LIFE AS WE SAW IT

A PORTRAIT OF WASHINGTON IN THE 80S

America! Reagan Country!

Let us return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, which is to say 1980.

Bring up the soundtrack, with lots of those wagons-ho French horns like you used to hear in the movies when the pioneers crossed the wide Missouri.

Cut to the wagons circled for the hoedown that night, the young bucks prancing in the firelight much as they pranced on election night 1980. This actually happened, part of the victory party at the Washington Hilton, young Republican males doing a peculiar victory jig that involved crouching over, gritting their teeth, pounding their fists into their palms and barking, "We're gonna turn this country AROUND. We're gonna change this COUNTRY."

A new breed had arrived in Washington. These were not the aggrieved, shaggy and intense young men in faded Levis, loafers and tweed sport coats who together with young women wearing Nikons as fashion accessories had been what cultural historians call the "modal personalities" of every fund-raiser, book-signing and wine-and-cheese party in Washington during the 1970s. (Remember wine and cheese, those sacraments of liberalism?)

No, these were young conservatives, guys in university-shop neckties and the kind of fresh haircuts you got from a barber, not a hair stylist, guys with a kind of expectant glare to their eyes, like fraternity boys watching a practical joke about to happen, a balloon full of water about to fall on some creepy kid's family car during parents' weekend . . . guys who looked like Dan Quayle, come to think of it.

"We're gonna turn this country AROUND . . ."

And of course they did, burning with their extremely manifest destiny while dinner-party journalists and trust-fund environmentalists fiddled away, as if their elegant ironies, along with a caravan of special interest groups, would win the White House back for them.

Yes, there was much turning around. Consider not just the Russians pulling out of Afghanistan or the fact that you're now allowed to be proud of having fought in Vietnam, but the fact that the palm-pounders did get government off our backs with a tax cut and deregulation. Once off our backs, however, government headed straight for our pockets. Free enterprise did not mean free lunch, unless you ran a savings and loan, in which case you left the taxpayers with a bill that's starting to push a quarter of a T-for-trillion dollars. The Laffer curve straightened out nothing, particularly the scales on which the budget was supposed to be balanced.

Never mind. The palm-pounders turned this country around so far that the shaggy-aggrieved-Levi-loafer crowd is actually afraid of Dan Quayle, and believes he has such power that it has to make fun of him at every opportunity, lest the electorate take him seriously. A vice president! Dan Quayle! Power!

This is serious.

But not quite as serious as things were a decade ago, with inflation, recession, the lingering nightmare of hour-long lines to buy a tank of gas, commies romping and stomping from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, a canceled Olympics for the American team and, worst of all, the American Embassy hostages in Iran. What a humiliation! The hostage thing was so bad that for the first and probably last time, ordinary American citizens felt sympathy toward people who worked for the State Department.

But then America turned from Malaiseville into Reagan Country. Nobody ever said the ayatollah was stupid, and he let the hostages go before Reagan could get on the phone to the Pentagon after the inauguration in 1981. It seemed like such a triumph at the time, which shows you how bad national morale was. Imagine people being proud to wear buttons that said: "I WAS IN WASHINGTON D.C. WHEN THE HOSTAGES WERE RELEASED." It bespoke about as much glory as a button saying you'd been there when your country surrendered on favorable terms.

On the other hand, bless those people: It wasn't much, but it was the only triumph we had, the stone soup of patriotism. We actually had a parade for the hostages. People wrapped themselves in the flag to watch it. Ordinary people. Women who were dismissed as "little old ladies in tennis shoes" when they supported Goldwater in 1964. People who were tired of being told they were stupid redneck racist silent-majority outside-the-Beltway Peoria-nobody losers who were to blame for every starving child, unhappy housewife and right-wing dictator in the world.

These people may have known that the palm-pounders couldn't wait to trash most of the stuff the Democrats had spent decades giving them, from Social Security to support for labor unions, but voting for Reagan was worth the risk if they could feel proud of themselves again.

