CARRYING OUT THE SACRIFICE

"Laser Eyes"

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Actually carrying out the sacrifice would not be an easy task. When Ronald Reagan declared in his first address to the country that "the American economy was in the worst mess in half a century," real Gross National Product, total industrial output, total jobs and real personal in-come were the highest of any nation in history. The only sense in which America could have been considered to have been in "the worst mess in half a century" was because of our overwhelming guilt from such un-paralleled prosperity. Given the extraordinary vitality of the American economy, Reagan's main problem was to find ways to halt the growth of this prosperity for a couple of years while sacrificing symbols of our greedy desires in order to cleanse us of our guilt. This would not be a simple task.

What would help Reagan most in slowing down the economy would not be just the power of the government, as important as that was. Even more useful would be the shift to puritanical attitudes by most of the country as he came to office. The resurgence of puritanical strictures against enjoyment could be seen everywhere at the beginning of the Eighties, not just in the extremes of the Moral Majority. "New TV Season: Sex Is Out, Old Values In," U.S. News accurately proclaimed,(1) and the same was true for the movies, beginning already with Star Wars and Superman, both based on traditional heroic scenarios. The ethos of the Eighties preached hardness and viewed pleasure as weakening, an attitude by itself guaranteed to reduce spending.

To back up the shift to the new Puritanism, new myths had to be invented. For instance, "permissive attitudes toward sex" were held responsible for what was thought to be an "epidemic of teenage pregnancies," in order that sexual freedom for teenagers could be

attacked. That the actual statistics showed teenage pregnancies steadily declining since 1957 (from 96 per 1,000 to 53 per 1,000 by 1980) was con-veniently ignored.(2) Even many liberal educators shared this shift to puritan attitudes. As just one example, Dr. Sol Gordon, the founder of National Sex Education Week, whose books had been instrumental in Opening up sex education for teenagers, now proclaimed that the "recent increase" in teenage pregnancies was "a national social disaster." "I can't think of any good reason for teenagers to have sex," he told the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. "Sex is a health hazard to boys and girls."(3) The same sort of conservative shift was evident in all areas of American life, as the older psychoclass reacted negatively to the freedom and prosperity of the previous two decades.

Given this puritanical mood, the people of America were, if anything, ahead of Reagan in his early months in their demands that something be done quickly to reduce American prosperity. When he still hadn't passed his sacrificial budget by the summer of 1981, his Gallup disapproval rating (poison index) began climbing at a faster rate than any previous president's in American history. He would have to move fast if he were to prove to us he could be a successful sacrificial leader. By early summer, Reagan's media imagery had moved from "strong" to "cracking," months earlier than Carter's, and he had to admit at his June 16, 1981 press conference that "we are seeing the first beginning cracks"-ostensibly in the Soviet empire, but really in his own image. Something would have to be done soon to assure the people that he was, indeed, determined and ruthless enough to carry out the internal sacrifice. . . and, if necessary, the external sacrifice as well. This "something" took the form of two carefully-staged actions designed to convince the country that he could carry out sacrifices. These actions were (1) the destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), and (2) the shooting down of two Libyan jets.

Reagan moved to the "cracking" stage earlier than Carter.

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We thought that Reagan was weakening

The firing of the PATCO workers, termed "an ambush" by one neutral observer,(4) was set up by Reagan's letter of October 20, 1980 to Robert Poli, head of PATCO, promising him, in return for his election support, that he would back PAT-CO's demands and "will take whatever steps necessary . . . to adjust staff levels and work days commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety." In the next six months, Reagan's negotiators encouraged PATCO to believe that they were open to union demands and that a strike could be part of the bargaining process, only then to have Reagan summarily dismiss the 12,000 PATCO members and bankrupt the union because they went out on strike.

According to one Presidential aide, Reagan "wanted to jut his jaw out . . . He wanted to be tough." The action was applauded by almost everyone in America, from the whoops of joy in the business community for "finally sticking it to the unions to the two-to-one margin of approval by the public in the Gallup poll and The New York Times editorial which called the firings "a commendable precedent." Precedent it indeed would be, but mainly for a ruthless attitude toward workers in the recession, not for union-busting.

