I’m not sure it’s possible to hate my 1984 self any more than I do. I was a bona fide idiot and as such, voted for Ronald Reagan in my first presidential election.
I’m grateful I didn’t get a tattoo back then, because it would’ve easily been one of puffy, scruffy, yellow-sunglass-wearing Hank Williams Jr. Alternatively, I might have gotten a giant red, white, and blue rising-eagle tattooed across my back or “Proud to Be an American” stenciled across my collarbone. Poor reasoning such as this is grounds for why I advocate anyone thinking about getting a tattoo wait until they’re 40, because – hopefully – we all change as we age. Perhaps, we shouldn’t vote till we’re 40 either.
To fully understand why I voted for Reagan and who it was that voted for Reagan in that polling booth, one must walk with me back to 1984. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was the very first president of the United States? That’s what Republicans would have you believe. They date their entire history to this man. A visionary, he muscled the Soviet Union into submission. He set America on a course for prosperity for 30 years. He broke the backs of the counter-culture hippy and psychedelic movements of the 60s and 70s. He made up the guest room for God in the White House. When clouds gathered in any part of America, they rained gold coins on every man, woman, and child in the country! Under Reagan.
Hokum
All the evidence of Reagan’s charade was right in front of me, but I couldn’t put the elementary puzzle together. Reagan was an actor. Somehow back then, that escaped me. He played tough guys. He was likened to John Wayne, who was the most fabricated tough guy ever. When Autry, Gable, Fonda, and Stewart were flying and sailing in foreign theatres of war, John Wayne was arguing for deferments before draft boards. Often lauded for his tough, movie-line quotes, Wayne’s own essence didn’t call those words forth. Writers wrote those words for him. Writers created Reagan’s words and characters, too – writers, who Republicans think are the weakest of Earth’s creatures.
“Reagan’s a tough guy,” people would say. “Reagan’s gonna kick some ass.” I liked those descriptions of him, but now I think, tough guy? What does that mean anyway? Vladimir Putin is a tough guy – he’s also a depraved despot who has his enemies gunned down in the streets and poisoned over tea. Kick ass? Leaders don’t get into cage fights with other countries’ leaders. Foreign relations isn’t Popeye and Bluto where Popeye eats a can of spinach and punches Bluto through a window with an anvil-shaped fist. Countries get into maiming, raping, refugee-blooming wars with other nations and, now, pseudo-nations.
I watched too many war movies made in the 50s where no blood was spilled and death was clean. Men in uniforms just fell over. People’s homes weren’t looted and burned. Soldiers didn’t cut their enemies’ penises off and shove them in their killed prey’s mouths. Civilians weren’t forced on 35-mile death marches in the freezing cold without food, water, or rest in John Wayne war movies.
After Vietnam, the oil crisis, Watergate, 14 percent inflation, and the Iran hostage-taking, people wanted everything to be okay again.1 I wanted everything to be okay again, and Reagan appeared to represent calm and control – a patriarch taking hold of a dazed country coming apart at the seams. He reminded me of my grandfather, whom I trusted and had supreme confidence in as provider and protector.
If Carter and Mondale were Democrats and so many of the terrifying events of the 70s happened under Democrats, then Republicans had to be the answer – in my mind and in so many Americans’ minds. Look what Reagan had already done!
The campaign was not just about how Reagan had relaunched America’s brand in the world. It was dually about economic success: money, corporate profits, jobs, the bull market. It was all about the myth of a turnaround in the economy brought about seemingly by Reagan’s ingenuity, skill, and both his common sense and visionary approach to economics. Later, of course, we learned that his turnaround was artificial – produced through economic chicanery that had to be unraveled by subsequent presidents. In 1984, America was standing in the vestibule of the money-happy 80s. Greed was applauded, admired, and aspirational. Anyone who couldn’t or didn’t find a path to riches was considered an ignorant hayseed – or worse, a pie-in-the-sky liberal.
Sistuhs
At the time I voted for Reagan, I was a sophomore in college and 19 years old. I had high hopes for myself. I was new to politics – having just registered to vote the year before – and I believed all the Reagan nonsense: “Trickle Down”; “Morning in America”; “Peace through Strength.” I was a child, and the GOP’s childish-minded rhetoric, black-and-white thinking, and cartoon universe appealed to me. Nineteen-eighty-four was a landslide victory for Reagan, and I voted with the masses. I was caught up in the “everyone loves a winner” mentality of young people. I hadn’t lived long enough in the world to realize that life is not black and white; that people are nuanced; that the world is complicated; that I myself did not belong to this party and should not ally myself with the people this party benefitted: that is, the wealthy.
