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Those sacrificed were often seen as small as children.

It was not just that, as one commentator put it, "kids have no constituency to protest; battered babies don't vote."(31) Parents vote, and if hurting and killing children had not been essential to our Time of Sacrifice, the outcry of parents would easily have stopped the slaughter of the innocents as quickly as it had stopped the proposed cutback of Social Security checks. Yet article after article was written during the winter of 1981-2 on the rise in infant mortality in areas hardest hit by budget cutbacks and unemployment, on the over one million additional children on the poverty rolls, on the six million children who had lost health coverage because of layoffs of their parents, of the half million children who had lost health services because of the closing by the government of 239 community health centers, of the hundreds of additional children who would be battered to death because of Reagan's cutback of almost all of the funds for the highly successful National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect-in all, over twenty million children suffering needless pain, hunger and death with barely a mourner in sight.(32)

During those cold winter nights, we all watched television and saw nightly scenes of children sleeping in the snow under bridges because their parents had been laid off and scenes of newborn infants dying on camera because of lack of funding to the government's program of diet supplement for poor pregnant and nursing women. Yet we never really felt guilty for the dead and suffering children who passed before our eyes. "The Reagan safety net is a myth," reported television commentator Bill Moyers. "People are dying as the result of these cuts."(33) Yet we felt nothing. Nor did Reagan. When attacked by Rep. BoIling for having caused "human suffering," he retorted: "Look, my program hasn't resulted in anyone getting thrown out in the snow or dying."(34) Denial was total. What had happened to the guilt?

The usual answer to this question is that we avoided guilt through use of various rationalizations, by saying it was someone else's fault, not ours, by blaming everything on "the impersonal forces of the economic system" and so on. Yet rationalizations as transparent as these would not by themselves have been enough to still our conscience when incidents happened which arose to expose them.

As one instance, during the Christmas week at the end of 1981, the government, to show that Reagan was a caring president, released 30 million pounds of cheese to be given to the hungry Americans whom they had previously said did not exist. As millions of people lined up for their five-pound blocks of cheese, it was uncomfortably obvious to all that the government had the means to alleviate hunger during the recession by giving away much of the 2.4 billion pounds of surplus milk, cheese and butter which it had bought and was storing to hold up dairy prices. In fact, the government could give away this food at a cost that turned out to be less than the $1 million a day it cost to store it. With the gigantic stockpile being added to at the rate of $6 million a day, it was obvious that handing out only a tiny portion of our huge growing stockpile of dairy products-a stockpile which grew by two-thirds during the reces-sion years-while warehousing the rest at a higher cost and letting it eventually rot meant we wanted people to be hungry. It was as transparent an act of cruelty as President Roosevelt's order to plough baby pigs into the ground during the Great Depression (again, to hold up farmers' prices) rather than giving them to hungry Americans to eat. When one Congressman complained that he could not understand "why food was withheld and destroyed even as people went hungry," another, who voted to cut back on the distribution, replied that having to deliberately cause people to go hungry was "perhaps the greatest paradox that we face in our country today."(35) Since such moments of clarity of motive so often revealed the transparency of our economic rationalizations, the question remains: what happens to our guilt? Why do we almost never feel any guilt for the death of innocent people we hurt and kill through political means?

The answer to this question is that we displace our guilt into criminals. Every period in history when we increase our sacrificial victims through economic means also shows a parallel increase in our efforts to punish criminals. Reagan's Time of Sacrifice was no exception. Even though overall homicide rates were not increasing during 1981,36 Reagan and the media invented a ''crime epidemic'' which was purported to be sweeping the country. Reagan himself led the nation in this group-fantasy. In the same speeches in which he asked for "more sacrifices" by the American people, he also decried the new "American crime epidemic" whereby criminals are "quite literally getting away with murder."(37) Language such as this is the only evidence that Reagan ever dimly recognized that he himself was "quite literally getting away with murder" in his economic program. Combined with his claim that "no one was dying" from Reaganomics, his insistent repetition that "the people of the community are really suffering" from a crime wave reveals the shift of guilt from himself-and ourselves-to criminals.

