Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1984. július-december (38. évfolyam, 27-48. szám)
1984-11-01 / 41. szám
Thursday, Nov. 1. 1984. AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZO 7. MERCÜRIUS VERIDICUS EX HUNGÁRIA. A Magyar Hírmondó, The Importance of Beating Reagan Who do you believe, me or your own eyes? —Groucho Marx The choice we will face 10 days from now has been obscured for much of this election season. Only during the past few weeks has the trance enveloping the electorate lifted, as if four years of televised White House artifice had suddenly switched off. The moment of clarity came, ironically, from a video spectacle, and now it may disappear again because the president remained awake at his lectern on Sunday night, didn’t drool, and stumbled into incoherence only at the end. But out beyond the studios a political struggle is blazing between social groups and between political ideas. The division is ideological, involving forces larger than either political party; and to understand it we must look back further than the past few months or years, not at polls but at history. American history, especially in this century, is the story of social movements overcoming the barriers erected against them. These movements comprised disparate groups, and their immediate goals sometimes conflicted, but they’ve embraced one common theme: the building of a society more equal, more free, and more secure. Underlying that premise is a patriotism far deeper than the manipulation of such icons as flag, family, or church. It is a patriotism that over the decades has benefited nearly every citizen, uniting workers, farmers, immigrants, women, blacks, Hispanics, the aged, -children, veterans, students, the disabled, the sick, and the destitute. It is a love offreedom that has protected the nonbeliever and the devout, the conformist and the bohemian, the victim and the accused. It js a love of country that has preserved the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us. This historical process has always been too slow, too painful and bloody; often our nation’s generosity, tolerance, and wisdom have been thwarted. But our col-t elective advancement over the decades ' and generations has indeed made us better off as a people than we were 50 years ago—despite resistance from those who abhor every gain as a threat to their privilege. The current expression of that abhorrence is Reagan ism, the transformation of government from a sometime ally' of humane purposes into an unrelenting enemy. Every right and every liberty we possess are at risk, and that is our stake in this election. Reagan is heir to an ugly legacy concealed behind his smiling face and upbeat rhetoric. His political forebears opposed labor’s right to organize. They opposed the right of blacks, Hispanics, and women to full citizenship. They opposed Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, Head Start, student loans, day care, and veterans’ benefits. They opposed free speech and every confirmation of the Bill of Rights. They opposed environmental protection and every other curb on corporate power. They opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, then and now. Their reactionary testament was conceived long before Reagan became its executor, but he has remained faithful to it Each policy is rooted in that legacy: crushing unions, abandoning worker safety, undermining civil rights, cutting social welfare, subverting the judicial system, ruining the environment. Personally vacuous he may be, but that has never stayed Reagan’s hand. He has well earned the allegiance of the selfish rich, the military porkbarrelers, arid the fundamentalist bullies. The latter deserve special mention. Not since Prohibition has religious fanaticism made such bold moves toward state power as the Falwell ilk is making under Reagan. Most Americans rightly despise their crusade to Christianize the nation with school prayer, constitutional amendments, and right-wing dogma, and many Americans—including Jews, Muslims, and Catholics—resent their intolerant utterances. They are an affront to our freedom of conscience, but the president is their unashamed sycophant. Walter Mondale is an inheritor of the decent traditions that Reaganism has sought to bury. His political history began when he was Minnesota’s attorney general in the early ’60s, and a man named Clarence Gideon was suing the state of Florida for sending him to prison after a trial without legal counsel. Prosecutors across the country feared that if Gideon won, they would be forced to provide lawyers for all indigent criminal defendants, and a group of them solicited Attorney General Mondale to join them in opposing Gideon at the Supreme Court. Mondale did the opposite, stating publicly his risky opinion that Gideon was right. The court agreed. From then till now, Mondale’s record on civil rights and civil liberties has been consistent, up to his denunciation of the repressive aspects of the Simpson-Maz- zoli immigration bill in Sunday’s debate. His record in the Senate of support for progressive legislation was among the best The loudest criticism voiced against him by opponents this year has been that Mondale is too good a friend to labor, minorities, women, the elderly, and the poor. These categories, and others, have been labeled Mondale’s special interests, but together they represent a popular