I was a member of a sorority – which is a whole ‘nother outlying decision in my life – and in 1984 was living in the sorority house with about 40 other young women. About eight of us including me were very strident Republicans. We were insufferable, really. A vociferous left wing lived in the house, too, and often the two camps would argue. At one point, I plastered the doors of my Democratic sisters with posters I drew and printed of Walter Mondale – who I thought looked like an owl – sitting in a tree calling out, “Who-hoo-hoo are you voting for?”
One day fairly close to election night, we righties decided to escalate the banter by hosting a Republican-themed table at dinner. The sorority kitchen – staffed by paid employees – served meals three times a day. Breakfast was a buffet with set hours; lunch was a buffet with set hours; but dinner was a sit-down meal served at 6:00 p.m. One did not come late to dinner. The house mother, Mrs. Shehorn – an elderly woman who managed household logistics, such as ordering, gardening, housekeeping, and repairs – sat at the head of the table like the Queen of Spain initiating the meal and calling people on their manners and tardiness. You excused yourself to Mrs. Shehorn if you were late, and you asked to be excused if you needed to leave before she was ready. The dining room had three, large, formal tables. One needed to sign up for dinner ahead of time and a place was set for you. If someone were missing at the table, the house mother knew it and would scold the person for wasting food by not attending.
The rules were rigid, and Mrs. Shehorn did not like games, pranks, or anything out of the ordinary at dinner. We expected that our Republican-themed dinner plan would be met with regal resistance, so we didn’t tell Mrs. Shehorn in advance.
We generated our dinner idea at approximately 3:00 p.m., so we didn’t have much time before the evening meal. The theme of our meal, in keeping with the theme of the GOP overall, was “[Reveling] in Festive Gluttony.”2 We were limited in what we could do, because we couldn’t bring alcohol or whole hogs into the sorority, and the kitchen was off-limits to members; it was for staff only. So, we set about recreating culinary excess as best we could in 180 minutes with no ability to cook, no budget, and no say in what the kitchen staff would be serving that evening.
Ambush
We divided into two small teams. One team convinced the rush director – a devout, born-again Christian and as such one of our backers – to give us access to the house’s rush-week decorations. Since sorority rush featured different theme days, we were teeming with decorations in storage. There, we found red, white, and blue bunting, tiny American flags, and Styrofoam™ “skimmers,” the quintessential political hat.
I was on the team selected to hit the student store for food. The plan was to supplement the meal that would be served with epicurean flourishes that wouldn’t be found on the non-Republican tables.
The student store was a glorified 7-Eleven. We tried to think of what said “food of the aristocracy.” Butter seemed decadent, so we purchased several boxes of butter quarters. Beef Wellington sprang to mind. The closest we could get was beef jerky, so we purchased several packs. Petit fours seemed fancy, too. The store had Hostess pink cupcakes, which could have stood in, but we opted instead to create our own petit fours by buying Starbursts and decorating them with Pillsbury canned frosting and silver dragees. Texas, or at the very least the South, seemed to be the representation of the GOP, and nothing said “southern” like barbecue. The student store didn’t have ribs, so we bought several party-size bags of Lay’s barbecue potato chips. In keeping with the way Reagan delivered prosperity to America – on borrowed money – we used our richest friend’s credit card, paid for by her father, to pay for our excess.
We could not festoon our table until we actually sat to eat. We huddled in one of our bedrooms and began preparing our decorations for quick installation. With colored markers and construction paper, we created a GOP elephant sign and a Reagan-Bush ’84 sign. So we could better wave and sway our new signs around, we affixed one to a pointer we had in the house library and another to the non-business end of a broom. We plated our butter quarters and began the delicate work of fashioning our petit fours. We decided to leave our chips and beef jerky in their giant bags and pass them around at the table. It was much more obvious what these things were when left in their packaging. It just seemed much more overt and obnoxious.
We divvied up the decorations and got tape. We each took a skimmer. We stood in the library just outside the dining room and when the bell rang for dinner, we rushed in and grabbed seats at one table. We then worked feverishly to string the bunting. We had gotten red plastic cups and blue paper napkins, and we set those in front of us. We knew the china plates would be white, so the triumvirate of the color scheme was complete. We put our skimmers on and stood behind our chairs dutifully waiting for our sisters and the house mother to enter the dining room.
One of the sisters always greeted Mrs. Shehorn and walked her into the dining room. Shehorn entered slowly and immediately noticed our decorated table. Our signs were down, however, and our food was out of view. It simply looked like we were celebrating the electoral season. She made an inquisitive face, furrowed her brow, then shook her head in tacit acquiescence of what appeared to be our youthful exuberance. We all said grace and sat down.
