Waxing Nostalgic
By Michael Boyajian
Sometimes I am old fashioned. I yearn for instance for retro stereo equipment that when you press the power button lights flicker on and power surges through the receiver and thumps the speakers to life. Now I know things are always better now than before. I mean how could we live without the internet and email that works to bring the whole world together.
But maybe just maybe some things in the past were better like the old Rockefeller Republican party that was for things like a good education having built the state university system in New York unlike the Texas education board that threw out Thomas Jefferson replacing him with a religious figure or Arizona which wants to do away with multiculturalism.
Oh they may have been pro business but they were for reasonable regulation and consumer rights unlike George W. who sold the country in a liquidation sale. I mean even the pariah Richard Nixon passed some monumental environmental laws and Bush senior had the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Today we have right wing pundits who are community college drop outs and fringe teabaggers who want to do away with all the reforms instituted by Theodore Roosevelt back in the early 20th Century. Roosevelt was a Republican superstar at one time now they would throw him and Abe Lincoln out of the party.
So I am afraid businessmen can produce a retro stereo if there was demand for it but the old GOP isn’t coming back anytime soon having lost much of its liberal and moderate base and been over taken by teabaggers and fundamentalists and elected leaders who only know how to say no rather than here is how I would do it and by the way I like this idea of yours. You remember them; they’re the ones who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 not the ones today who want to repeal it and turn the country inside out and upside down.
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