by Corey Taylor
Reminder: above all else, once again, you don’t need to read this book. You don’t need to buy it, borrow it, read it, or believe it. You don’t need to give three-fifths of a free shit what I think I know—or claim to, anyway. Chances are you bought it because of the cover or because you know my bands. But once again, I’m not trying to change your minds about how you feel about our country. None of us are ever truly aligned intellectually. We try, but we never get there—that’s one of the great things about being human. If you are set in your ways, by all means, continue. If you’re unsure about how or what you think or feel, please read on. I just want us all to get down on a couple of things, then I’ll be happy, content, pleased as punch.
Overall, this book may not have a happy ending. I know I try to tie my books together with some positivity at the Last Chapter Wrap Parties, but that may not be the case here. This will be a pretty unflinching look at how the United States of America lives and breathes in this day and age. Some of you may not like it. But I hope it’ll be something approaching fair. But just like you, I’m going to do my best to be optimistic, not naïve. I’m going to try to be proactive, not so negatively reactive. I’m going to sit all sides down and really try to figure out how the fuck we got here, man. My happy place from the nineties has been harshed so dramatically in the last twenty years that I’m ashamed not of everyone else but of myself. When you take your foot off the gas, the car rumbles to a halt. When you take your eye off the ball, it smashes into your face and breaks your nose. I did both of those things. Hell, I’d say three-fourths of the country did these things. So now it’s time to play catch-up and try to make it right or at least get back up to speed so we can try to make things better.
The other option is just sitting back and pretending that it’s all an illusion or, worse yet, a dream we’re all going to wake up from or, like some of these sleazy cunts, pretend there is nothing wrong with this country, that there is no such thing as white privilege, police brutality, or class war, that we can sit back to enjoy more reruns of Matlock and Murder, She Wrote. I don’t know why I picked on those shows—I happen to love Matlock, and Angela Lansbury is a goddamn treasure. But anyway, you get the point. You can either engage or enrage, tune in or tune out. Sometimes you get just as much done by doing nothing at all. It’d be like a sit-in if you didn’t give a rat’s ass about whatever it was you were supposed to be protesting.
That’s your right, after all, just as it’s my right as an American to bitch about it. Like I said before, it’s not going to be pretty, it may not end well, and we may not be friends or even cool with each other by the end of this prickly tome. This is a risk I take any time I commit pure opinion to virtual paper: being quoted and having it come off as holier fact. I don’t give a shit if you don’t agree with me, to be frank with you. Even if my name is not Frank, I still feel this way, and I probably always fucking will. It might turn you into a giant Resting Bitch Face who can’t play nice with others. However, if you’re up for the journey, sit back, pull on your red-white-and-blue motorcycle helmet, and let’s try to find some closure, easy rider.
Don’t forget to hold it in once you inhale.
Fuck the fascists.
CHAPTER 2
HOW RONALD REAGAN SAVED CHRISTMAS
WHEN I WAS A KID I TRULY BELIEVED IN SUPERHEROES.
I know. Crazy, right? Sure, I was a kid and all, but I mean it. I believed in superheroes. To me they were as real as everyone else: Spider-Man swinging from building to building, Batman fighting clowns with his mind and his fists, Iron Man soaring through the clouds with Superman and Hawkman, the Hulk smashing through the landscape to do battle with aliens—this wasn’t fiction. These weren’t made up stories. These were news features! In my head the reason they were drawn was because they were so fast that you could never get them to stay still for a real photograph or because with all the explosions and crazy battles going on, no one could ever get their cameras to focus correctly. So we had to rely on sketches and illustrations. Hell, they showed drawings of courtrooms and stuff, and those people were apparently real, so why couldn’t my comic books be as relevant and real as the Sunday Times?