Gall
Platters of food were set on the tables by the “houseboys,” male college students who served our meals and cleared our tables for low pay but free food and access to girls. Ever so slowly, I and another sister raised our signs in the air and when they were at full staff, the elephant was out of the bag. The rest of the dining room knew what we were up to: a GOP assault on our political enemies.
We ate. And as we ate, we would say, “Boy, this would sure taste terrific with some real butter. Julie, do you have any real butter?” The house only served tiny pats of margarine and in very skimpy quantities at that.
“Why, yes,” Julie or Pamela or Jennifer would say, “I do. Here it is. Real butter.” And we’d all make a big show of passing around and slicing into small plates of three or four cubes of butter stacked high on top of each other.
We’d munch for a bit then someone would say, “Boy, do I have a craving for barbecue. Anyone else feel like barbecue?”
And the others would shout, “Why, yes! Barbecue! That would hit the spot. Nothing like good old southern barbecue flavor!” And the big bags of chips were lifted off the floor and circling our table, too – again with the sisters making a big show of opening the bags, picking out the largest chips, standing and crunching dramatically in the direction of the rest of the house eating dinner.
Another of our abettors then started in criticizing the main meal saying, “Chicken! Chicken’s for peasants! It’s not a proper meal unless there’s red meat on the table.” Then out came the beef jerky packs. “Beef? Beef anyone?” And the beef jerky was circulating around the table with, again, each of us making a big show of having a gnarled tug of smoked beef in our hands.
Much to our surprise, Mrs. Shehorn was smirking at our loathsome behavior, then laughing. To our delight, she leaned over and asked for a piece of jerky and a skimmer for herself, which we gladly set upon her head. As soon as her hat was on, we cheered and began throwing barbecue chips around like confetti. Someone handed Mrs. Shehorn a mini American flag. Shehorn was a Republican! She was on our side, and we were gold. We could be as obnoxious as we wanted, and we were. No one would stop us. Somehow we had gotten a pack of party horns, and we placed one in Mrs. Shehorn’s mouth. She began blowing on her horn, wobbling her head, waving her flag in one hand and her beef-jerky chaw in the other – and we did, too. We blew our horns, waved our flags, and chanted, “Four More Years! Four More Years!”
The Dems were getting into it, too, but they had no bright slogans. They were just making noise and using a lot of good sense and big words to argue with us. They tried to yell, “Where’s the beef?” – Mondale’s jab at Gary Hart back then – but that backfired when we held up our beef jerky packs and strips and began pumping them in the air.
One of our GOP cohorts then stepped to the piano and began playing “Hail to the Chief.” We fell out laughing and began hooting like Mondale owls. “Who-hoo-hoo are you voting for?! Who-hoo-hoo are you voting for?!” That was it for everyone but us in the dining room. All the Democratic sisters got up and stormed out seething; the non-partisan sisters just slowly walked off, some carrying their plates. That’s when the platter of petit fours came out, and we screamed at the fleeing Democrats, “Wait don’t leave! There’s dessert!”
Crux
I had no business cavorting with the GOP. My dad was a teacher who also worked two side jobs, and my mom was a retail manager. We were solidly – via a lot of hours in the workforce – middle class. I had, however, some very wealthy friends in school. Much of the reason my parents worked so hard was to send their five kids to private school.
My friends were children of prosperous San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles families. Many were trust-fund babies. Their parents flew in private jets and helicopters. They owned Tahoe homes and estates in La Jolla. They were partners in giant construction companies that built the Saudi Oil infrastructure and signature buildings in downtown San Francisco. In high school, I could tell when my friends had money by the houses they lived in, the furnishings they had, the cars their parents drove, and the food they kept in their refrigerators and pantries. In college, friends’ wealth was less apparent. We all lived together in apartments, dorms, and sorority rooms. Everyone had the same four walls. Hardly anyone drove a car. I never saw my college friends’ parents’ homes. But I did know I was the only one with a job.
After college, our lives would take very different paths. They would be set up in apartments in tony neighborhoods. They would travel Europe for the summer. They would go to exotic graduate schools paid for by their parents. They would take up residency in their parents’ companies or land jobs in Fortune 500 firms through high-powered connections. I would go back and live with my mom and dad. I cleaned houses and worked part-time gigs pursuing my writing until I couldn’t take living at home anymore; moved into an apartment with roommates I barely knew; and settled for a job in a safe field because I was running out of money. I would begin the life of coin-op laundry, crowded-bus commuting, and nine-to-five drudgery that might, if I were lucky, lead to middle management. I would struggle to make my bills and rent and keep my car running. I would lead the normal life of a middle-class college graduate with a liberal-arts degree. I’d begin to understand the exertion my parents experienced to launch five kids. I would learn that life requires decades of work and saving, discipline, and good choices to get to a comfortable place if you’re not born into it. I would learn my true station.
