In the middle of the Carter presidency, for reasons unrelated to national politics, my mother died and my family was bankrupted. I was sixteen, and almost overnight I went from living in a middle-class suburban household to living in my car, a 1971 Vega that was a hand-me-down from my brother. I ended up in a trailer in southern Illinois, starving and broke, and stayed there for five years.

As one of my readers noted the other day, I had led a sheltered, isolated childhood in my middle-class suburb, where they simultaneously preached racial equality while seeing to it that I might never have to meet anyone of another race.  In contrast, my trailer park in southern Illinois was in the bad part of town, where burned-out and ne’er-do-well white college students lived beside poor blacks. I was scraping by from month to month, allowing myself one twenty-five-cent can of generic spaghetti per day for food, and suddenly the lives of the students I moved among seemed absurdly privileged and decadent. Like Joni Mitchell, I’d looked at life from both sides now, or the American Dream anyway. I’d seen that the image of the happy family, the house in the suburbs, the kids, the yard and the station-wagon, that was all just a veneer, as delicate and insubstantial as a Christmas ornament, and as easily broken.

(For what it’s worth, I have twice been the victim of racial discrimination. When I was fifteen, I was fired from my job as a busboy, because the Mafioso owners of the restaurant, as a cost-cutting measure, decided to, literally, bus in illegal immigrants from Chicago to do my job. Then, when in my thirties, I was told by more than one prestigious New York theater that they could not produce my plays because I was not a minority. And yet, in spite of these bitter, bitter defeats, I never took my eyes off the prize, and nothing ever held me back from pursuing my lifelong dream of one day writing a cartoon about talking ants.)

I am an artist, and I found that the art I responded to most strongly in my teens was populist and sentimental. I thought Frank Capra was a genius, I thought Steven Spielberg was a godsend, and I thought Norman Rockwell was better than Rembrandt. (I still greatly enjoy Capra, and I still think Spielberg is pretty great, but I find I can no longer abide Rockwell.)

I was a sentimentalist from my time as a suburbanite, but my tenure as an indigent gave me a cynical streak as well. (An actress once described my work as "crunchy on the outside, but squishy on the inside," which I count as one of the best reviews I've ever received.) I loved the Beatles first, but I loved the Stones second, and while everyone I knew was listening to Boston and Journey, I was listening to Elvis Costello and Talking Heads. It’s no wonder, then, that my favorite author at the time was Kurt Vonnegut, who was the perfect blend of dewy-eyed liberal and coal-black cynic. When Vonnegut wrote “Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind,” I took him at his word. Either all people are created equal or they are not, and if they are created equal, then I felt that they all have value and should be treated that way. That’s what I had been taught in my suburban enclave anyway, and that’s what I had been taught by Meet John Doe and E.T. and Jailbird. Vonnegut admitted in his preface to Jailbird that his entire output could boiled down to seven words: “Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail,” and he also passed along to me the words of his son Mark, who, when asked what is the meaning of life, said “The meaning of life is to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” And those two statements seemed to me to be an apt philosophy to get me through this thing, whatever it is.

1980 came around, the first election in which I was able to vote. I didn’t think Carter had done a very good job as a president, and I was frankly appalled at the notion of a washed-up B-movie actor attaining the highest office in the land, so I registered myself as an independent, which I thought was a very cool thing to do, and I threw my support behind John Anderson. I don’t know if I could tell you now what Anderson’s policies were, but he seemed authentic to me, he seemed to care about people, and he seemed trustworthy. And he, like me, seemed to have lost faith in America’s two-party system. I was nineteen, and I thought that Anderson might actually have a shot at the thing.

Well, that didn’t happen, and Reagan became president, and is now universally admired as a “great communicator” who won the Cold War and single-handedly dismantled the Berlin Wall.

But Reagan didn’t seem like that to me. Reagan seemed like an empty suit, an actor, really, no offense meant to my actor friends, genial but stupid, his crinkly smiles masking a stone-cold heart. I thought for sure that the country couldn’t possibly fall for his sparkly bullshit about it being “Morning in America,” I’d been near the bottom of the national food chain for years and it wasn’t anywhere near morning where I lived. When Reagan was elected in 1980 I felt like we entered a long, dark national nightmare. His empty rhetoric and repellent gaffes showed me that he was just a figurehead, a doddering fool who was controlled by someone else, someone behind the scenes, a feeling I’ve gotten from Republican presidents ever since. Say what you want about Nixon, one never got the feeling he took orders from anyone.