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If Reagan needed criminals into whom he could dump his own guilt, it makes sense that at the same time as he was demanding a "war on crime" he actually was cutting law enforcement funds. For if crime were really to be reduced, his guilt would then return back to him. So law enforcement funds had to be reduced to keep crime high. Only such irrational motives can explain the public's attitude toward crime, an attitude which includes an addiction toward and fascination with criminals that betrays deeply irrational group-fantasy sources. Since punishment of criminals is the goal of our laws, not reduction of crime, studies are easily ignored which show that therapy and guidance are far more effective and less costly than punishment and incarceration. For instance, during Reagan's term some states considered new laws mandating ten-year jail terms for people who kill or maim others while driving when drunk. Yet it would have been impossible to get any attention for a proposal to give intensive therapy and guidance to the same people, even though the cost would be a fraction of the $100,000 per year per person cost of jail cells and the results far more effective than punishment by incarceration in assuring that offenders would not drive while drunk in the future. Yet rather than do something which might actually reduce crime, we in Reagan's America spent most of our time on such emotional issues as the restoration of capital punishment, in order to accomplish our aim of punishing "the criminal in ourselves."

these "inept" included the disabled, an early Reagan target even though the Social Security disability fund which supported them had plenty of money in it from workers' disability contributions.(41) Over 500,000 disability cases were reviewed in Reagan's first year, and an astounding 45 percent were terminated on flimsy pretexts, "even though both their doctors and the Social Security Administration's own physicians agree that the individuals cannot perform even ordinary day-to-day functions of living," according to the Los Angeles Times report on the crackdown.(42) Equally as "inept" were black youths, whose unemployment rate topped 50 percent, several million people who had grown too discouraged to look for work, additional millions who ran out of unemployment benefits - so that, in Detroit, many unemployed purposely drank heavily or took drugs so they could enter alcoholic and drug wards which by law had to house and feed them - and many other helpless or powerless people, all symbolically "inept" children to be punished.

Not included as "inept" were the wealthy, who alone benefited from the three-quarter trillion dollars in tax cuts (over the first five years), the largest tax giveaway in the history of any country, "likely to go down in history as the single most irresponsible fiscal action in modern times," according to former Budget Director James Schlesinger.(43) The result was a predictable record rise in executive salaries (up 12 percent in recession 1981), a rise in sales of Rolls-Royce, Cadillac and Mercedes cars, a boom in expensive home swimming pools and record purchase prices for Manhattan co-ops, mostly for cash.(44) "We've found that the very wealthy are spending more money than normal," wrote Newsweek, deadpan. U.S. News put it more bluntly on their cover: "FLAUNTING WEALTH: IT'S BACK IN STYLE."(45) As Stockman had put it, "The hogs were really feeding. The greed level, the level of opportunism, just got out of control."(46)

Yet this was precisely what we wanted to accomplish, to feed the top while punishing the bottom. Otherwise, there would have been at least a token fight by the Democrats against Reaganomics. Instead, as one commentator put it, "In Washington people remarked on the magical disap-pearance of the Democratic Party."(47) Initially, Democratic leaders pretended that their acquiescence was only tactical. "Democrats Have a Plan: Sit Back, Relax, Enjoy," headlined The New York Times, citing a "beaming" Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, Jr. as saying "I think I'll sit on the sidelines a while."(48)

Yet he would sit forever if he thought all the pain would turn the country against Reagan. Everyone agreed that Reagan's image was enhanced by his sacrificial actions, not tarnished. Puzzled, most commentators ascribed this not to the efficacy of sacrifice but to some mysterious quality in Reagan's personality. "It doesn't much matter what happens," said

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New York magazine. "The people like Ronald Reagan."(49) "For the first time in years, Washington has a president it really likes, one who clearly relishes the role and is good at it to boot," echoed The Washington Post's Haynes Johnson.(50) "The president is still riding high in the polls," said another reporter, "because in the domestic area Reagan has acted."(51) "Just about everybody here thinks Reagan can walk on water," conceded a Republican politician in Indiana.(52) A Democrat in Houston who had voted for Reagan thought his decisiveness was more important than anything else; sounding like a woman in love with a man who beats her up, she told reporters, "He'll either make us or break us. He is a leader and I got tired of not having a leader."(53) As another woman from North Carolina told The Washington Post, even if everyone were worse off because of the recession, she herself felt "better off mentally."(54)

The media during this period were filled with praise for the beneficial effects of the punishment. "IN PRAISE OF RECESSION," hymned William Safire in The New York Times, adding, "we must not quit when we are winning."(55)

We moved into a "collapse" phase.

