I knew a guy in HS who expressed a desire to run for “Rose Princess”, a local sort of beauty contest that picked, from the various schools, the Queen of the Rose Festival. He was not effeminate, he just wanted to make a feminist statement (this was 1977). That is the most specific, concrete memory I have of him, but I remember he was a good person and fun to be around.
I lie, that was not my most concrete memory. I lost touch with him for a decade. Then his name popped up on the evening news. Shot in the head point blank by Contra rebels in San Jose de Bocay, el Cua, Nicaragua, after being wounded by a grenade in a firefight.
So WTF was he doing in a rural war zone? He was helping the locals develop a system to generate electricity for their village. This story pissed not a few people off at the time and it hit me pretty hard. Adding the Iran-Contra scandal to the mix makes the whole thing especially detestable.
The whitehouse barfed out the usual nonsense, “He knew what he was doing … he deliberately put himself in harms way”, blah, blah.
Well, fuck the Reagan administration, my friend was a good man, better than any of those empty suits. Fuck the bastards who turned any good memories I had of him into a locus of pain and anger. And you who support that administration and their Contra thugs, fail to try me, you got nothing.
The contras were a horrifying terrorist organization, and it appalls me that anyone would defend our support of them. For that reason if no other, Reagan should be reviled.
Seventeen years of horror, but not all in vain. It blossomed when the Sandanistas lost a fair election, and handed over the government to a center-right coalition. Because that’s what they promised. The only miracle more hopeful than a successful revolution of liberation is one that they win, and then don’t fuck it up.
Come now. If there’s anything I’ve learned from thirteen years on this message board, it’s that Ronald Wilson Reagan’s presidency merits nothing less than a paean.
In fact, I plan to visit Simi Valley this summer, just so I can paean his grave…
ETA: For You, I’m sorry for the painful memories you’re experiencing today. I wish you peace.
Met a guy from El Salvador on the run, hiding out with some friends of mine, way back in The Day. I commended him on his courage, and he looked at me with that look that says “I think you are a good person, but you don’t know shit”.
Not about courage, he said. If he fought them, they would kill him, if he didn’t fight them, they would starve him, enslave him, and then kill him. Even a dog will bite with his last breath.
There’s a guy that comes and hangs out in at the farmers market on Saturday sometimes. He helps me break down my tent and load coolers. He was stationed in Central America during the dirty wars. He’s badly badly broken. Like most vets, doesn’t say much about what he did but the oblique hints are enough to piece together a real ugly picture. So yeah, fuck Reagan.
The real irony is that Danny Ortega Saavedra is again running the country, so Reagan’s war came to nought. Worse yet, Ortega has become a hardline Catholic, women have no right at all over their own bodies.
Well, that should tell you that for all the concerns the Reagan Administrtion voiced about democracy and human rights in Central America to justify their support of the Contras and fellow anti-Communist forces in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatamala (some of whom are now on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity), it was really all about ensuring the Soviets and the Cubans did not gain a foothold in the region even if the fear was entirely exaggerated. Once the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved, what was going on in Central America became as important as what was going on in Antarctica as far as the U.S. was concerned.
I suspect the school administration quashed his entry, because though we were “enlightened” in those days, there were still enough knuckledraggers about that it would not have gone over very well. I do not recall him having been in the running from the get-go, it seems to me we had a girl princess that year, as usual.
In light of everything else covered in this thread, I think it’s fitting to supplemental-Pit the Obama Admin for not doing the right thing about Honduras.
In this case, Obama is not allowed to do that, nor do I think he is particularly so inclined. Zelaya is on the wrong edge of the spectrum: remember when Frankie (allegedly) said something like “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” ? That is how it goes. Leaders that may be problematic get no favors from the US, and this president is certainly not some left-wing tradition-smasher. In fact, I can barely see where he is to the left of Reagan.