The carefully-staged destruction of PATCO even impressed the Kremlin. According to Richard Pipes, Reagan's advisor on Soviet af-fairs, "Seeing photographs of a union leader being taken away in chains-that surprised them and gave them respect for Reagan. It showed them a man who, when aroused, will go the limit.. "(5) Back in 1970, when the postal workers struck, they were rehired. But this was the Eighties. This time, as The New York Times reported it, "the White House leadership team, smiling and joking among themselves, looked on at 11 A.M. Monday as Mr. Reagan announced his deadline and brushed aside suggestions that his first move toward the controllers might have been less severe. 'What lesser action can there be?' he said, his face expressing amazement. "(6)

Equally staged was the shooting down of the Libyan jets a few weeks later. Libya's leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, played a very special psychological role for the Reagan period-that of Reagan's "evil double." When cartoonists and others wished to portray elements of the repressed, "out-of-control" sadistic image of Reagan, they often drew a Qaddafi figure using a familiar Reagan symbol.(7) For instance, Qaddafi was shown swinging a sacrificial sword - Reagan's most often-used symbol during his first year - with sadistic glee and lots of blood, even

though the real Qaddafi had no connection with swords. Like all split-off feelings, our attitude toward Qaddafi was thoroughly irrational. He was not just the leader of a small country. He was something very close to our hearts - evil personified, "a cancer which has to be removed," according to Secretary of State Alexander Haig.(8 )The Qaddafi-devil symbol would play an important role whenever America needed a figure of pure evil for group-fantasy purposes, a place to put our own sadism.

Qaddafi was pictured as swinging Reagan's sacrificial sword.

Qaddafi was therefore chosen as an appropriate target for Reagan's first foreign killing. The Libyan shootdown was as carefully planned as the PATCO firings. Although in 1980 Jimmy Carter had avoided holding Sixth Fleet maneuvers in the disputed Gulf of Sidra waters near the Libyan coastline, Reagan knew that in order to have a shootdown he would have to provoke the Libyan planes patrolling close to the shore. The operation was staged as carefully as a Hollywood movie. First, the exercise was moved from July, when the Defense Department had originally planned it, to August, to avoid media conflict with Reagan's budget victories. Next, Reagan personally gave instructions for the American planes to shoot down the Libyan planes, since the Navy's standing rules of engagement often allowed them to ignore confrontations such as these.(9) White House technicians then installed extra media equipment and phones in Los Angeles, where the President would be staying during the shootdown, in order to be able to handle the extra teletype and phone traffic that would result. A week before the exercise, the White House encouraged Newsweek to run a feature article describing the coming "testing" of Qaddafi, giving the Libyan leader plenty of notice that he was being challenged. As the F- 14 Tomcats headed toward the Libyan coast on August 19, they met two Libyan SU-22 jets. Both sides said the other fired first. The superior American Tomcats quickly destroyed the Libyan planes, as planned. At least one of the Libyan pilots died in the shootdown. It couldn't have been more successful.

Reagan had staged the incident so carefully he wasn't even awakened when the planes were shot down. Unexpectedly, this led to media speculation that he was not "in control" of the shootdown - whereas he was actually more like the director of a thoroughly - rehearsed stage play who didn't come to the opening. Reagan laughingly admitted later that

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he already knew when he went to bed the battle was going to take place: "If our planes were shot down, yes, they'd wake me up right away. If the other fellows were shot down, why wake me up?"(10) The staged quality of the whole event was so flagrant that, according to one reporter, "When he saw his top assistants for the first time the morning after, Reagan performed a bit of pantomime, impersonating a Western gun-slinger drawing six-shooters from both hips."(11) Again, he was John Wayne. Finally, as planned, he went to have his picture taken wearing a "Commander-in-Chief' cap aboard the aircraft carrier Constellation, watching Navy planes being launched, giving the impression in the media that he had been physically present during the Libyan shootdown.