coalition behind him, and a potential majority. These people and their children are the beneficiaries of that democratic tradition Mondale has undertaken to defend. If the domestic program of Reaganism has been competently destructive, its foreign policy is both incompetent and dangerous. Its single accomplishment has been to place a little Caribbean backwater under protective custody. While the White House savored this triumph, Sovi- et-American relations have grown increasingly hostile, and we have responded with an arms buildup which is bankrupting us. The president hais lately postured as a statesman seeking better relations and arms control, but this is belied by his offhand remarks, his public statements, and his failure to achieve even the beginning, of serious negotiations. Instead, this administration is attempting the most audacious Pentagon swindle of all time, the so-called strategic defense initiative or “star wars” plan. The president’s argument for this tril- lion-dollar weapons program is strange. He insists we cannot reach a new arms control agreement—or even ratify SALT II—because the Soviets are untrustworthy. He disparages the mutual, verifiable freeze proposed by Mondale for the same reason. But then he asserts that if we develop killer satellites and death beams, we will find the Kremlin so reasonable that he foresees a treaty giving them this new technology. If this fails, at least we can all look forward to fulfilling the prophecy of Armageddon. Nobody expects the spate weapons to be feasible, let alone operational, by 1988, so Reagan is obviously making utopian promises he won’t have to keep. Star wars is a formula not for peace or disarmament, but for a more costly and deadly arms race; it is an alibi for failure. Reluctance to seek peaceful solutions abroad is at the heart of Reagan’s other foreign failures and disgraces. There has been no credible movement toward a settlement in the Middle East, only a miserable carnage in Lebanon. There has been no honest negotiation in Central America, only an illegal secret war and the killing of civilians by the thousands. There have been no sanctions against the South African racists, only a wink at apartheid. Wherever possible, everyone should arrange to take the day off from work on Election Day to work full-time on getting out the vote. On Election Day, the lists of persons called must be followed up. They should be checked off at polling places, called at home if they haven’t yet voted and given help, if needed, to get to the polls, including transportation, child care, etc. Indeed, the president even scorns the hesitant human rights policy pursued by the Carter administration. His remarks about the Philippines on Sunday night gave not only Ferdinand Marcos but every other oppressive ruler patronized by the United States a free hand. The alternative to rightist dictators, said the president, is communism. His words were a death sentence for democratic dissent around the world. Mondale has vowed to end the illegal war in' Nicaragua immediately, and to pursue the Contadora process for a negotiated regional settlement in Central America. He has promised to institute hew sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. He has opposed the bolstering of unpopular regimes with American weapons. Most importantly, he has announced that he will seek annual summit meetings with the Soviet leadership as the first step toward arms control and better relations. This is the sanest proposal to improve Soviet-American relations in years. We have many disagreements with Walter Mondale’s positions and his conduct of this campaign. We have frankly been dismayed by his occasionally bellicose rhetoric, his emphasis on the deficit rather than employment, and his reluctance to cut defense spending. We think he could have addressed his campaign more directly to the black and Latin communities whose votes he needs more than any other Democrat in history. We don’t expect these differences to disappear. Should Mondale win, we’ll shake his hand and come out fighting. But we have also admired his courage in facing difficult odds, in choosing Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, in challenging the American ayatollahs. He has held onto principle when he might have waffled, and where we disagree we believe that Mondale has the virtues of intelligence and honesty—qualities lacking in the incumbent. There has never been, and perhaps never will be in our lifetimes, a better reason to vote than in 1984. Mondale will probably carry New York City, but the margin of his vote here will affect his chances to carry the state without which he cannot possibly win. And the Mondale margin will also affect the mayoral race next year, and the Senate race in the year following. lb those who would abstain because Walter Mondale is not pure enough, we say: consider the millions of people, in your country and around the world, whom you would thus consign to the mercy of Ronald Reagan. Our responsibility to them, to ourselves, and to the future is to elect Mondale and Férraro on November 6. ■ (Reprinted from the Village Voice) Most likely the large number of “undecided" voters are undecided not about who they will vote for but whether they will vote at all. They must be convinced that their vote can and will make a difference. No sector of the electorate should be conceded to the ultra-right.