I lived in San Francisco, which began to influence my politics. I worked alongside people of many backgrounds and began to see life through “new eyes and extra colors”3 – those of minorities, immigrants, gay people, the aging, poor people, artists, high-powered women, and east-coast transplants to name a few. My world was opening up. I began traveling abroad a little, seeing the United States the way other countries saw it. The glossy veneer of the GOP was beginning to crack.
I believed back then that Republicans, led by their lion Reagan, were the party of staying out of people’s lives. Yet the abortion issue kept hitting a sour note for me. I couldn’t understand how a party that said it valued the sanctity of people’s privacy would be so concerned with such an intimate facet of a woman’s private life. The tone started sounding very anti-women.
Abortion wasn’t the only private-life alcove the GOP kept slinking into. It was getting involved in people’s sexual orientation. If the party as it claimed was the party of staying out of people’s lives, why was it against gay marriage? Why did it care? If the GOP was so pro-life, how could it defend gun rights in the face of mass shootings? I was always uncomfortable with the party’s religious bent. I thought evangelicals were kooks and still do. I was very skeptical of the “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative and knew that would literally never fly. I also couldn’t figure out why a party so bent on small government would be willing to spend $1 trillion on such an aeronautic fantasy.
Makeover
The seeds of my conversion were present, but still I stayed in the party. For 21 years, I was a registered Republican. It took me meeting my future husband and his family to pull me out of the GOP nest. He and his family were all union workers. His uncle was a union leader. They pounded and pounded on me that Republicans were not for the working class. I saw how hard it was to get ahead. I watched my husband get up for work six days a week at 3:00 in the morning to do manual labor in the elements. I felt how difficult it was to save money for the future.
One day, my husband’s uncle Don Luba asked me, “Are you rich? Do you come from a rich family?” I said no, thinking about my dad who had just been pistol-whipped at his night job in a liquor store. “Then you have no business voting Republican,” Don said, “because Republicans are the party of the rich.” And that was it. It finally dawned on me: I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t like my friends in high school and college. I was a worker; I was the child of workers; I was the wife of a worker; and as such I had to be a Democrat. It all came down to pocketbook issues.
People use the term “identity politics” like it’s a bad thing. They use the term to disparage what they consider to be a naive and hurried approach to politics. In my opinion, identity politics is crucial to politics. It means supporting issues and candidates that allow for the respectful and fair treatment of your way of being in the world – whatever that “way” may be. In order to vote well, one must know oneself. My problem was I was identifying with the wrong people. I was identifying with the rich. So, I straightened that out.
But identity politics isn’t simply about what I or anyone else is. It’s about what I am and what I am not and what I will never be allowed to be in a society that needs stratification to maintain social order. It’s about choosing those I feel an obligation toward over others who do not need my support. It’s about understanding the ways in which I will never be noticed by certain groups of people except when it comes to the vote I can cast for them and against myself and my interests – a vote that will set myself and my people back and move others who have all the advantages forward to injure even more those already compromised.
The last time I voted as a registered Republican, I voted for the Democratic candidate, Al Gore. After the re-election of George W. Bush, I left the GOP and officially registered as a Democrat. At age 40, I redeemed myself for my first presidential vote, and I started liking myself a hell of a lot more.
Well past 40 years old now, I’ve asked myself several times would I consider getting a tattoo. It’s not blooming likely; but if I did, a giant “2004” inked draping over my shoulder might fit the bill. Two thousand and four marks a pivotal point in my life. It was the moment I went from standing in the dark to standing in the light. It was the year I woke from my fugue and saw my true bracket, people and place. It marks the dawn of my political and social consciousness. But a tattoo…I don’t think so, because we all still change as we age, and no matter how beautiful, meaningful, and powerful a tattoo seems when you get it, it’s gonna be an utterly preposterous, illegible, disastrous mess on the 85-year-old human body. I’ll honor my awakening through writing and leave the ink to the younger rebels.
Notes
1 – http://it.stlawu.edu/~quack/seminar/reagan_message.htm St. Lawrence University, “Media, Advertising and the 1984 Presidential Election,” Andrew Van Alstyne.
2 – Firstwefeast.com, “20 Signs of the Decline of Civilization,” Erin Mosbaugh, April 21, 2013.
3 – Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
Images
¤ “Full Dress Uniform” – Photo by DonkeyHotey, FlickrCC https://tinyurl.com/y7u6e4a4
¤“Gilt Gluttony” – Photo by Ryan, FlickrCC https://tinyurl.com/ycsldzvg
¤“Memorial Day 2010” – Photo by JD Hancock, FlickrCC https://tinyurl.com/ydfbe2wk