The meaning of the shootdown was understood by everyone in America. As Ed Meese put it, "We're not going to war. We're just shooting 'em down."(12) It was our first taste of blood under Reagan, wholly unnecessary for any diplomatic purposes, but vital as a question put to the American people as to whether it would be allowable to attack small nations in the future in order to make us feel good. The media answered with an exultant "Yes." Time thought killing Libyans was fun: "A YANKEE DOODLE DAY: Victory In The Air, Fun At Sea.. "(13) The Daily News headlined Reagan's boast: "RON ON LIBYAN INCIDENT: 'WE'VE GOT THE MUSCLE.' "(14) The New York Post saw the attack as having shot down Reagan's critics:

DOGFIGHT BLASTED REAGAN'S CRITICS

President Reagan's closest advisers believe last week's inci-dent off the coast of Libya should quiet those critics who charge the Administration has failed to articulate a foreign policy. "That dogfight did for us what 20 presidential speeches never could," a high ranking official said.(15)

In the press conference on the shootdown, Secretary of Defense Weinberger and General Gast of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to lie about the planning for the incident, claiming that "no specific instructions" were given to shoot-but they nevertheless looked so jubilant that one reporter was moved to ask, "You said that they carried out their mission extremely well. It seemed as though you are almost proud of the way. . . " Weinberger interrupted testily, "I don't think it's necessary to try to do any amateur psychoanalysis at this time."

Like the PATCO firings, the shootdown of the Libyan planes was crucial to our group-fantasy aims. It was the revenge of the old psychoclass for relative American restraint and resulting humiliation in Vietnam and Iran. And it was a promise for the future, accomplished in a meaningful way, through action, "better than 20 presidential

speeches." The major media carried no protests about the shootdown. Both sides of the political spectrum applauded Reagan for his "decisiveness and strong leadership," and for his quick action, so different from Carter's civilized restraint. Time's Hugh Sidey, a Reagan supporter, reported that "Pollster Richard Wirthlin last week hustled his latest sampling out to Reagan in California. It showed deepening support across the country-a feeling that Reagan's recent actions, from his vic-tory over the air controllers right up to his air victory over Libya, have clearly been in the national interest."(16) The Los Angeles Times' Charles William Maynes, a Reagan critic, agreed it was good to attack small targets: "You don't have to agree with the Reagan Administration's overall approach on key issues to admire its tactics . . . It moves decisively when the target is small, unpopular and manageable. Both the con-tinuing conflict with the air controllers and the new crisis with Libya, different as they are, fit this pattern."(17) Political commentators instinctively connected the PATCO and Libyan shootdowns, as though by those two symbolic actions during the months of August 1981 something im-portant for America had been decided. They were right. Reagan felt it in his body when he impersonated John Wayne the gunslinger, shooting from the hips. Since in politics the most important communications are conveyed in symbolic action rather than in words, the two incidents were questions from Reagan to the American people, and our praise for both actions was our answer, our authorization for more of the same in the future. The destruction of PATCO authorized the internal sacrifice, and the Libyan shootdown authorized the external sacrifice. Now we really were Reagan's America, united in blood guilt, through our praise and our silence, for the sacrifices to come.

By September, the internal sacrifice was begun in earnest. "Just about every major economic indicator is now confirming that economic activity fell off a cliff in September," said one Wall Street broker, "and the magnitude of the drop is much larger than anyone anticipated."(18) The high interest rates produced by the squeezing of the money supply caused a severe drop in sales of cars and homes and an even more severe drop in exports.(19) As consumer demand dried up and capital equipment investment plummeted, output fell, inventories built up and unemploy-ment began its record climb to an official figure of 10.8 percent, a figure con-

Reagan was seen as strangling America.

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America watched passively as Reagan carried out the bloody sacrifice.

siderably lower than the reality, if dropouts and the partially employed are counted. The reaction of the Reagan administration to the disastrous news was to increase the pain wherever possible. "The only corrective action the President was con-sidering was further reductions in civilian spending Stockman's 0MB has prepared a list of $32 billion in bloody new cuts in everything from food stamps to Head Start programs."(20) The imagery of "bloody cuts" was repeated everywhere in the media.