Reagan announced his ground-breaking economic policies in that “I’d never hurt you” sing-song old-geezer voice of his, and became the template of the Great GOP Daddy – treat the populace as children and they will see you as a father; abuse them and they will see it as love. Ronald Reagan didn’t see all American citizens as equal – he saw all wealthy people as equal, and the rest of us as cannon fodder. Who benefited from Reagan’s economics? He kept patting us all on the heads and assuring us that the money would trickle down to us, but where I lived the money somehow never showed up. Instead, social service programs were cut all over the place, homeless people proliferated on the streets and Gordon Gekko ruled Wall Street. I knew nothing of conservatism, all I knew was that Reagan’s vision of equality meant, quite literally, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

Reagan’s bellicose war-mongering intensified the cold war to the point where, in 1982, it seemed certain that nuclear war was just around the corner. Worse, he built up the military by reinstating the draft, and I was required to register for it, upon penalty of law. Living in difficult circumstances in the shadow of a mushroom cloud was bad enough, but now Reagan wanted to kill me. Fight a war? For that clown? I tried to apply for Conscientious Objector status and sought out all the necessary forms, but they all demanded that I be religious (I am not) or have some long-standing, well-documented moral objection to war. Well, I was a teenaged kid living in a trailer, what kind of documentation could I have pertaining to my moral objection to war? There was no box on the forms that said “I hate our president and will not fight or die for any war that he starts.”

That Reagan was elected once was, for me, a nightmare, but the idea that he might be elected a second time was unthinkable. I didn’t care that Walter Mondale was an ill-defined, watery, non-descript Democrat, I was going to vote for him and I assumed that everyone else in the country felt the same way. To my horror, Reagan was re-elected, by a huge majority, by smiling, smug Reaganites. I quite literally did not recognize the country I was living in any more – this America was mean, selfish and bullying. This America didn’t watch out for the little guy, this America ran the little guy down in its Mercedes, then rifled his pockets for spare change. I was living in New York by the time 1984 rolled around, and the streets were filled with crazy people who had been turned out of mental wards, and homeless people who had fallen through the societal safety net, and crack dealers who had found a way to prosper in a society with no other chances.

(Mario Cuomo, on the other hand, was a candidate I liked immediately, and whom, it was said at the time, could not be elected president because his name ends in a vowel – meaning that, since he is an Italian-American, the voters would not be able to think of his as “presidential.”)

Michael Dukakis, like Walter Mondale, was not my idea of a good candidate. I find it hard to believe he was anybody’s idea of a good candidate. All I knew was that it was important to stop Bush I from becoming president. And yet, in 1984 I was still registered as an Independent. Why? Because as much as I found George Bush I repellant, fake and cruel, I still hadn’t seen a Democratic candidate who I could look at and say “Hey, this guy thinks like I do, sees the world the way I do, will fight to make America the place I think it ought to be, I’ll gladly stand beside him and give him my vote.” Not a single candidate shared my worldview, none of them ever spoke to Republican power in the voice I heard inside my head, every one was a compromise, some kind of stop-gap measure, someone who would “do” until a real candidate came along.

And so I watched in horror, again, on another election night as a man named Bush – Bush! – became president and assumed the job of administering Reagan’s third term. Bush I, while clearly “smarter” than Reagan (and benefiting from not being senile), was far worse to me. I didn’t buy for a second his war in Kuwait, his “line in the sand,” a war I felt was fought simply because Bush had a problem with being perceived as a “wimp.” (Remember the “wimp factor?” Sheesh.) Bush I was like the paperback version of Reagan, a politician found at the bottom of the Reagan Remainder Bin.

As I hacked my way through the tangled undergrowth of the New York theater world, trying to eke out a career for myself as a playwright, Bush I tried to take even that away from me, using a bullshit cultural battle surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe and 2-Live Crew (remember 2-Live Crew?) to slash funding for the NEA. Bush I declared artists to be enemies of the state – it seemed like no matter what I did, there was always some Republican politician or other standing in my way.

And yet, when 1992 rolled around I was still an Independent. I thought that Bush I was a massive failure as a president, but I found Clinton to be a noxious, unappealing used-car salesman of a politician. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I have in my possession an autographed photo of a young, dark-haired Bill Clinton in a meeting with my grandfather, who was, apparently, a figure of some standing in Arkansas politics.) I searched in vain for something, anything to like about him, and the only thing I could find to recommend him was that he was, like me, a fan of Elvis Presley. That’s a painfully thin reed to hang a vote on, but, as they say on the political blogs, I held my nose and voted for him.

By the time 1996 came around, I was a reasonably successful playwright and a part-time screenwriter. Just as I cannot fairly blame Carter for my family’s dissolution, I cannot fairly credit Clinton for my relative success. And while I still didn’t like Clinton that much as a person, or as a president for that matter, I couldn’t disagree with the economy that flourished under his reign.

(And, since it’s doubtful there will ever be a more appropriate place on my blog to mention this, let me just say that I couldn’t help notice that, as long as Clinton was getting serviced by interns in the oval office, the nation remained at peace, but the moment the blowjobs ceased, we were at war again.)

The strange thing was that I remained skeptical of Clinton right up to the point where the Republicans tried to remove him from office. Once the Ken Starr witch hunt began, I became intensely partisan, and by the time the Clinton presidency came to an end, I found I had much to admire in him.

Next: Katrina brings it all into focus.