Call it youthful naïveté, wishful thinking, parent envy… Yours Truly didn’t grow up covered in peaches and cream, you know. But for a while there I believed with all my heart that if I lifted my eyes skyward, I’d see heroes. With or without powers, caped or capeless, smiling, grimacing, winking, frowning, judging—however you wanted to see them, they were out there somewhere, fighting the good fight, protecting the innocent, righting wrongs, settling scores, watching over those who never had anyone to look out for them. They had to be real, right? I mean, what good was a world where no one cared whether good could conquer bad? What good was a world where common decency could be killed by extraordinary chaos? The only thing that got me through it all was thinking—knowing—that out there in the darkness were great beings with greater power and responsibility, looking for crimes to stop and people to save. Ignorance doesn’t always have to be bliss; sadly, it can also be sanity.
As I got older and the abuse kept on coming and yet no one was rushing to my rescue, that idea and those images started to fade until I finally cut them out of my life completely. It’s a cold pact to make with yourself, but a necessary one. I learned a long time ago what quite a few survivors learn: hope can make your pain worse, especially when you eventually accept that your knight in shining armor is a two-dimensional character with no possible way of getting to you. Cartoons don’t save lives. Men and women in costumes don’t really exist, not even now with the so-called real life superheroes who go around in packs of spandex coaxing kittens out of trees and walking grandmothers across streets. That’s all well and good, but a YouTube video doesn’t actually dispel thirty years of pent-up cynicism and rage. I’m sure some of the inner cities and rougher parts of suburbia could use a few heroes to carry their fucking groceries for them.
Sorry. I know I tend to be one of the more optimistic assholes, but in this case it was a bitter pill to swallow, realizing that none of those fantastic people would save me—or anyone else, for that matter. But I’ll tell you an amazing thing that happened: once I wrapped my head around that reality, I decided I was going to protect myself. From that moment on, I was going to defend myself, educate myself, fight and push and work and dedicate myself to never ever looking that fear in the eyes again. I swore that I was going to do whatever it took to keep myself safe, and when I had a family of my own I would keep them safe. I would make myself stronger and honor my debts. I would learn on my own and live on my own. Sure, it meant becoming a person I wasn’t sure I was prepared to be. It meant steeling myself against too much sentiment. It meant propping up my backbone with a little bit of false bravado. It meant forgetting most of the lessons that being afraid had taught me. There were times when I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off. Luckily, I had a couple of bands and some talent to help me along the way, working these psychoses on the in- and outside. But I buried a ton of shit as well—shit that I’m only now starting to figure out through therapy. I know: it sounds scary, and it is. But I’m getting through it.
I tell you this story of disillusionment and eventual self-reliance because in so many ways that’s exactly how Ronald Reagan became the patron saint of the Republican Party, but in the opposite order of events.
In order to understand how this works, you have to go back and look at where America was in the mid-seventies. Our country had been through some serious fucking shit: several key assassinations, unemployment, gas shortages, undercover CIA work on domestic soil resulting in a massive influx of drugs into the black and Hispanic communities, Watergate, the Cold War—and that’s just a short list too; I didn’t even get to disco and bell-bottoms. The country had lost its innocence with Vietnam and had been given no time to regain its conscience, instead being destroyed from within by hatred and PTSD. Even when a genuinely good man like Jimmy Carter was elected president, he was saddle
d with so much debt, inflation, and hopelessness that by the time the USA hockey team beat the Russians at the Winter Olympics, it was a blip on a radar screen that seemed to disappear like a UFO sighting. People wanted something to give them hope again, to feel the happiness they’d felt long ago when things felt more optimistic. They wanted a hero.
The Republicans didn’t want shit—they needed a hero. After the fallout from Nixon and the presumption of Ford’s idiocy, the GOP was in shambles. Corruption at the highest level had eroded the core idea of conservatism. Their rallying cry of “smaller government” was seen as hypocrisy because of covert break-ins and executive privilege coupled with unconstitutional surveillance. The Right hadn’t had a black eye this bad in years. No one wanted to hear them preach about “self-starting.” No one could care about states’ rights and how they used their funding when everything seemed so bleak. To the country, the Republicans were just as bad as the Democrats: they were all just a bunch of fucking politicians out for themselves.
