Two days after Ronald Reagan died, I dreamed the Central East
Side was destroyed by an atomic explosion. There were collapsing buildings,
sheets of radioactive flame, and above it all, a perfectly symmetrical, iconic
mushroom cloud rising hundreds of feet into the air. Somewhere, amid the sirens
and the commotion and the screams of the dying, I could hear a radio or television
announcer excitedly proclaiming: "That's right, folks! All indications
are that this is the big one! The end of the world! Life as we know it
on Earth is over!"
That was the part that didn't fit. After all, an amplified voice
shrieking, "There is no hope! We're all doomed!" hardly qualifies
as the sort of helpful instructions your local station is supposed to provide
If This Had This Been An Actual Emergency. It had to mean something.
And I think I know what it did mean. This was no third-rate,
low-budget nightmare about some two-bit, single-city jihadist attack- the kind
of nightmare thoughtless fathers pick up at the airport gift shop on their way
home. That voice-over was there to assure me that I was getting the real deal:
genuine, all-expenses-paid, five-star Armageddon, the kind they just don't make
any more.
This dream was sent by someone. Someone, even after all these
years, still cared enough to send the very best; someone who, even in death,
spared no expense to see too it that my generation's nights sweated with only
the finest in apocalyptic terror. Yup, I think the late President Ronald Reagan
himself sent me this dream to remind me what real nuclear nightmares were all
about. It was his little way of saying goodbye-- wake up screaming just one
more time for the Gipper.
The certainty of imminent nuclear annihilation was the backdrop
against which a generation of Americans-- my generation-- came of age. During
the Reagan era, even plenty of level-headed adults were giving society a less
than even-money chance of surviving the decade; for teenagers, with their natural
flair for the dramatic, the situation was correspondingly more dire. The universal
adolescent skepticism of adults' ability to run the world was given, in our
case, a uniquely stark point of focus: the maniacs were going to blow it up.
Everybody knew it. As Charlton Heston so eloquently put it, God damn them all
to hell.
I don't want to get too self-aggrandizing here, but I honestly
don't think that any generation experienced this particular bit of existential
angst quite as keenly as mine did. Those born after about 1977, for example,
simply never experienced the crushing knowledge that any day might bring with
it the long-awaited blinding flash that would indicate that civilization, as
we knew it, had come to an end.
I'm not saying it's been all beer and skittles for the under-30
crowd; they've had their own crosses to bear, some of which weren't even dreamt
of in my day. When I pulled on my socks prefatory to facing another day of 9th-grade
purgatory, I did so without any real fear that I would be gunned down in study
hall in some Columbine-style massacre. (And in any case, if anyone in my high
school had decided to liven up 3rd period by rampaging through the halls with
an assault rifle torching jocks, it would have been me.) I never had to pass
through a metal detector on my way to class, and in the isolated farming community
where I grew up, the chances of being caught in the crossfire of some teenaged
crack-dealer turf war were pretty remote. So, yes: if one grants what is obvious
only in hindsight-- that the world did not, in fact, end in a nuclear holocaust
circa 1986-- being a teenager today is actually probably more dangerous than
it was then.
But dangerous and frightening are two different things. As grist
for the mill of adolescent anxiety, the specter of a few heavily-armed goths
with a score to settle is pretty small beer compared to the complete extinction
of the human race. At the risk of sounding like the old fogey I am so clearly
becoming, Generation Y doesn't know how good they've got it.
And what of the previous generation, the baby-boomers? Didn't
they suffer under the constant, crushing threat of radioactive apocalypse? To
this I can only say: apparently not. I mean, just look at them--obviously, it
didn't get to them the way it did to us. Mood rings, Pyramid Power, and Air
Supply are not the creations of a people who have stared nuclear holocaust in
the face and genuinely understood the seriousness of the situation.
Oh, I'm sure they knew that nuclear war was a possibility. It's
just that the national mood at that time was still so colored by post-war optimism
that they couldn't take it seriously. The children of the 50s and 60s were brought
up to believe that good civil-defense practice, Dad's backyard bomb shelter,
and a well-chosen supply of canned goods would get us through any nuclear conflict,
the same way gas rationing and Rosie the Riveter had gotten us through the Second
World War. This was America, after all, the nation that time and again had made
the world safe for democracy; it was unimaginable that such a nation might be
unable to make the world safe for itself. Not until Reagan ramped up the arms
race in earnest that the sheer overwhelming mass of nuclear ordnance available--
enough, as we were told almost daily, to destroy the world fifty time over--
did the concept of mutually assured destruction become an undeniable reality
for even the cheeriest flower child. And only Reagan, alone of all world leaders,
ever seemed genuinely willing to use that ordnance. Until Reagan came along,
it must have been easy to believe that somehow we would come through anything
with colors flying.
