I don't remember the exact moment that my youthful mind wrapped itself around Ronald Reagan. There was that time in kindergarten, 1980. Our teacher, a rather large woman with a happy smile who I absolutely adored asked the class who our parents were voting for and I felt confidant in saying that my hippie parents were voting for Jimmy Carter. Somehow this got back to my parents and I got a stern talking to about how I shouldn't speak for their voting. They did vote for Carter, by the way. They just didn't want to admit it.

Maybe it was the G.I. Joe cartoon. They were all such good right wingers with big guns and cool planes and tanks. They knew that a strong American meant a strong military and hey, that's one to grow on. I know it had something to do with the Cold War, my turn to Reaganism. I think it had to do with the "star Wars" missile defense system. For one thing, it sounded like a cool G.I. Joe weapon. For another thing, shooting missiles out of the sky with lasers appeals to a young boys sensibility. Finally, it meant we could win a nuclear war and one thing I hated as a child was being told that certain events were "impossible." To a child, Star Wars meant that none of their missiles hit us and all of our missiles hit them and that we win the war. To a child brought up on G.I. Joe, this pretty much happens without any casualties on either side.

I just received a book in the mail called The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media b a guy named Norman Solomon who is an excellent media critic (he gives out the annual P.U.-litzer Prize for media hijinks) and is the author of a funny book called The Trouble With Dilbert. The forward to this book was written by Jonathan Kozol, who wrote a very good book about the state of education in the U.S. during the late 1980's called Savage Inequalities.

When I was in high school Kozol came to speak to my private school. I engaged in an hour-long pissing match with him, calling him a hypocrite for accepting money to speak at the private school and laughing at his notions of "white flight" from urban neighborhoods, telling him that the goal of being an American is to make enough money to move out of the Hellish city and into the posh suburbs and if city dwellers couldn't get that through their heads (and happened to not be white) that was too bad. I also explained to him how I earned the right to go to private school by passing an admissions test and how my family (parents are public school teachers) wasn't exactly rich.

I remember, after I had finished speaking he said, "why is it always the conservative kids who argue the most strenuously and who seem the best informed on these issues. When are we going to get some liberal kids to argue as well?"

Well, I became that liberal kid after about a year in college. A few things happened. I wrote speeches for a Republican senate candidate in New Mexico and was confronted by an inbred idiot who asked me if my candidates "wife was a Jew." I went to a larger public college and met more types of people than I had encountered at private school. I realized it was more impressive to watch a single mother raise two kids and get an "A" in a lecture class (and do all the reading and never miss class or an assignment" than it was for me to do the same. I started to realize my advantages and not feel guilty, but feel at least the wish that others had the same luck. I started to read more. Conservatives seemed like simpletons, always looking for black and white in a world full of complicated grey.

Well, seeing Kozol's name on an essay (a rather good essay) brought all that back, and I wish I could meet the man again so he'd know that loud-mouthed right wing children often grow up to be loud-mouthed left wingers.

Oh, and legalize pot.

Michael Maiello would also like to renounce his childhood addiction to Olivia Newton John.