It didn’t help matters that there was no clear idea or vision of what the United States was. The national identity was more regional than anything. Nothing unified us as a country; nothing made us proud to be American. We were at war with what we thought we should be. We weren’t like some of our allies: Great Britain had the royals, France was the seat of art and sophistication, Japan had its culture and history. And our enemies were just as well off: the USSR, as it was called (or CCCP in Cyrillic) had Communism, and the Middle East had oil and Allah. America had a tattered flag and a broken promise. Conceptually we were still a baby when it came to being a nation. We had legs—but what the fuck did we stand for?
Enter the good governor from California.
Ronald Reagan had been a star in the GOP for quite some time. He originally had been a Democrat but “went Red” in 1962. That makes sense when you remember he was a big film star from Hollywood’s Golden Years, and that city is as Blue as they come. Ron and his wife, Nancy, had become the very epitome of class and refinery among the elites in La La Land, and when his film career began to slow down, Reagan found he was a natural for politics. He seemed at ease with the whole “Communist threat” scare tactic that most Republican politicians used in the sixties, balancing such messages by using charm and a mega-watt-power smile to move through the ranks. In the GOP he had the room he needed to be a giant. He easily won the governorship in California and immediately started laying the groundwork for a run at the White House. With the help of some visionaries in the party, he came to represent the look and message of the new Republican Party: the flag, the country western music, the patriotism, the eagles, the working-man persona—our view of the modern-day United States started with the Reagan years.
After two failed attempts at capturing the Oval Office, he finally won by a landslide in 1980. When you look at the circumstances, it makes perfect sense why the other tries shit themselves only to have the third time be the charm—because of a better trailer for a bigger movie. America needed a hero; Reagan was John Wayne with a crisp suit and a fistful of pomade. His nickname was Dutch, and he had a ranch to go with his digs in Washington—I can’t tell you how many times I saw the pictures of ol’ Ron decked out in his “civvies” while he rode horses out at Camp David. He seemed amiable and jovial, yet there was a toughness in the squaring of his jaw and the squint of his eyes. You could see where years in front of the camera had honed him for the role he was born to play. Hell, he just looked like a president. Looking good wasn’t a novel idea: people have long thought that Kennedy was the first president to be elected on his fuckability. But with Reagan, there was another aspect that I don’t know if anyone else has picked up on: America was not only looking for a hero but also needed a father figure.
The hippies and yippies and mes and yous and whatever else generations were coming into their own, out of the fog of war and the haze of the drug-addled seventies. Suddenly responsibility was being thrust upon men and women no one thought were going to make it out alive, let alone make a living. They had rejected their own parents out of spite and because of the taut shackles of the fifties. Now they couldn’t remember anything past their first joint. Here comes Bedtime for Bonzo, a man who looked like he’d help you with your chores and punish you if you got out of line. Reagan could be America’s Dad, although at his age, he could’ve also been our Granddad as well, seeing as he was the oldest president ever elected. So with these ideals thrust upon him, no one stopped to wonder whether his supply-side economic policies would hold water—and, it turned out, they didn’t. This so-called Reaganomics model advocated tax reductions for the rich to encourage them to spend more, at which point the profits would “trickle down” onto the lower classes. It didn’t work; in fact, the policy has only been shown to really work on a micro level, like a town or small city, not nationally and not even on a state level. Kansas is feeling the unfortunate effects of trying to hold onto that sense of deregulation right now.
Side note: I think the name Obamacare is retaliation for naming that economic policy Reaganomics, in a way, even though the ACA originated as a Republican concept.
