Down the Rabbit Hole to the Reagan Era

     I'm thinking of 1988, we are its afterbirth.  Reagan's final year in the room shaped like a circle seen from a sideward angle, a room with a jar of jelly beans offered by the movie star vanity ranch president to every visitor.  How charming when Diane Sawyer was offered a jelly bean by the smiling old man, his attentive slavishly devoted wife, protector of the legacy, the lie that is Ronald Reagan, seated erectly beside the president, keeping careful eye out for Alzheimer's symptoms.  Must cover with a charming humorous statement if hubby forgets where he is, that he's doing an interview, or doesn't remember meeting Diane Sawyer twenty minutes ago.
     On the soundtrack now, courtesy of YouTube randomness nevertheless directed by algorithms, Chubb Rock, "The One"  Hip Hop, I suppose, a genre I haven't explored, but maybe I now am.  The opening of this post was composed to two 1988 songs by Slick Rick.  A Slick Rick video has the
rapper with the eyepatch standing before a huge sculpture (plastic maybe, but well done) of three Alice in Wonderland characters, including Alice, the Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter.  He tells a story to an older Black man in a four poster bed in the middle of what looks like a park at night.  The old man has on either side of him two delicious young women in nighties.  In other words, the Life.
     This music of 1988 to 1991 is quite fine, I'm discovering.  Beats are crisp, clever, interesting, throbbingly good.  "O.P.P." by Naughty By Nature is worth checking out.  Has a sample of a woman moaning sexually.  If you like that sound.
     When I inhabited the age range eight to twelve, I saw all but one of the Marx Brothers films of 1929 to 1950.  There are thirteen in all, but one eluded me for three decades, Room Service (1938), starring a young Ann Miller, Lucille Ball looking hot and statuesque, and the Brothers themselves, though not Zeppo, who'd retired from acting after the political satire Duck Soup (1933) to become a top Hollywood agent.  Another brother, Harpo, was my favorite.  My mother bought a Goodwill beige trenchcoat for me to wear on Halloween.  We couldn't get a top hat in time, so I went to Plan B: cold cream on the face, coffee grounds making me a bum.  A straw Huckleberry Finn hat completed the look.  Huck Finn grown up and poor, grubby, smart, but still dealing with shitty situations--feet wet most of the time.
     Huck Finn goes to the Phillippines, witnesses waterboarding practiced by U.S. troops.  American Empire born in the war pushed by the Hearst Syndicate.  Patty Hearst kidnapped, maybe, because she represented the irresponsible profit-driven journalism that helped bring about the American Empire during the Spanish American War of 1898, a war, remember, begun with an incorrect conclusion.  The U.S.S. Maine wasn't hit by Spanish forces in Havana harbor.  U.S. Navy and National Geographic investigations many decades later found that the ship's forward magazines exploded, no known reason why.  Something happened internal to the vessel.  That a U.S. battleship was even in a Cuban harbor smells of the same intrusiveness and meddling of American Empire still practiced, on a vaster scale, today.
     In 1988 the "existential threat" was proliferation by the Soviet Union and United States of nuclear weapons, a problem created by Ronald Reagan's strategy of exorbitant spending on nukes to make the Soviets do the same, thus eventually weakening their economy, drained as well by their fruitless eight year war in Afghanistan.  Is Afghanistan a jelly bean Reagan would've chewed on for seventeen years and longer?  How would he have reacted to 9/11?  Would he ever have invaded Iraq, thus betraying his ally Saddam Hussein?  Did he know the Marx Brothers?

                                                                                Vic Neptune