Big Ron Part 2

“I’m not too worried by the enemy / I know that Reagan will look after me”

Howard Devoto out front of Magazine, singing “Model Worker” at Festival Hall in Melbourne, 6 September 1980.

“I’m not too worried by the enemy / I know that Carter will look after me”

The same song as it appears on the band’s third album “The Correct Use of Soap”, released earlier in the same year.

What a difference a few months make. When Devoto wrote those words he could only have been thinking ironically: poor old Jimmy Carter couldn’t even look after his wayward brother Billy, or the Tehran hostages, let alone the rest of the free world. With the emergence on the scene of candidate Reagan, the line becomes one of, what, desperation, wishful thinking, even greater irony? From some point in 1980 and on to the end of the decade, the world was perched rather too close to the brink. The Soviet army was in Afghanistan; Iran and Iraq were fighting the war between the USA and the USSR by proxy, the CIA was throwing money at all kinds of bad people not just in the Middle East but also in Central America, on the theory that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend - as another song from the era says, “what a catalyst you turned out to be” - and the threat of nuclear annihilation kept too many of us awake at night, with the cold sweat of fear. (A lot of Magazine songs are about fear; this is what made them such an important band, and probably why they failed to ignite in an era that was turning to music in order to get away from all of that: “I’m the dandy highwayman”, anyone?)

Over it all loomed the iconic figure of Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood actor and governor of California wth the tough-guy swagger (no, not you, Arnie; you’ll get your turn). Did he stare down the Soviet Union in the last great battle of the Cold War? Or did he just happen to be at the helm during a time when the termites that had been working away under the surface to destroy the Soviet empire from within, just began to break through to the surface, soon to reveal the rottenness that lay within? What we do know is that if Reagan had lost in 1984 there wouldn’t be the hoopla we have been seeing this past week. Nor would we, I should think, if the Communists had managed to stagger on in power for another 10 years. He was certainly the right man at the right time; what can’t be known is whether he drove the times or they drove him.

I always thought that Reagan was essentially a simple-minded man who had the good sense to surround himself with people he knew he could count on to make the decisions that mattered, and the good fortune to be president at a time when the tide of world affairs was moving overwhelmingly in America’s direction. When George W Bush became president I thought that his success, like Reagan’s, would depend on whom he surrounded himself with. What I didn’t know then was how important those choices would be for the rest of us.