In Washington, of course, it doesn't matter all that much how the rest of the country feels. Ad- ministrations come and go, and we get richer -- note, for instance, that between Carter and Reagan we had 12 straight years of presidents who ran against Wash- ington, and we seem to have survived quite nicely, thank you.

It is this knowledge that gives the faces of the Washington establishment their peculiar look -- demure and modest enough to avoid the taxpayers' censure, but also the look of people who have learned they don't really have to listen to anyone, not even to each other. The trick is to look fiercely earnest but utterly calm at the same time, to have a face that says no more or less than: "I take your desire to be taken seriously seriously," while you ignore whatever is being said in order to think of something clever to say in hopes of being taken seriously yourself.

This is a vision of hell, of course, but that's where you meet the most amusing people.

Ah, that hair pulled back from women's furrowed brows! Oh, the ambassador's cigar! Mmmmm, the elder statesman pondering the amusing fact that so few people at the party understood he had absolutely nothing better to do than to be here! Or were they only pretending, knowing that they too had nothing better to do than be here. These people will always be here. Rather like the economist's parable of the town where everyone has a job doing everyone else's laundry, this is a town where everyone becomes important by going to everyone else's parties.

Some things change. One does not smoke cigars anymore, which means that there is no longer a need for those huge potted plants to flick the ashes in, either. But one still senses, as we sensed in the early '80s, that something has been lost, something we thought we'd found for a while in the early '60s. Could it come back? Wait! Is that a knock on the door? Is it Camelot stopping by for a nightcap? Is that you, McGeorge? Dean? Walt? Pierre?

Meanwhile, "outside in the cold distance," as Bob Dylan once put it, the homeless were on view. Where did they come from? Why? Was it the recession? Was it alcoholism, drugs or the fact that, thanks to liberation-minded lawyers starting in the 1960s, we'd been clearing out mental hospitals the way English landlords used to clear the peasants off their land -- which is to say, in the name of progress?

The homeless were the ghosts haunting our prosperity, a sort of Greek chorus for the tragedy of an America that believed it not only could but should make public life look just as right, bright and tight as Disneyland. They were a horrible suggestion -- just as Reagan was railing about the Evil Empire of Communism -- that Pravda might be right about American capitalism.

With every bad cold snap, we began to dread the morning news and its death count from parks and alleys. We saw a revival of the beggars' guilds of the Middle Ages. Just as those guilds had once demanded tribute from burghers and nobles, Mitch Snyder led Washington's homeless in demonstrations to demand food, clothing, housing and the right to sleep in subway entrances. They acquired such legitimacy that movie stars camped out with them on heating grates.

By the end of the decade, the homeless had lost some visibility. The new horror of AIDS had taken center stage. The homeless had gotten a little food and shelter, and they had gotten a lot of the sympathy they were going to get. Their natural patron and ally, the Democratic Party, decided it had to spend less time appealing to special interest groups and more to Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch USA if a Democrat is ever to find a home in the White House again.

Like so much of life and politics in Washington, it was all a question of telling the difference between the problems and the solutions. As with organized special interests, this was not always easy.

Consider Mayor Marion Barry. In 1984, he had his critics, but he was still part of the solution, a model for black youth, leading the neglected and the downtrodden toward a bright future of pride and urban revival. And even if he didn't shovel the snow very well, he picked up the garbage and patched the streets, which is more than most mayors do. But as the '90s grew near, he had turned into the problem.

As his wife once said, he was a "street dude," and much as we'd believed that the no-bull, down-home vigor of street dudes would solve the problems of the cities during the heyday of black power (when Barry made his name as a political activist), we would come to associate street dudes with drive-by shootings and drugs. The words "drug use" and "Marion Barry" kept appearing in the same sentences.

