US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

What's the difference between the US and Russia? The US has a communist party.

—Popular joke, circa 1991-1992

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy

[In contrast to the Brezhnev doctrine:] We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine. He has a song, I Did It My Way. So every country decides on its own which road to take.

—Soviet Foreign Minister Gennadi Gerasimov, October 25, 1989

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41 (Con't)

My opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And The Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, "Read my lips: no new taxes."

—George H. W. Bush, Nomination Acceptance Speech (1988)

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41 (Con't)

This election is not about ideology: it's about competence.

—Governor Michael Dukakis, Nomination Acceptance Speech (1988)

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41

I'm following Mr. Reagan — blindly.

—George H. W. Bush, as quoted by reporter Sydney Blumenthal (1988)

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

The issue presented is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy... to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at best, facetious.

—Bowers v Hardwick (1986), majority opinion

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

We let the marketplace decide whether it's in good taste or bad taste.

—FCC commissioner James Quello

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

What Jesse Helms has done has backfired. I now know more about lesbian sexuality than I had hoped to know, quite honestly, because I have seen artist upon artist find the authentic voice that has been told it cannot speak out. And because they have defined what the territory is, we're now in their territory, pushing, pushing, pushing.

—An activist quoted in Steven Dubin, Arresting Images (p. 248)

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

Identity politics amounted to demobilization into a cloister.... Marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House.

—Todd Gitlin

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

—Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass)

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

How wildly wrong [Reagan] is about what is happening in Moscow. Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West—actual disarmament will follow—by elevating wishful thinking to the status of a political philosophy.

—George Will, January, 1989

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds -- well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch....

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not....

[N]o one kept proper records of meetings or decisions. This led to my failure to recollect whether I approved an arms shipment before or after the fact. I did approve it; I just can't say specifically when.

—Ronald Reagan, oval office speech on Iran-Contra, March 4, 1987

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

Mistakes were made.

—Reagan, 1987 state-of-the-union address, about Iran-Contra affair

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

If such a story gets out we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we found out who did it.

—Reagan at early meeting on Iran-Contra

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War

They were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.

—Reagan, at a press conference, April 18, 1985 (referring to German soldiers buried in Bitburg)

I am convinced, as you have told us earlier when we spoke that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery. Of course, you didn't know. But now we all are aware. May I, Mr. President, if it's possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS. Oh, we know there are political and strategic reasons, but this issue, as all issues related to that awesome event, transcends politics and diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil. And we must never confuse them, for I have seen the SS at work, and I have seen their victims.

— Elie Wiesel to Ronald Reagan, upon being given the Congressional Gold Medal, April 19, 1985

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weight his song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children's children shall say they have lied.

— W. B. Yeats, "He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved",
quoted as an epigraph to Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust (1989)

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

[Regarding] the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years.... None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband's deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends' deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

— Andrew Sullivan, 2012

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

I meet young gay guys today and they don't know what it's like to watch your best friend pound the floor with his fist in agony because the pain won't stop; to pick up a buddy off the carpet when you drop by after work, and see his brittle bones covered in fresh gray diarrhea; to see a friend wake up one day and be unable to tie his shoelaces because toxoplasmosis had eaten half his brain away; to have your shirt cuff brush past a friend's skin and have him scream in agony because of neuropathy; to dance on a disco floor next to a rail-thin guy covered in KS lesions who knows this is the last time he'll dance to anything; to open up the local gay rag and find 10 pages of obits where the real estate ads now sit; to hear a friend speak of watching as a needle is pushed into his open eyeball to alleviate the threat of CMV; to see your date consume two handfuls of toxic drugs twice a day to do something about a virus that would nevertheless kill him at the age of 29; to hear of couples torn apart and bereaved lovers thrown out of their homes because their in-laws hate them and their husbands just died; to scan the eyes of a doctor to see if he's lying to you about your prognosis; to catch the face of an old man on the street and realize seconds later that he was a friend who looked 25 only a few months before; to attend more funeral services than happy hours; to feel shame because of an illness; and to endure sickness knowing that there is no end or future except pain and death.

—Andrew Sullivan, 2007

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

I suspect -- I know -- my funeral will shock people when it happens. We Americans are terrified of death. Death takes place behind closed doors and is removed from reality, from the living. I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public; I want the public to bear witness. We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, friends, and families. And we are dying of a disease maintained by a degree of criminal neglect so enormous that it amounts to genocide.

I want my death to be as strong a statement as my life continues to be.

I want my own funeral to be fierce and defiant, to make the public statement that my death from AIDS is a form of political assassination.

We are taking this action out of love and rage.

—Mark Fisher, "Burry Me Furiously", published anonymously a few weeks before his death

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US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

AIDS demonstrates how economics and politics cannot be separated from disease; indeed, those forces shape our response in powerful ways.... AIDS will be a standard by which we may measure not only our medical and scientific skill but also our capacity for justice and compassion.

—Alan M. Brandt, 1986

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