I wanna be felated

That's him.

That's the guy.

It all started there. All our problems today... come from him and the people who worship him.

This is a thirty year systemic failure of the American system at the hands of an aggressive plutocracy. Reagan didn't invent this crisis, he simply enabled it.

bhcompy: Felated? Is that being related to a female?

It means being related/linked by a bond of fealty (allegiance). (e.g., I wanted to ensure my co-worked that I was dedicated to the project and therefore ask that she help me become felated)

I thought fellatio was something that only Liberals did, to Fartb0ng0.

wmoonfox: It's cute how America is putting up statues of its cold war heroes just a few years after helping tear down those of other countries.

Such as? Because if you're classifying Gaddaffi, Saddam, and other tyrants as heroes...

Jim_Callahan: Yeah, that's not a ridiculous oversimplification verging on outright fabrication and demonstrating an appalling ignorance of history at all. You clearly have the background and thoughtful nature to be regarded as having a meaningful opinion on politics.

I'm glad you questioned my assertion! I'll be happy to explain, in an essay I like to call "Ronald Regan Invented Gangsta Rap".

America has this amazing ability to create a social problem, and then punish that problem further as a result of having created it, exacerbating it into an epidemic but still blaming the epidemic's existence on the supposed self-evident symptoms of the epidemic itself. You got all that? I'll explain.

Ronald Reagan's arrival to national politics in 1980 brought about two very important, far-reaching changes to America, both of which I'll talk about in turn. They are:

1) Priority emphasis on privileged classes
2) Empowering the evangelical population.

Priority Emphasis on privileged classes

When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, he decided that the government should refocus its efforts on the most cherished, most valued, and most important demographic in the country, which of course meant people just like him: Old, rich and white. Nearly every other class and social status declined in the 80s (and since) as a result of renewed emphasis on old, rich white people (and people who will within their lives become old, rich and white -- or think they will. Let's call them Reaganites). A new generation of economic thinkers emerged who told the Reaganites what they wanted to hear: Namely, that if the Reaganites give themselves more money and power, they'll share it with everyone else and America will be happier and wealthier.

That didn't happen. Instead, they just kept it all through an insultingly stupid economic system known as "trickle-down" where they likened the rest of America to a mongrel beneath the dinner table consuming fat and gristle and all the unhealthy table scraps that they didn't feel like eating. Just enough to keep the average American alive, but too weak, stupid and malnutritioned to do anything about it.

The 1980s was a weird decade where standard of living declined while people simultaneously flaunted wealth and status. Thanks to "trickle-down", a delirious amount of money was suddenly in circulation on Wall Street, which led to the high risk, high finance, freewheeling cocaine binge of the 80s characterized in movies like Trading Places, Wall Street, and The Secret of My Success. They even made a kid's movie about business and money, starring Ralphie's friend who got his tongue stuck on the flagpole and was also in The Toy and became a porn star when he grew up.

Relaxed business regulations made high risk maneuvers a common trait: Cutthroat acquisitions, hostile takeovers, mergers, and the closing down of the entire manufacturing sector and moving it overseas for cheap and easy profit. Yes sir, it was a ridiculously fun time to be in big business. A lot of rich people got a lot richer during this period. But as any economist can tell you, that means a lot more people got poorer.

(before you interject: While it's true that wealth creation is not a zero-sum game, it doesn't exist in a vacuum either. If you make money, that means someone somewhere else has to lost some)

Nowhere was this more immediately evident than in the ghettos and inner cities all over America. The poorest, the youngest, and of course the most visible minorities in the nation were being strangled, their opportunities for advancement being shut, their few remaining avenues for sustenance being canceled, moved, outsourced, laid off, or ignored. As High America raced forward with new forms of gratuitous gaudy wealth, the underclasses of the system were marginalized and forgotten, left to themselves to fester and rot in decrepit urban prisons as mini-third world countries, bereft of opportunity and advancement. And, of course, gangsta rap.

Empowering the evangelical population.

Ronald Reagan was the first politician who galvanized on the national stage a yet untapped massive voting bloc: Evangelical Christians.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, devoutly religious people did not vote at all (and that was a good chunk of the country's population). Many faiths (Jehovahs Witness/Millerites, Pentecostals, Mennonites, and even most Mormons, I believe) advocated non-participation in elections or politics entirely. They simply abstained just as they abstained from alcohol and caffeine. And their religious leaders constantly preached this practice of political non-participation. Their leader was Christ, not the President.

But sometime around the 60s or 70s, maybe as a Hegelian backlash against the government-enforced Civil Rights laws/movements, these people suddenly started taking an active role and interest in politics. In fact, the final straw might've very well been Roe vs Wade in 1973, giving women the freedom to pursue abortions, which the evangelicals have always found repugnant. Their preachers stopped pressing them to abstain, and the concept of voting became adiaphora. But the first big campaign to really bottle and capitalize on this powerful new demographic bloc was Reagan in 1980. By selling politics to the evangelicals, suddenly the Conservatives, the Right, the party of small government, fiscal spending and laissez-faire economics, became the Super Evangelical Right, and dropped the small government and fiscal spending part (they had to if they wanted to re-engineer society by legislating morality the way the liberals tried to in the 60s).

The tragic thing about this technique is how incredibly successful it was: Hardcore Christans voted in droves (and have been ever since), and Reagan absolutely destroyed Mondale in '84. Every Republican now operates in the shadow of Reagan, and the modern party is pretty much an amalgamation of opportunists trying to duplicate Reagan's success by appealing and re-appealing to the Evangelicals, reinforcing their narrative.

Because of this, the Republicans have increasingly looked less and less like true Conservatives and more like moral crusaders for God and country. The Evangelicals, whom no more than 40 years ago weren't even a politically relevant voting bloc, have now completely taken over the Republican party, or at the very least convinced Republicans that the party can't win without them.

Both these things -- the rich and the fundies -- are tearing the country apart for various reasons, and both of them came to the forefront on the national stage under the Reagan administration.

This is bad.

This is what's wrong with America.

crab66: Urge to deface property. Rising.

You may not. You may, however, defecate should the urge strike you.