老朽何必装烈鬼? 炮灰经验何必吹? 若是美国临末日, 再使南蛮戴头盔. 申时行: The Ronald Reagan Debacle In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was not much closer to socialism than, say, Israel. The golden hue of the Lenin and Stalin era had long faded, and tides of revolutionary progress receded. State management of the society and the economy had been imitated all around the world, especially in US and UK; social welfare had been matched in Norway and Sweden; employment security had seen duplicates in Japan and Korea. In the old socialist world, China has since arguably replaced the Soviet Union as the new big brother. The first Cultural Revolution in China finished off the bits and pieces of the old regime without bloodshed, whose success was followed by a rapid economic boom to match the previous boom in social and political affairs. Things did not go well for the old big brother. However, at least as it took on the world, the Soviet Union was getting more and more aggressive, and occasionally explosive. As US and other vandalists and imperialists were being driven out of the Far East, the Middle East and Mesoamerica, the Soviet Union lost most of its spiritual and material grounds in the row with US and Europe. All that remained was some sort of hollow inertia, dressed up in borrowed slogans. It was at this time that Ronald Reagan came to the stage. He was probably not smart. But he was a bull dog, more ready to take on the Soviet Union than most of Americans and Europeans. And it appeared he won some scores during his presidency. However, given him all the deserved and undeserved credits as far as the Soviet Union goes, he was the one who helped to launch a reactionary movement in US and Europe, which is still rampant. Together, the reactionaries reversed the course of history, and plunged US and Europe into a new permanent phase of decline. The growth of US economy slowed down from an average of about 3% to about 1%, if you average out the rates since the mid-1970s. Franklin Roosevelt¡¯s New Deal set on a track to debacle. Availability of higher education was chunk by chunk sliced smaller, until it costs all that a family can squeeze out of their diet for 20 years. As the baby boomers came to their ripe ages, they found themselves without pre s c r i p t ion drugs, and within long lines waiting for prescribed surgery. All the breakthroughs in science and technology disappeared. One after another, capitalist economies deflated in the Far East and Eastern Europe. Japan and Germany and the whole Europe have been in trouble for about a decade, already. We can trace all these trends to Ronald Reagan, to say the least. It was in his years that US industries were finally thrashed after leading the world for about 100 years. Motor vehicles like cars and trucks made in Germany and Japan replaced those made in US as the most popular models of the world. International Business Machines and Hewlett-Packard lost out to K-mart and Walmart. A long string of US bubbles jumped out of their nests: the iron and steel industry; the textile industry; chemicals; drugs; television; home and office electronics; and recently telecommunication; machinery; so on and so forth. We can trace all these trends to Ronald Duck, to say the least. Nowadays the bust started to engulf such critical industries as finance; aircraft; spacecraft and genetics. The list can go on and on. We can trace all these trends to Donald Duck, to say the least. In his inaugural address, Ronald Reagan told Americans that they had mortgaged theirs and their children's future for their short-term convenience. He was probably right. But he did not tell he was the one who foreclosed those mortgages, leaving US in long-term fear, doubt and incompetence. History, therefore, will not judge him favorably. However, maybe he did not have to care. He was an actor, and played his role as assigned, with heartless and mindless loyalty to the s c r i p t.