I'm sure the Cuban missile crisis shook this faith somewhat.
But I don't think it's any coincidence that within five years of that nerve-wracking
standoff, the kids who lived through it had all moved to San Francisco with
the soles cut out of their shoes and were fucking anything that moved. That's
really the main thing that separates us from our parents-- at least they
had the Sexual Revolution to take their minds off their troubles.
Yes, putting all speculation about national mood and middle-class
denial aside, I think you have to grant my generation this one indisputable
historical fact: We are the only age group to spend our sexual prime confronting
nuclear annihilation and AIDS simultaneously. AIDS and Reagan at the same time--
top that, you sanctimonious baby-boom fucks. Maybe we weren't the only generation
who came of age under the threat of thermonuclear apocalypse, but we were without
a doubt the only one who couldn't even get an occasional casual, guilt-free
fuck to take the edge off while we were doing it. (Considered in this light,
the timing of the War on Drugs seems like an especially cruel and unwarranted
blow. Thank God this latter campaign was so spectacularly unsuccessful, otherwise
we probably would have killed ourselves in our thousands.)
It was the enormity, the inescapability of the thing that really
got you down. Your school, your town, your mom, your favorite TV show-all of
it gone, forever, just like that. And depending on the timing, there was a good
chance that the whole terrible nightmare could go down before you'd gotten a
chance to get laid even once. No wonder The Cure sold so many records.
Total destruction, without warning, at any moment: this was the
backdrop against which a generation of then-young minds developed. We were all
going to die, worst fears confirmed; no deposit, no return. I admit that there
was something undeniably appealing to the adolescent mind about this concept.
The end of the world; how dramatic was that? I remember being 16 years old and
walking outside to stare up into the night sky, looking for the incoming ICBMs
that would, as the Cold Warriors themselves put it, destroy my way of life.
I couldn't argue with the terminology; whatever differences the American political
establishment and I might have had over what "the American way of life"
should be, both our definitions included being alive to live it. The chances
at the time seemed slim. Ronald Reagan and his defense-contractor buddies had
pushed us so close to the brink of full-scale nuclear conflict that even if
neither side was foolish enough to initiate a first strike, a simple clerical
error or computer glitch would be enough to send the nukes flying. Every day
was another day to be endured in the shadow of The Bomb.
And Reagan, for all practical purposes, was The Bomb.
They were one and the same; twin heads of the same unholy, all-destroying monster.
Reagan was both the symbol and the master of a destructive force that stood
for everything an adolescent could hate and fear. Even the jokes about his age
had a serious undertone. Sure, nuclear war would mean the end of life on Earth
as we knew it, the extinction of the human race, but what did he care? He was
going to die any day anyhow. We, on the other hand, had our whole lives ahead
of us, or should have. Who was this evil old fuck to take them away from us?
Later, when "Generation X" came to be reified as a
cultural phenomenon, with distinct characteristics that could be enumerated
to codify the ways in which we'd fallen short of our parents' expectations,
we were chided for our nihilism, our cynicism, our apathy. Well, shit, was it
any wonder? I never expected to live to see my 21st birthday. Might as well
start smoking, drinking, shooting smack; whatever gets you through the night,
because God only knows if there'll be a tomorrow. (I'm surprised I bothered
to take the SATs; I think I did it mostly because I didn't want to spend the
last few years of my life living with my parents. If I'd known I was going to
live as long as I have, perhaps I wouldn't have majored in the humanities. But
that's a story for another time.)
And now, finally poor old Reagan is dead, and the world, for
all its many day-to-day perils, is still with us. Even as I write this, somber
public men are eulogizing him. They call him a great leader, and thanks him
for winning the Cold War, whatever that means. They want to put his likeness
on the dime, on the ten-dollar bill, on Mount Rushmore. I, for my part, just
want to put his body in the ground, even if it is about 30 years too late, and
forget that he ever existed. I'm not sorry he's dead, I'm glad. I don't care
how much he suffered; it wasn't enough.
Ron Reagan Jr. once said of George W. Bush, "What's his
great achievement? That's he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" I would say
something similar of Reagan, senior: What's his great achievement, that he managed
not to destroy civilization? Well, I haven't destroyed civilization, either.
In fact, I can go Reagan one better; I didn't even try to destroy civilization.
Put me on fucking Mount Rushmore.
Marty Smith is the Editor of Lime
Tea. The Department of Homeland Security already knows where he lives.