As political columnist Joseph Kraft put it, "There has been blood all over the floor and screaming galore,"(21) an apt image for the human sacrifice which was going on all around him. Yet Kraft, like most of us, managed at the same time to deny the real human sacrifice. His phrase "blood all over the floor and screaming galore' ostensibly referred to government department heads' budget battles, not to live Americans being killed. Reagan, too, man-aged to acknowledge the bloody sacrifice while at the same time denying it. The problem in America, he told the country in his September 24, 1981 address to the nation, was that we had "hemorrhaged badly and wound up in a sea of red ink." The imagery was quite accurate, both in terms of government borrowing going on (he was having to borrow a record $14 billion a month to keep the government running) and in terms of the number of deaths Reaganomics was causing (over 3,000 a month at that point). But his denial was so effective that when he spoke of hemorrhaging "a sea of red ink" he was actually referring to previous administrations, while in fact his program was producing double the deficits and victims of any previous administration.

In demanding that the nation undergo even more "sacrifices" for his "crusade," Reagan consistently voiced our need for human victims while effectively denying our guilt for the sacrifice. One device used by the media in reinforcing this denial was to split the image of the sacrificer from the actual sacrifice. Thus, Reagan would be pictured on one page

of a magazine as holding an ax, but without a victim. Then, on the next page, the same ax would be shown cutting off a victim's head, but Reagan himself would be nowhere in sight. In this manner, we could not only save ourselves the guilt which we would have otherwise felt if we had openly portrayed our leader as a killer of innocent Americans, but we also could hide the anger that we felt toward him for being our hired killer. For even though we had delegated to Reagan the job of chief executioner, we still didn't like to know he was killing our neighbors. Since at some level we knew precisely what he was doing for us, we also hated him for it, and in several incidents in the fall of 1981 we showed evidence of renewed death wishes toward him. Cartoons showing people wanting Reagan dead began appearing for the first time since his shooting. "Wall Street" was pictured as wanting him to "Jump." The "Dems" were shown carrying him in a coffin to a cemetery. Yet such open portrayals of death wishes were rare, being too little disguised for comfort. The death cartoons soon stopped, and instead a rumor swept through the Stock Exchange that Reagan had had a heart attack.(22) Obviously our death wishes were not to be denied an outlet of some sort. We therefore constructed a new group-fantasy in order to provide a container for those death wishes: we imagined

We split Reagan's image off from the actual killings. Death wishes toward Reagan briefly appeared again.

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that it was the Qaddafi-devil, not us, who wanted to kill Reagan. The CIA, our chief delegate in concocting paranoid threats, produced a list of names and photos of a "Libyan Hit Squad" supposedly hired by Qad-dafi to kill Reagan. It did not matter that there was no proof of any such plot. That several of the informants had peddled phony information previously, that some of those named as part of the "Qaddafi Hit Squad" were actually anti-Qaddafi Amal Shutes, that the "detailed evidence" which Reagan and the CIA promised was never forthcoming and that FBI Director William Webster ended up admitting that no con-firmation of any hit squad was ever made and "acknowledged the infor-mation may have been planted to make U.S. officials look silly"(23) made little difference to our group-fantasy. The Qaddafi-devil and his "Hit Squad" now contained both our death wishes toward Reagan and our death wishes toward our sacrificial victims. The "Hit Squad" had to be real, because it contained an important part of us, our sadism toward both Reagan and toward our fellow Americans, which, as we saw earlier, had been symbolized as deadly insects (boll weevils and gypsy moths).

Qaddafi was pictured as a scorpion containing our rage and poisoning America.

