Remembering to Forget

FOR ALL HIS HARPING on the glories of the American past, Ronald Reagan is most interested in ignoring the realities of the present.

What Reagan's State of the Union speech showed Tuesday night is that his program is not simply an effort to recapture a glorious past; it aims rather to engender a calculated forgetting--a forgetting of those people we are least likely to remember.

Reagan began his address by inviting our country to forget those on the margins of the American economy. For while he remains committed to the necessity of continued large defense expenditures, Reagan called into question the entire welfare program's existence. The past 20 years of social programs have led to a "sinful waste of human spirit and potential," he said. He went on to claim that welfare has "degraded labor," thereby admitting that he finds fault not only with individual social programs, but with the whole philosophy behind government assisting those in need.

It is no coincidence that Reagan emphasized the amount of private charitable givings made last year. American government should have very little to do with the poor according to Reagan's mythic view of the past.

But if the poor can be forgotten in the name of remembering the protestant work ethic, then pluralism can be forgotten in the name of returning to our puritan roots. Private values, he told us last night, are at the root of public policy.

Reagan promised to return to children their right to acknowledge God in the classroom (as if no prayer in public schools automatically expunged God from the minds of students the minute they enter classrooms.) He pledged similarly to heal "the single wound on the national conscience" by ending legalized abortion. Nothing was said to those children or those thousands of pregnant teenagers whose private concerns have no place in Reagan's public policy.

Reagan's lesson in forgetting by remembering extended to foreign policy as well. Proclaiming America's commitment to "extend the family of freedom," he promised to help freedom fighters everywhere in order to assure that "all God's children" will achieve their dreams. But Reagan remembers this commitment only in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua--all countries with Soviet backed governments. He conveniently forgot El Salvador, the Phillipines, and Chile. The struggle by Black South Africans to end apartheid was noticably absent from his text.

Tuesday's State of the Union address climaxed Reagan's frighteningly successful effort to redefine what attitude and rhetoric will be acceptable in the future of American politics. Pointing out problems in our nation has been made to seem unpatriotic, largely because forgetting has been made to seem American.