground neither we nor our children can ever make up.

Ironically (again), it was we free-loving, dope-smoking, VVAW radicals who looked at the gloazing Eighties, shook our unwashed heads, and said, "Somethin ain't right here."