By PETER S. FERRARA<br>Record Columnist
Will we ever have another period in our history like “The Roaring Twenties,” when jazz, booze, easy money, and dances like the Charlston had America partying like never before? The exuberant greed in the banking and financial markets would eventually lead to the collapse of the American economy even more dreadfully than what we witness today. This unrest and uncertainty led us into The Great Depression of the Thirties. People lost their savings, their jobs, and their homes in an orgy of failures worse than what we’re going through now.
Who can forget how the world suffered through the greatest period of carnage and mass destruction in human history during the Nineteen Forties? In 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginnings of the Atomic Age and the Cold War. Then came the Fifties, and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. The struggle of African-Americans for equality under the law resulted in the historic Supreme Court decision in 1954 (“Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education”) which declared the practice of segregation unconstitutional. The CIA’s secret toppling of the Iranian government and installation of the Shah of Iran set America on a collision course with that country and ultimately with much of the Muslim world. We are paying the price today for seeds sown back then. Let’s also remember the devastating effects of the Communist witch hunt spearheaded later in that decade by a lying coward named Senator Joseph McCarthy. This was followed by the Korean War.
I could be tempted to call the Fifties a deceptively important decade except that the Sixties were next—with a sea change in American thinking led by its youth. The Sixties are impossible to boil down to a few words. Among the dreadful events of greatest significance were the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Civil Rights legislation passed in 1964 and 1965. At the same time, the development of the birth control pill coincided with the Women’s Liberation Movement and the “sexual revolution.” This potent combo made the Sixties a time of new attitudes toward sex, careers, and relationships. The widespread use of psychedelic—or mind-expanding—drugs like pot and LSD changed the worlds of art, entertainment, fashion, literature and advertising forever. Technology began bringing us computers, video games, and the Internet.
We also learned more than we wanted to know about the government’s lies relating to how we got dragged into the Vietnam War in the first place. Most famously was the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, where a phony attack was used to justify our ill-fated pursuit of a foreign policy based on “the domino theory.” That discredited theory held that if we let Vietnam “fall” to the Communists, then Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and the rest would topple as well. What that terrible conflict did lead to was the loss of 58,000 American lives and over a million Vietnamese in a war we lost because we should never have gotten into it in the first place.
The Seventies were a time of further disillusionment, highlighted by President Richard Nixon escalating the war after his promise to end it. He sealed his doom by authorizing and funding burglaries and break-in’s which came to be known as the “Watergate” affair. The only good thing that came out of that was Nixon being forced to resign the Presidency in disgrace while facing impeachment. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was marked by gas shortages and the Iranian hostage crisis, when our embassy was stormed by angry Iranians and 69 Americans were taken hostage.
The “Go-go” Eighties were marked by historic greed on Wall Street (sound familiar?), along with more unconstitutional activity by the Reagan White House in what has become known as the “Iran-Contra Affair.” This was when then-President Ronald Reagan broke the law and the oath of his office by illegally selling arms to the Iranians (You read that right) and using the profits to fund rebels in Nicaragua. For this criminal activity Reagan should have been impeached and not enshrined. Massive de-regulation also led to the Savings and Loan debacle, foreshadowing more recent events.
The Nineties were most notably the Clinton Era, during which we were first attacked by Al Qaeda, the “tech revolution” created a huge “bubble” on Wall Street, and Bill Clinton got impeached for lying about his sex life. Say what you want about Bill Clinton, but he also balanced the budget and actually left his successor the promise of government surpluses for years ahead.
That dream was short-lived, however. We had entered at a decade that, unlike those above, is much harder to describe numerically. What exactly should we call the period from 2000 to 2009? I consider the Bush Era the worst decade in my lifetime. Many today conveniently forget that it was President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney who let America’s guard down in the first nine months after taking power. This lead to us being attacked on September 11, 2001, after ignoring repeated warnings that the attack was coming.
Bush-Cheney used the “9-11” attacks to justify a sweeping illegal expansion of the power of their Executive Branch of government. Suddenly it was okay to wiretap anybody they wanted without first obtaining the necessary court order. Next came the ill-fated invasion of Iraq when those who attacked us were next door in Afghanistan. The Bush White House blundered America into this mess we’re into in the Middle East. War profiteer Dick Cheney was especially involved, throwing no-bid contracts to his buddies at Halliburton—where he had enjoyed a couple of years running that immensely corrupt conglomerate in the only non-taxpayer supported job he ever held.
But the party didn’t end there. Long-time Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was led by the idiotic notion that the markets should be left to decide things and self-regulate. So the greed and corruption that has come to symbolize that era led to the melt-down for which we are all now paying the price. Though history has shown that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company were wrong on just about everything they did, they and their cronies have since been able to laugh all the way to the bank. By the time they were finished America was isolated, the economy was looted, we were in two unwinnable wars, the country was dangerously divided, big banks and corporations were failing, mortgages were under water, homes were foreclosed, and we were in debt up to our eyeballs. Why anybody today would listen to Dick Cheney—the war profiteer who was wrong on everything—is completely beyond me.
Since the word “naught” means literally “nothing” or “zero,” I have heard the first decade of the 21st Century referred to as “the Naughty Decade.” Having a naught before the single-digit numbers marking those first nine years creates the opportunity for the play on words
“Naughty Decade” contains. And it was a naughty decade. Criminality was rewarded. Bad guys were pardoned or left unpunished. Bush stupidly pushed the rest of the world away from us—isolating America as arrogant and dangerously immature in its foreign policy. We will continue paying the price for this failure of his leadership for some time to come.
For now we can call the decade just passed “Naughty.” What the future holds is anybody’s guess. I wonder what to call the awkward years 2010 through 2012, before we slide comfortably into the “teen’s” and onto the next set of “Twenties.” There are those who believe the world will end on December 21, 2012, as predicted by many ancient and some modern civilizations. If they are right—and I don’t think they are—then what to call future decades will not be a problem. Just the same, the term “Naughty Decade” fits the ten years we just came through perfectly.
I wish you and all of America a Happy New Year and pray that this decade might yet come to be called “The New Age of Reason.” Call it the audacity of hope.