If anything, most political commentators considered Reagan not cruel enough for the task we gave him to do for us. "He may be too nice to be president," said the nation's foremost expert on the subject, Richard Nixon.(56) Haynes Johnson agreed: "One word springs forward to describe him. Nice."(54) Those few who disagreed were labeled Reds. "They clearly are militant radicals," TV announcer Gabe Pressman pronounced as he watched 10,000 very middle-class demonstrators in New York protest the presentation of the humanitarian award to Reagan for "courageous leadership in humanitarian affairs."(58) Nothing, no note of criticism, no hint of guilt, must be allowed to deter us from cleansing our nation in our mystical sacrificial rebirth. After Reagan moved into his third, or ''collapse,'' phase, overt birth images began to appear in the media.

Reaganomics was pictured as a giant egg, with Reagan praying for the birth to take place soon. The more the recession deepened, the more pain and death inflicted on the sacrificial victims, the more miraculous the rebirth of America would be. "We are on the verge of a recovery like nothing ever seen in this country," said the Under Secretary of Treasury.(59) Business Week agreed, shouting from its front cover "HERE COMES THE RECOVERY!"

Reagan prayed for our rebirth via Reaganomics.

Many Americans even imagined their wishes had come true and Reagan had already accomplished the rebirth. For instance, although the government was borrowing a record $16 billion a month just to meet its bills, pollsters were startled to find two out of every five Americans thought Reagan had in fact already balanced the budget as he had promised.(60) As Reagan himself put it, "There's a spiritual revival going on in this country." Like all revivalist movements, it was aimed at a rebirth through the purging of our sinful excesses. Those who were puzzled by the "triumph of faith over evidence,"(61) as economist Lester Thurow called the fantasies that Reaganomics was working, didn't understand how much Reagan's America was essentially a religious movement designed to produce an "America Reborn" through sacrifice.

Of course, sometimes reality intruded. Then Reagan and his associates would blame business or Wall Street for not producing the miraculous rebirth. "We gave them more than they ever dreamed," complained the Republican minority leader, Rep. Robert Michel, "and you'd think there would be more of a quid pro quo. 'We have carried through our commitments," agreed Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan. "But where is the business response? Where are the new research and development initiatives? Where are the new plants? Where are the expansion plans?"(62) That business had no conceivable motive to expand produc-tion when demand had dried up and industrial utilization had been reduced to 67 percent seemed to escape these economic experts. They really believed in the miracles produced by pain. "Reaganomists: Forge Ahead Despite Pain," headlined The Miami Herald. 63 In a revealing "Freudian slip," Reagan told a fund-raising dinner, "Now we are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we're going to succeed." Senator Pressler agreed: "It would not be a good idea to saw him off at the legs at this point."(64)

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A baby boom was imagined

During the spring of 1982, images of the rebirth group-fantasy multiplied in the media, until they subliminally dominated the feeling-tone of every American's daily life, though they were not consciously noticed by most people. A "new baby boom" was proclaimed, although the actual birth rate per potential mother was dropping.(65) Pictures of pregnant women were displayed on the front covers of magazines to show what was happening. In fact, everything suddenly seemed to be pregnant that spring, from Reaganomics to the atomic bomb. Phrases associated with birth feelings began to be used with increasing frequency, such as "It's like waiting for a baby to be born"(66) or "the pressure was building from all sides"(67) or "This Administration believes that life begins at conception and ends at birth."(68)

Discussions of abortion multiplied. Reagan even personally endorsed a bizarre plan by anti-abortion advocates in California to hold a fetus funeral for 17,000 aborted fetuses which the group had collected.(69)

Everything seemed to be pregnant in the spring of 1982.

