Put on your head, wear your eyes.
We finished recording the new album a few weeks ago. In just a little while now you'll see it on shelves, but we still have some fine tuning to do before we release it to the general public. This new album, it has something of a new sound; I've described it as our "first rock album." Now we've been classified as rock in the past by some of our
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- world hunger (taking to heart Reagan's quote, "A hungry child knows no politics," although his administration's withholding of food aid from Ethiopia for two years due to unwelcome efforts to implement land reform by the then-current government indicated that he certainly did)
- AIDS (something which, as again noted above, Reagan failed to mention publicly until 1987, much less advocate in favor of funding for research and/or treatment) and
- debt relief (which, hey, Reagan basically created for you to protest about by authorizing the IMF and World Bank to issue high-interest loans to developing countries in return for following so-called "free-market" policies that allow multinational corporations to come in and soak up the majority of the countries' GNP).
But the above pronouncements just don't sit square in my brain with not only what I know to be true about Reagan and the events that marked his presidency, but your own feelings and opinions about the man as well. In addition to some of the very pertinent points raised by the marvelous lastgrrl (who, if you're reading this, oh my God I want to have your children), let's list a few other products of his administration:His relaxation of environmental and work safety standards to appease big business at the expense of workers and the environment, his statement that "trees cause pollution," and his appointment of strip-mining advocate James Watt, who was quoted as saying "perhaps the cartridge-box should be used" in dealing with radical environmentalist activists, as Secretary of the Interior.
His steady slashing of monies for public housing, defended by his opinion that many in need of shelter were "homeless by choice."
His resistance to supporting economic sanctions for apartheid-era South Africa for the first five years of his presidency.
His refusal to cancel his visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, which contained the remains of known Nazi officers, stating that the one-time SS members were "victims" of the Nazi empire, as much as any Holocaust survivor.
And finally, and most damningly.
Diplomat? Working for peace? Tell it to the tens of thousands of people who died at the hands of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, regimes the Reagan administration gave military support to. The 60,000 (as estimated by the British newspaper The Guardian) deaths in Nicaragua as a result of the war between the CIA-trained Contra forces and the Sandinista rebels don't exactly shore up those claims either. And let's not forget the official US-sanctioned widespread use of torture by all of these governments.
Why did the Reagan administration condone, nay, even help bring all this about? Ostensibly, it was to prevent the spread of Communism, but you and I know better, don't we, Bono? I don't have the space to get into a long dissertation of the US's black, rotted history with Central and Latin America, but it's a fairly safe bet that what Reagan and his cronies were really trying to do was protect American business interests. Any time a Latin American country tries to kick American oligarchy-like corporations out, the US responds with some degree of force, a tradition that goes all the way back to the Eisenhower administration's overthrow of Jacobo Arnenz's Guatemalan government in 1955 at the best of the United Fruit Company.
Damn LJ comment limits. To be continued on side 2.
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