The truth is that Uncle Ronnie had some misfires—trickle-down economics, the war on drugs, slashing government spending on everything but the military, fighting public-sector labor, the Iran-Contra affair, bombing Libya, escalating the Cold War by cranking out the missiles in an arms race with the Soviets—even as he had some great moments, like reducing inflation and seeing the gross national product grow annually at a very healthy rate. He also skirted being called two-faced by making his famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The man who’d ramped the fuck out of nuclear weapons manufacturing as a deterrent could now also be credited with helping to bring down the Berlin Wall—not too shabby when you consider that his party had been dead set against the Red Threat for years. Ronald Reagan and David Hasselhoff, fighting the good fight together—now that would have been a ticket to believe in.
But I’m an asshole, so what do I know?
The problem started when Reagan couldn’t stay president forever—even those of us who didn’t like him never really hated him. Sure, my favorite hardcore punk and heavy metal bands at the time all had Reagan T-shirts depicting him in various degrees of degradation. To them Reagan was the enemy, the face of the growing power of the Right, the fascists forcing obedience on a generation that would never be tamed or bought. Being a poor kid, I identified with those bands, not ol’ Dutch. So America’s dad became the nagging father I’d never had in the first place and now definitely didn’t want. Couple that with a Republican governor in Iowa, Terry Branstad, who showed no signs of stepping down (and who, shockingly, has recently been reelected again), and I had no love for the GOP.
But once again, never underestimate the power of PR, with lasers and myths and a pyrotechnics display. Reagan may have been going out, but the office was still in their hands; George Bush Sr. was set to rise up from VP to Big P. No more vice president—here comes President Bush (part 1). Bush had the know-how, the experience, and the leadership skills. He even had the Texas knack of getting us into a war right away (a tradition started by Johnson in Vietnam) with the first Gulf War. But he didn’t have Reagan’s panache. He lacked Ron’s ability to, with a wink and a smile, get the American people to roll on down the hill with him on a float made of bald eagles and mountain lions, smothered in flags and fireworks, designed to make sure AMERICA IS MOST, AMERICA IS FIRST! Because of this lack of pop, Bush only lasted one term and ceded to Clinton in the nineties. Then, eight years after that, Bush Jr. picked up the flag and tried stabbing the heart of the dragon, getting into all the shitty things the GOP were now starting to wear on their sleeve.
This was really when the Republican Party’s confidence started to shake. It was becoming more and more apparent that the message and the reality weren’t the same. Here was a conservative party appealing to the middle and blue-collar class but actually using white-collar, multi
-million-dollar corporations’ influence and money to deregulate everything, driving that same middle class into the poverty zone and putting a bullet in the head of the living wage. But people still stayed with the party for some reason. I believe it has to do with a lot of things: the aforementioned kick-ass special effects of the party that sees no irony in “AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!”; a lack of perceived condescension from, and I quote, “elitists, liberals, and progressive intellectual types”; and zero hesitation to make a show of strength, which would sadly lead to the disgusting bully tactics of the Trump fanatics. We’ll talk more about that later, but those are all good reasons to support a party that pretty much shits in the mouth of everything blue-collar America really stands for. Sometimes that “better trailer” is really just the best bits of the movie; the “bigger picture” leaves you pissed off that you wasted your money on such a bag of chopped hog shit.
Fast forward, and now we see ourselves in a world where the GOP is reeling because they allowed themselves to be taken over by a spoiled orange cunt of a human being who may or may not have only wanted to run for president so he could promote his new television network, convinced he’d lose the whole time. Well, at least that’s what the conspiracy theorists on the Left think. On the Right, they’re just shaking their heads. Look a little farther to the right (I won’t use that nouveau fucking term those Nazis love), and they’re not shaking their heads; they’re goose-stepping into a new phase of white supremacy. I have a whole Trump chapter coming up—that’s how bad he’s fucking made it for all of us—but I wanted to paint a clear picture of what happened after Reagan. Thirty-six years later, and we’re not just seeing a sullying of “the house that Lincoln built”; we’re seeing what happened when we gave in to temptation, when we decided that looks should overrule policy, when we decided that values do not mean nearly as much as winning.
