1979 - 35 years ago!

In 1979 I was a college senior, getting ready to graduate and study medicine. Things were a little different in those days. I didn't own a TV, so I didn't follow the news as closely as I might have. Yet, one of the defining moments for me was coming back from class and viewing the wreckage of the failed Iran hostage rescue mission at Dessert 1. I remember thinking "Can't America do any better?" I would vote the next year for Reagan, and for years I would believe that things were getting better. Only in hindsight - 35 years of it now - can I see that Carter was right, Reagan was wrong, and that the terrible crises we are in today stem from decisions, poor ones, made at that time. My entire college career was marked by the economic and energy shocks of the late 1970's. Both winters of 1976-77 and 1977-78 (my Freshman and Sophomore years) were severe. The University of Notre Dame had its own energy plant burning coal, and in both winters, ran its coal reserves down very low. In January 1978, a sever blizzard closed the school for 2 weeks (it had never closed for more than one day for weather before). Students were dorm-bound. The snow drifted to the third floor and higher. I remember walking to other dorms: you exited on the first floor, then climbed "stairs" in the drifts and walked on pathways that were even with the third floor until you reached your destination, where you took the "stairs" back to ground level. One student was injured when he jumped off the 4th floor roof of his dorm and landed on a bicycle rack buried in the snow. Notre Dame had a basketball scheduled with the University of Maryland midway through the blizzard. Since the game was televised (and paid) the University contracted the City of South Bend to make special snow plow jobs of the city airport and roads to get the Maryland basketball team in for the game. The game was thrown open to the entire student body free to give them something to do. Set against the unusual weather, President Carter's goals for energy self-sufficiency seemed important, although his calls for cutting back seemed to counter-progressive. Driving 55 and turning the thermostat down sounded quaint. But his earlier plans were nothing compared to his speech of July 15, 1979. Dubbed the "Malaise" speech, (a word that never appeared in the speech), Carter identified the crisis' cause not on an external enemy but on American's themselves. The crisis was due to American materialism, self-indulgence and consumption, and a failure to find meaning therein. A crisis of values among the people. Carter spoke of a "system of government that seems incapable of action", of "a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful self interests". The common good was lost: "You see every extreme position defended to the past vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another." Finally, Carter indicated that America was at a turning point: "There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that path lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility." The alternative - a course consistent with our past traditions, lead to the restoration of American values. The problem was never-ending consumption, the desire for more. The alternative, living according to our permanent values, meant living within our means. How we dealt with energy, would determine the type of freedom that would prevail in America. Carter outlined a plan to decrease, and eventually end, our dependence on foreign oil. His plan, though, would require sacrifice, and effort. I personally didn't hear the speech. I do remember the reaction, and the "malaise" label. And I remember Reagan, and his "morning in America". I also remember his promise that the problem with our lack of energy was a lack of domestic drilling and production. Reagan insisted that we could not insist on doing with less. 1979-80 played out as a backdrop to my finishing and graduating. Then in the spring of 1980 came the failed Iranian Hostage rescue, and my personal crisis with American military power. I went on to vote for Reagan; practically everyone else did to. He promised a great future. It's interesting to look back now and see how his promises turned out. He promised to restore economic order in government spending: "You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why, then, should we thing collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation?" The average Carter deficit was $54.5 billion annually. During the Reagan years, average deficits grew to $210.6 billion, on average over his two terms. Federal spending doubled from $590.9 billion in 1980 to $1.14 trillion in 1989. The federal bureaucracy grew by 5% under Reagan. Most of all, I remember Reagan as a great sales man. He learned that as an actor turned spokesman for GE. He sold Americans what they wanted: self-indulgence and consumption. The Reagan revolution was not a conservative revolution at all. It was a revolution for American invulnerability and global supremacy. His support for SDI, "Star Wars", made the Soviet Union paranoid for good reason. Its basis was to make American invulnerable to any kind of retribution. This would allow America to demand anything necessary for its "survival", specifically, foreign oil. The Global War on Terror (GWOT), and especially the war in Iraq, had little to do with terrorism and everything to do with access to Iraqi light, sweet crude. Despite Reagan's assertion that America's energy shortage was the work of Washington preventing domestic production, and despite the fact that Alaskan oil discoveries where brought to market as gast as geologically possible, American oil production peaked in 1972 at about 9.7BB per day. Even today, with the shale revolution and "fracking", production is "back" only to 7BB per day. Imports peaked in 2005 at 10 BB per day, and fallen to 7 BB per day. The question I have come to ask myself is this: I know that we American's are not aggressors. I know that we maintain our military supremacy to deter and defend against aggression. The question is, what do Russia and China and North Korea and Iran and Syria believe? And since the military maxim is to look at your enemies capabilities, not intentions, does it matter? Looking back to Carter's questioning American consumption, especially with regards to oil, the choice was summarized well in a slightly different regards by Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, after 9/11. "We have two choices, Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter." So, instead of choosing conservation, higher mileage standards, alternative energy sources, decreased consumption, and trying to live within our domestic oil production, or living with what oil we could import from friendly sources, America chose to pursue global hegemony, so that we could pursue getting oil from the entire world, despite making the world change the way they live. Since Russia has enormous amounts of oil and gas, it is any wonder that they alone have been able to resist our demands for oil, no doubt due to their remaining stocks of nuclear weapons? No doubt why Iran continues in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. It seems the only way to resist America.