Everything was going well and the dean of students was beaming with pride up until it was my turn.  The representative from BofA dressed in her polyester beige skirt and jacket and coiffed bouffant blond hair looks at me and asks, “So Mr. Allen what should the role of government be in modern society?”  I, never one to be shy about speaking my mind, had a dilemma––did she really want my true opinion on the topic or was this some kind of test that I was being set up to fail? Remember these were the heated years of the Vietnam War after Nixon had bombed Cambodia and the students at UC Santa Barbara had burned down the BofA in Isle Vista. 

It seemed like an eternity before I opened my mouth to speak, but surely it was more like five seconds, I responded that what we needed now was something more like the Works Progress Administration than another war in some far off country that none of us knew very much about.  There… I said it. And in the very long and uncomfortable silence that followed came the rebuttal that you hear again today, “but the WPA was a failure. How can you justify this position?”    Well I was sort of stuck because you know they never really taught us anything about the Great Depression in school and the only thing I knew about that period came by way of family memories passed down by way of my grandmother– whose memory at times– was shall I say… sketchy. 

In the intervening years, this latent family memory and lore of the Depression, FDR and Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign has always echoed in the distant corners of my mind.  I have found remnants of this history tucked away in books most people never read and oddly enough painted on the walls of our local schools and Post Office. Last year for instance, I became fascinated with the murals in the cafeteria at Dana Middle School and subsequently remembered that the library at the local high school had a collection too.  These are heroic art deco scenes painted in very populist style mostly honoring people at work and/or industrialism. They are pedantic and hinge on being social propaganda of an era that up until lately most of us never thought we would see again.

This year, of course, has brought us back to the brink, conjuring up the collective memory of the Great Depression as the mortgage bubble burst, the Wall Street giants collapsed, the Dow Jones tanked and the FDIC started taking over major banks.  We are poised to infuse hundreds of billions of dollars into failing corporations who are described as, “just too big to let fail.”  It is like watching a slow motion train wreck with each car connected to the next one––all piling up behind an engine that couldn’t stop soon enough to avoid the collision. Capitalism is that engine. The cars behind it are the markets and the manufactures followed by the retailers and we the people are the passengers. 

Waking up from this nightmare to hear President Elect Obama mention a “WPA solution” or that he’s been reading about the FDR transition from Hoover is the sign of intelligent life returning to the Oval Office. And brother it’s about time after eight long years of dumb and dumber. Even to the extent that the current “resident of the White House” seems to be frozen into inaction and fundamentally recalcitrant to change even in the face of the surmounting disaster. Bush is the engineer on this train and he’s been talking on his cell phone and ignoring the signals.  Remember the red/green light game on the Engineer Bill show when we were kids? George is the boy who always got caught drinking his milk at the wrong time. But I digress and am really dating myself with such illustrations.

The obvious revelation in all of this is that the part of our economy that hasn’t fallen apart at this point are the things that the Reagan Revolution didn’t dismantle. Can you imagine if the Republicans had been successful in privatizing Social Security or lifting the deposit insurance on FDIC regulated banks at this point?  Not only would we be standing in soup lines but… The last thing I’ll say for all of those nay-sayers, who at this late date still propound the “wisdom of the free market,” is that the quintessential role of government, large or small, is to do for the people that which they can not do for themselves, and right now there’s a hell of a lot that needs doin’ and undoin’. 

Unraveling the mistakes of the last eight years is just the beginning, for we as a nation will have to rewind the tapes to the decisions made in all earnestness by that former movie star California Governor and President Ronald Reagan with his disastrous formula of cutting education, public health care, destroying unions, deregulating financial institutions and privatizing government. You can see today where Governor Schwarzenegger gets his inspirations for balancing the budget on the backs of college students by raising their tuition and cutting $2 to 4 billions from education statewide!  He’s just another of our Hollywood geniuses playing by the Reagan game book, pretending he represents “the people,” and then sabotaging the very programs that gives America a middle class worth being included in. 

The issue is that conservatives—from paleo- to neo- and everything in between—have been in denial of the cause of the 1929 crash since it happened, just as they will deny any responsibility for tanking it this time. The solution is putting the nation back to work on projects that bring lasting value and quit dumping the treasury down the black holes of corruption and war.