New legislation also seemed to be stuck in the birth canal that spring. The Washington Post cartoonist drew Reagan as though he were helping Tip O'Neill give birth, and the caption right next to the cartoon quoted Reagan as saying, "You may make me crap a pineapple, but you can't make me crap a cactus," as though Reagan himself were the one who felt he was giving birth.(70)

As Reagan told the nation, America would "soon emerge from this dark tunnel of recession"-the same dark tunnel which America had hoped to see "the light at the end of" during the Vietnam war. Everything seemed to be going down that dark birth tunnel that spring: the White House, the economy, all of Washington, Reagan himself, the American people. The world was felt to be one giant hole, and we were

We all felt as if we were going down a dark birth tunnel.

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Reindustrialization was seen as a fetus in the womb.

dropping into it, as we felt we did long ago during our own births.(71) Reagan announced in April that we were "approaching a climactic stage," one in which he began to hear "a drum beat' '-ostensibly of criticism, but equally the loud heart beat of the mother in labor. American revitalization and reindustrialization were imagined to be the prize at the end of the rebirth tunnel, and were pictured as a fetus in the womb awaiting birth.

Uncle Sam, too, was pictured as standing in the watery womb, looking at a drawing of where we were-in the womb-like belly of a whale, ready to begin our birth travail. It would be terribly painful, but it was unavoidable, and the sooner we got it over with the better.

We felt like we were in the womb, awaiting birth.

With birth beginning, with the pressures building, it seemed as if "Mother Nature" was "going berserk," as a U.S. News cover put it. With our faith in the economy collapsing, as our mother's womb once did, we imagined birth would feel as if the world were ending, as it felt during our own births, when the contraction pressures and hypoxia (lack of oxygen) made us feel as if we were dying. Therefore, newspapers across the country began running articles describing fears of "The End of the World," supposedly in connection with the chance lining up of the planets which took place that spring, in about the same manner as the previous year, when no notice had been taken of it.(72)

We feared birth would feel like the end of the world.

In fact, our apocalyptic fantasies soon reached such a degree of reality to us that we became newly concerned with the possibility of a nuclear holocaust ending the world. Observers were puzzled at the timing of the new concern over nuclear war. "Why," asked The New York Times, "37 years into the Atomic Age, the sudden rush of concern? Has last year's European peace movement crossed the Atlantic?

Is it that a new generation has grown up ignorant of Strangelove? Have older generations failed fully to appreciate the risks?"(73) Unless one recognized the birth fantasy, the sudden and all - too - temporary attention to atomic apocalypse-climaxing in the massive Freeze rally in New York City on June 12th - was inexplicable. As did Carter's America during its "collapse" phase, Reagan's America seemed everywhere to be full of falling and collapsing feelings, which could only be cleansed through some apocalyptic upheaval, some acting out in reality of the powerful fantasies we shared.

Our apocalyptic fantasies included a renewed interest in nuclear war.

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We seemed to be going off a birth cliff. We were trapped, unable to be born. We felt stuck in the birth canal.

Yet nothing in reality seemed to be available to us which we could use to move the birth fantasy along. No foreign nations threatened, and none seemed to be forthcoming in the near future to accept our challenge and deflect our bad feelings outward. Everything seemed to make us feel trapped in this unborn position. Our economy was still falling. No miraculous rebirth could be found there soon. We were unprepared emotionally to go to war. All seemed increasingly hopeless. Just as the baby feels its birth pains are endless, we, too, felt closed in, without hope, unable to get a breath of relief, stuck in the birth canal forever. This imagery of being stuck in the birth canal dominated the country's cartoons that April, and the political language reflected the fantasy. "Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan pronounced the national economy 'dead in the water' yesterday," the newspapers reported.(74) We were in fact "in a deep trough," the White House press secretary confirmed soon after.(75) It seemed as if we might lie in the womb, "dead in the water," forever. How could the birth be pushed along? Where could we look for help? The answer to our dilemma came from events even then moving to a climax in the South Atlantic.

We felt "dead in the water."

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