We (still) have good reason to hate the Brits!

Exactly 30 years ago today I wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post titled "We Have Good Reason to Hate the Brits"  in a vain attempt to provide a counterweight to American Anglophilia about the Malvinas Islands.

But nothing is as easy as you think. I went through a meeting with intelligence agents, deaf and hostile debates in the media and even threats sotto voce. The best response was that of a cousin. "The nationalist in you came out," she wrote me.

And that's what I believe happened to many Argentines on April 2nd this year. Suddenly they spoke of the "heroes" of 1982. Few remembered that the Argentine armed forces had only been trained to suppress unarmed civilians.

The defeat by one of the NATO powers was only a matter of time. The soldiers sent to the "war" by the Argentine generals who had no experience of war, were cannon fodder, not heroes. Thirty years after the events there has to be a way to lower the emotional volume that the Buenos Aires government is stoking for plainly demagogic reasons.

The Argentine claim to the islands is no more legitimate than the Zionist claim to Palestine. Possession is nine-tenths of the law and the Argentines have not held the islands for nearly 180 years, just as Palestine was not a Jewish State since before Alexander the Great.

And frankly, what can Argentina give the Falkland kelpers?

Yes, as I wrote in 1982, the British took from Argentina (and Ireland, India, Anglophone Africa, etc.) much more than the Falklands. This is why they have earned the instinctive antipathy of most Argentines. But in Argentina and between Argentines there are fundamental problems of higher priority.

Ultimately, the war 30 years ago yielded the only beneficial result Argentina could expect: to get rid of the cowards in uniform who were strangling their country.

Let's bury the Reagan myth once and for all

"Obama is now trying to imitate President Reagan," said the cabbie. "That was a great president!" I asked why. "Well, he balanced the budget, for one." This is an exact misremembrance about Reagan, the president who added more to the national debt than all his predecessors combined and never balanced a budget.

"Actually, no," I told the cabbie.

"But what about his foreign policy?"

"OK, what about it?"

"Well, he defeated the Soviet Union."

"Actually, no, again. The Soviet Union collapsed from the weight of its own internal corruption, which started long before Reagan was ever president," I said.

I was recalling what had been whispered to me in the 1970s about Russian "partner-socialism" between workers trading what they skimmed off their workplaces. The last two decades of Soviet government had been rife with dishonesty and theft from the public till, from top to bottom.

"Oh," the cabbie insisted. "But Reagan gave me a green card."

He was referring to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which Reagan dragged his heels on for four long years. Reagan was no friend of the immigrant.

But wasn't the economy better?

Not if you recall the 1982 recession, which led to mass layoffs in manufacturing and the beginning of the off-shoring of millions of jobs. Nor if you recall the 1986 stock market crash. Nor if you recall the hundreds of billions of deficit spending proposed and pushed through each of eight years by Reagan.

Wasn't he the Great Communicator?

Reagan was a good reader of scripts. He was an actor, after all.

But his material included lots of lies. The "welfare queen" he cited as proof that public aid induced fraud never existed. The "freedom fighters" he encouraged in Nicaragua were accomplices of drug dealers. The "heroes" in his administration, whom he praised as such, lied to Congress and thereby to the people.

Reagan was easily one of the worst presidents in living memory. He pushed millions into poverty, took food from infants to pay for sweet deals with military contractors.

He was an evil and immoral man in every dimension of these words. Yet the propagandists and their media have developed a fantasy story that many good people of good faith are being convinced to believe was history.

All in order to enthrone and semi-deify the actor whose best role was that of president.

This is the first day of the rest of my life

No, really, it is.

In the 1999 film "American Beauty," Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey) says: "Remember those posters that said, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life'? Well, that's true of every day but one: the day you die."

This is the day I did not die.

This is the first day that the ghost of the past no longer hovers over me. Oh, I have a past, don't get me wrong. It's just that some really awful things in it no longer have a hold on me.

I feel like shouting in the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Free at last!