Qaddafi, too, must therefore be a deadly insect, so he was drawn as a scorpion, ready to poison America. He was a perfect container for all our rage, against Reagan and against our victims. Once again it was our comedians who gave away the motive behind the incident. When a television comedian asked for American donations to a "National Hit Team of Libya,"(24) the audience laughed and cheered wildly. Our death wishes toward Reagan were not very far beneath the surface. For Reagan personally, the "Libyan Hit Squad" filled the important psychological function of splitting off from awareness all these death wishes. He could label Qaddafi "deranged . . . a mad dog,"(25) order U.S. citizens to leave Libya and for a time rest easy that his paranoid fears about "The Most Dangerous Man in the World," as Time called Qaddafi, were isolated far away from our shores. In a world full of tens of thousands of atomic bombs, where a half trillion dollars a year is spent on arms, for the leader of so impotent a country as Libya to be called "The Most Dangerous Man in the World" reveals the growing irrationality of our group-fantasies during this period. The more we proceeded with our internal sacrifice, the more dangerous the world felt to us. Although actual terrorist activities were not increasing at this time,(26)

we began to discuss "the growing international terrorist network" as though there existed a well-organized army, running from Russia through Libya to Cuba and Central America, ready to poison us at any time. When our cartoonists tried to picture this "terrorist network," they drew a very strange-looking figure, bristling with weapons, spreading across the globe, looking suspiciously feminine for some reason. To understand this feminine imagery, one must first look at the infantile source of paranoid imagery in the political unconscious in somewhat greater detail. For most people, the first few years of life were spent mainly with their mothers, since it has only been in the past decade that very many fathers involved themselves with the daily care of their young children.(27) When the young child feels himself or herself to be bad, it is the mother's angry look which is most feared and which presages the punishment to come. Therefore, a period of national punishment like that of Reagan's America, when we imagine we must be punished for being bad and having enjoyed ourselves too much, is visualized as being presided over by disapproving eyes. Sometimes these eyes are seen as those of foreign enemies, but more often they are pictured as simply floating above us, strange, unidentified staring eyes.

Qaddafi, the alter ego of Reagan, was labeled The Most Dangerous Man in the World. The "world wide terrorist network" was seen as strangely maternal.

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It is this image of persecuting eyes staring at us, demanding punishment, which invariably surfaces during Times of Sacrifice. These

In November 1981, staring eyes burst out everywhere in the media.

paranoid eyes are the same ones as the staring eyes of the wolves in the famous dream of Freud's patient, the Wolf Man, who then broke out in a full-blown paranoid psychosis after the dream.(28) Staring eyes can be found during times of crisis in every country and every age, from the all-powerful "Eye of Horus" of ancient Egypt to the supposedly "hypnotic eyes" of Adolf Hitler which led Germany to its "great sacrifices."(29) The same thing happened during Reagan's Time of Sacrifice. During a two-week period in November of 1981, almost every newsweekly in the nation featured the hypnotic eyes of this imaginary punitive parent who was thought to preside over the nation's sacrificial punishment. The image of the mother's staring eyes was also used by many newspapers when report mg on Sandra O'Conner, who was chosen to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Her manner, reporters said, was "so stern, her stare so penetrating, that some young lawyers call her 'laser eyes.' "(30) Thus "laser eyes" became the Supreme Judge of our Time of Sacrifice, and we devoted most of our efforts during her confirmation hearings to ques-tioning her attitudes toward "killing babies," i.e., her views on abortion, as though these were all that mattered about her.

If the Supreme Judge of our punishment was often symbolically seen as a stern mother, those punished were usually symbolically seen as children, in accordance with the basic family drama in our unconscious. This could be seen in the choice of political symbols, as when the victims of budget cuts were often portrayed as children or as when the government was shown as killing rather than pro-tecting innocent young animals - Bambi's head being displayed mounted on the office wall of Secretary of Interior James Watt, who was supposedly hired to protect baby deer. Even when a general symbol for the economic sacrifice had to be portrayed, more often than not the victims were drawn as tiny little figures, as though they were symbolic babies.

The government was seen as killing instead of protecting the young.

But here again the media metaphor was also carried out in reality, in the deaths of real children. When cuts were proposed by Reagan in Social Security payments to the elderly, the national outcry was so great that he was forced to back down. But when cuts were proposed for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, school lunches, child care food programs, food stamps, child abuse programs and dozens of other government activities directly affecting the welfare and lives of children, few spoke up, and those few who did were puzzled by the impotence of their cries. It was not just that, as one commentator put it, "kids have no constituency [] to protest; battered babies don't vote."(31)

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