I started to “hatch” and become aware of politics and world events when I was around thirteen or fourteen. Ronald Reagan was the President and my dad was stationed at the Pentagon. It was a scary time; the left was telling us all the time that Reagan was a dangerous cowboy, that he was going to lead us into a nuclear war, that we were all going to die and leave nothing but radioactive cinders behind, and that only a nuclear freeze and negotiations with the Russians could save us!
My father is a retired Air Force officer. He was in speechwriting and public affairs, so he was stationed on the words and ideas front during the Cold War — and he was stationed at the Pentagon during President Reagan’s first term. He would sometimes bring home articles from the Pentagon clip service for me to read — some news articles, some from conservative commentators. He made sure I knew who Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was, and that I knew what Communism really meant. He would occasionally tell me about other Soviet defectors and how they had managed to read between the lines of the goverment propaganda, and realize how cruelly they were being deceived.
He also made sure to call my attention, again and again, to the unacknowledged bias in the mass media, and taught me to always be skeptical of what I saw and read.
So I can’t wait to talk with him about Memogate! How delicious!
UPDATE: Kind of like this. He sounds so punchy, doesn’t he?