Does Anybody Remember the "Peace Dividend?"

By Christopher Platt

I really thought I could stop writing angry columns. This was back about 14 months ago, when Barack Obama had concluded the miraculous campaign that finally ended the Dark Ages of the Bush Presidency and heralded – or so I believed – a new era of reconciliation, equanimity, peace – and, of course, prosperity. Yikes! Did I ever get that wrong. The time since Obama’s inauguration has been so filled with rancor, obstructionism, the most venal political opportunism, and ad hominem attacks, that I feel compelled to dust off the olde word-processing software and jump back into the trenches of social welfare warfare. Well, at least I can still mix metaphors with the best of ‘em.

Today’s tirade is about a forgotten phrase, the “peace dividend.” This was a term floated at the end of the Cold War era by the likes of George H.W. Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The code words – devised mostly by Republicans of all people -- for the peace dividend were guns vs. butter and swords into plowshares. The idea was that, with the fall of the Evil Empire, the defense budgets of the protagonists would shrink miraculously, of their own accord, and that we could use all those dollars, pounds or rubles to better the lives of the citizens who had spent the previous half-century making the sacrifices that enabled the Cold War in the first place. And who doesn’t like dividends? Maybe a better phrase would have been “tanks into dishwashers.”

I only bring this up because, the most egregiously malign of all the specious arguments the Republicans have raised in their kneejerk attempts to derail the healthcare reform and financial reform initiatives, so gingerly championed by their wussy colleagues and de facto opponents across the aisles in Congress, was that all this populist crap would cost a huge amount of money that we didn’t have, and would thus saddle our descendants with intractable debt for eons to come. How are we gonna pay for all this touchy-feely stuff when we’re fighting wars all over the place and bailing out the very banks that managed to knock us off our perch atop the New World Order – something those commies themselves couldn’t do in 50 years of trying? How soon they forget.

An emerging characteristic behavior pattern of the new conservative Republican dogma is a short memory. Whenever their Democratic majority proposes, well, anything at all, the Republicans reflexively announce their strident, lifelong opposition. But, quite often, the ideas they are attacking were their own, not so long ago. Yes, Virginia, “swords into plowshares” was a Republican idea. Yes, Virginia, the idea that “everyone should be required to have health insurance,” an Obama administration proposal that Republicans have wasted megawatts of verbal energy to eliminate, also was a Republican invention, one that found a home in Teddy Kennedy's Massachusetts under Republican Governor Mitt Romney.

Well, Dear Republicans, you also forgot that there IS money to pay for the administration’s hesitant sallies into caring for the electorate, if only we tap the Peace Dividend. I hear you asking, “What dividend? What Peace?” Yeah, well, there was supposed to be peace on Earth by now. That’s what we were promised by the Obama campaign. The fact that our two nasty and costly wars have continued under the Democrats is shameful. We are still spilling our children's blood in the sand, despite all the talk. We are still spending billions of dollars a year while apparently achieving few positive results. In fact, through the end of 2010, we will have spent – fruitlessly – about $1.3 trillion (with a tr) on the longest war in our history. The new healthcare reform bill, in its most-recent incarnation, would cost about the same over time, but could engender a budget deficit reduction of the same order, $1.3 trillion (with a tr) over the next 20 years. Damn! If we didn’t have those two pesky foreign wars to support ($136 billion allocated for FY 2010), we might even be able to boost the Treasury instead of continuing to drain it. Save some kids’ lives, too.

For inspiration, let’s travel back in time to the 1990s, when Bush 41 was talking about the Peace Dividend (also about “a thousand points of light,” but that’s another column), and All That was part of the Nickelodeon TV lineup. One of my favorite parts of the show was Ask Ashley, where a demure young girl, Ashley (“That’s me!”) would sit on her bed and answer questions from her fans. The questions were hysterically stupid, and Ashley would go blisteringly ballistic in reply, deservedly so. One girl “writes” that her room is on the second floor, and she leaves the house by jumping out her window. But she has broken her bones 17 times already, what can she do? Ashley’s caustic reply: “You moron, try taking the stupid stairs!” In another letter, some kid tells Ashley he lives in an igloo in Alaska, and every time he goes out without his jacket, he gets cold. Ashley tells him, in part, “Don’t go out without your freakin’ jacket!”

Now imagine a letter from, oh, John McCain, who writes, “Dear Ashley, Of course, I would like healthcare reform! But we don’t have the money because we are fighting two foreign wars and we’re broke!” Now, I’ll bet you’d be able to write Ashley’s acerbic reply by yourself.

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