With MAGA, one letter makes the difference

Imagine a place where the great isn't the enemy of the good.

Make America Great Again was not a motto born in this century. Neither was America First. Ronald Reagan suggested, “Let’s Make America Great Again” when he won the Presidency in 1980. He just didn’t think to trademark it, as our current President has.

It’s a clever slogan because it defies contradiction. Who wouldn’t want America to prosper? It also calls up disinfected memories of a time when kids were free to run around the neighborhood, no doors were locked at night, and a nice, secure job was there for anyone who could handle it. That didn’t apply to those who were redlined out of those neighborhoods and couldn’t use the swimming pools. But they never were part of the intended audience.

Today we don’t really heed the letters themselves, because MAGA has become a conversational word, long past an acronym. But, for the record, the G stands for Great.

Great has multiple definitions. It can pertain to size, like the Great Wall or the Great Barrier Reef. Or it can mean distinction, as in, “Tom Brady is the GOAT — Greatest Of All Time.”

But it also means might and power. Catherine The Great, Peter The Great, Alexander The Great. It would be hard to say they were overly large or accomplished, but they were able to do what they wanted, and most of what they wanted was conquest. A neighboring state was fair game, even if the process wasn’t fair.

That is the “greatness” on display of the first four months of this administration.

We could catalogue the blizzard of malignant acts, but we see them every day and every night. TV commentators and social-media warriors can think and talk of nothing else. Rational conversation is near-impossible, and it doesn’t move the ratings.

Let’s reduce it to this. In its pursuit of greatness, the current administration has specialized in attacking the American people to an extent broader than no other administration has ever imagined.

And it would be so simple to change just one word. It wouldn’t bother the acronym at all. Just substitute Good for Great. Because America hasn’t been beloved when it has over-reached for Greatness, as it frequently has. It has been beloved, and envied, when it has aspired to Good.

Instead of devoting an extra $160 billion to deportation, detention and wall-building, we could hire enough immigration judges and courts to handle the asylum cases of immigrants who want to arrive legally.

Instead of “traumatizing” government workers whom the authors of Project 2025 deem expendable, we could hire and re-hire air traffic controllers, weather forecasters and FEMA specialists to rescue us from trauma.

Instead of haranguing the president of Ukraine for his refusal to negotiate with the Russians who invaded his country, bombed its hospitals and kidnapped its children, we could use the money that is being ticketed for the Defense Department to make sure he can adequately resist a war criminal.

Instead of calling the tragic murder of 12 South African farmers a “genocide” and showing the media a phony photo from the Congo, we could pledge to restore PEPFAR, the program begun by President George W. Bush to extinguish HIV in Africa, particularly South Africa.

Instead of kicking out the 27 percent of Harvard students who are foreign-born and depriving the university of the types of grants that helped Harvard develop the defibrillator, the MRI, the pacemaker and the first kidney transplant….we could work with Harvard and other prestigious schools to bring their costs within the reach of the working American, and to discourage blatant advocacy among the teachers.

Instead of threatening Greenland with invasion and Canada with annexation, we could marshal the free nations of the world to devise a retaliatory plan against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Instead of requesting and accepting a $400 billion version of Air Force One from Qatar that will not be operational for at least four years and will go directly to the President instead of the Presidency, we could bring back the standards that forced Jimmy Carter to sell his peanut farm before he was inaugurated.

Instead o planning to disband the Department of Education and appointing a Secretary of Education who honestly thinks A.I. is a steak sauce, we could begin a badly-needed national project to overhaul the entire educational system, reinstitute basic learning, teach financial planning and manual know-how, and provide free education at community colleges.

Instead of slashing medical research and trivializing the entire vaccine structure, we could revive the pandemic prevention plan that kept the Ebola virus at bay and might well have done the same to Covid-19, if the President had not disbanded it in 2017. We could also continue the strides toward an Alzheimer’s vaccine. And, finally, we can kick the tires on the concept of restructuring medical debt.

Instead of ignoring the housing shortage that is causing despair among young professionals and throwing more and more citizens into the barren streets, we could build housing of all sorts, everywhere in America, even if it means dispelling the picayune regulations that gum up the gears. As someone pointed out the other day, the Empire State Building was built in a year.

Instead of rolling back child labor laws as they do in Sarah Huckabee’s Arkansas, we could actually do something about a federal minimum wage that has not budged from $7.25 per hour since 2009.

Instead of listening to our Vice President ridicule women who aren’t interested in having babies before they get their day-care situation straightened out, we could retrieve the fully-refundable Child Tax Credit that was passed after the pandemic. Had it not been allowed to expire, we would have a child poverty rate of 8.4 percent instead of 12.6.

Instead of enduring mindless attacks on Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, George Clooney and anyone or anything that happens to be “woke,” we could ask our leaders for peace, quiet and productivity.

Instead of scheduling a military parade with missiles and submarines that will destabilize the streets of the District of Columbia and cost us enough money to restore the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we could celebrate our President’s birthday by honoring California firemen and 9/11 first responders, some of whom will see their medical benefits disappear.

Instead of confusing the world with our reckless and self-indulgent campaigns against ourselves and anyone who dares oppose us, we could aspire to become the Shining City On A Hill that Reagan envisioned, not that he was seeing things. For the most part, it was real.

And instead of all this Democratic navel-gazing about the proper “messaging” of the things we’ve always cherished, we could draw everything from one simple code that everyone already knows.

Make America Good Again.