James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era by Joseph Vogel

If I had to use only one word to describe Joseph Vogel’s book, that word would be thought- provoking. James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era is a fascinating book that stimulates discussion and careful consideration. In this book, Joseph Vogel delves into Baldwin’s final decade of work and demonstrates how profoundly creative and engaged he was with social issues ranging from the Reagan’s war over the culture, the defence of patriarchy by embracing what he termed “traditional family values”,  to the deterioration of inner cities and the disproportionate incarceration of black youth, and from pop-culture and gender-bending to the evolving women’s and gay rights movements.

Vogel analyses four of Baldwin’s works written between 1979-1985. First, is Baldwin’s final novel Just Above My Head, a beautiful - breathtaking really - book with social-historical context,  where he grapples with the meaning of celebrity, fame and wealth.  Then there is James Baldwin’s unfinished play The Welcome Table where he explores the possibilities of love and intimacy amid the AIDS epidemic. Baldwin offered his most compelling critique of American masculinity in his 1985 essay Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood where he questions the meaning of masculinity and gender.  He  explores  the inner fears and deviances of the “freaks” and the role of androgyny in a “hard body” blockbuster era. He talks about Michael Jackson, an individual and a pop star who does not fit with the ideal of what a male - and more specific a African-American male - should be in the 1980s, an era that is characterized by the rise of televangelism, the Electric Church and the religious Right. Finally, in his insightful 1985 essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin explores the Atlanta child murders that took place over a period of almost two years in 1979 and 1980. He scrutinizes the news media coverage, the exploitation of the tragedy and he notes the significance of Atlanta as the site of these brutal killings—a city that claimed to be "too busy to hate”. Throughout his term in office, President Ronald Reagan projected himself as a force for change and people spoke of the “Reagan Revolution”.  There was a cutting of tax rates and something of  a reduction in government regulation of business, especially the banks, — both are key revolutionary aims among the conservatives - but neither taxpayers nor businessmen felt that the government was,  as the President liked to put it, “off our backs”, to any substantial degree. In the 1980s,  there was a shift in the American economy, caused by the rise of technology, from an industrial to a service economy.  Towards the end of the decade the world entered what today we call the “Information Age”, an age focused on the processing and exchanging of information. Others see the 1980s as a new “Gilded Age,” an era that was selfish, greedy, divisive, and destructive. There was a huge cut in social programmes ($25 billion). Inner-city poverty, homelessness, and crime all peaked during the Reagan era. By the end of 1980s, says Vincent J. Cannato  his Bright Lights, Doomed Cities (Living in the Eighties, 2009) nearly 50 percent of black children were living below the poverty line.

“The great, vast, shining  Republic knows nothing about them and cares nothing about them, recognizes their existence only in times of stress, as during a military adventure, say, or an election year, or when their dangerous situation erupts into what the Republic generally calls a riot.”

James Baldwin, Evidence of Things No Seen

On June 8, 1982, President Reagan delivered an address to members of the British Parliament where he predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history” and labelled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” an assertion that he repeated the following year in a convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Florida. He increased the federal military budget dramatically and in 1983 he initiated  the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) programme, nicknamed “Stars Wars”, to prevent a nuclear attack on the U.S. The 1980s is an important time in the U.S. history. The Reagan administration has much to teach us about the state of play in the American society today. The deconstruction of  that period can help us understand the U.S today, whether regarding race, gender, government, religion, capitalism, or the military. “What is happening in this country? That’s the most important question”, asked James Baldwin in his 1963 astounding autobiographical account, The Fire Next Time. It is a question that it was relevant in the 1980s and it is still relevant today, and is as important a question to address as back in 1963.