Barry got booed at a street festival in Adams-Morgan, and at RFK Stadium during a Redskins game. His smile got smaller and shakier. His face went sour with frustration. We'd seen the same look on Lyndon Johnson's face in 1968, just before Richard Nixon moved into the White House. Barring a miracle, as they say, his time was gone.

It was too bad. Not only did downtown Washington have problems, it had competition, like every other major urban area in America. Much as General Motors ignored Toyota 20 years ago, civic leaders and other D.C. burgher-kings ignored the competition, until they noticed people driving out of the city to White Flint or Landover Mall to go shopping and started hearing that an ex-pasture called Tysons Corner now had more office space than downtown Miami or Seattle. So strange, going out of the city to work or shop . . . but wait a second, was it possible that these things were new cities in themselves?

The news came as such a blow to all those people who'd chosen the hippest college majors of the '60s and '70s -- city planning and ecology. They knew all about preservation and mass transit. They knew we had to end the selfish, smog-pumping lone-cowboy fantasy of the American love affair with the automobile. They knew that the malls and new cities were tacky, soulless, opportunistic and hideously commercial. But when have such things ever bothered the American public, particularly when there's plenty of free parking?

A similarly tacky lone-cowboy fantasy found its avatar in Oliver North, a lieutenant colonel who instead of leading teenagers up firebreaks at Camp Pendleton, Calif., was running American foreign policy, selling guns to Iranians to buy guns for Nicaraguans and free hostages who didn't get freed. And nobody knew! Was Ollie saving it all as a surprise for the president's birthday? Word got out in 1986.

In the summer of 1987 Congress put him on television and made him a national hero. It didn't mean to, but it did. Who would have guessed that his polemics about patriotism and fatherhood would play better than congressmen and journalists whining about contradictions and nitpicking about legalities?

Where Ollie ran into trouble was at his trial. Instead of a bunch of media/political types judging him, he had a jury. They were real people. Some of them had never heard of him, or didn't care about him if they had. How reassuring to know that such people existed! They found him guilty, and the judge was smart enough to sentence him to community service, rather than send him to jail and make a martyr of him.

Besides, by that time, Ollie's lone-cowboy fight against the Evil Empire was looking quaint. The cold war was over. If you had to pick one moment when it ended, it might be as early as December 10, 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev stopped on his way to the summit talks and took a stroll at Connecticut and L. He straightened his tie, put on the best political smile seen in America since John Kennedy and started shaking hands. Terrific. He had that rare gift of persuading people that not only was he on their side but they were on his side, they were all in on it together. He was the kind of politician who leaves you staring at your hand after he's shaken it.

He became the most interesting man in the world. He had wild, nearly magical powers to incite screams, even rioting wherever he went. He turned Beijing into a mass demonstration that ended after he left with the old hard-liners opening up with machine guns. East Berliners chanted his name, and soon they were tearing down the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, he also presided over an economy in which salt and soap were being rationed by the end of the decade, and there was every chance he wouldn't last. Ah, but if he did, he'd be up there with Peter the Great as a man who singlehandedly wrenched Russia out of the past. Not to mention Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland . . . Even Benin announced it was no longer a Marxist country. A group of the sort of people who sign advertisements in the New York Times signed one suggesting Fidel Castro might consider that after 30 years of Cuban democracy, fine as it was (ah, those health and literacy statistics!), he might even improve things by holding an election.

Which would have the honor of being the last communist nation? Nicaragua? Albania? If the People's Electrical Collective makes its quota, will the last Communist to leave the tunnel please turn out the light at the end of it?

Perhaps someday we might no longer see those television reporters standing amid squalor and the sound of gunfire, saying: "Soon, the men in uniform will be back at their headquarters, but for the people who live here, the war goes on."

The reporters could be saying it in El Salvador, Peru, Angola, Israel or, by 1988, in Washington, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit . . . anyplace where money came together with illegal drugs in a combination that strewed the nation with thousands of corpses. Sometimes it was a little kid or an old lady who got caught in the cross-fire, and then people shook their heads and swore at the television, but all too often the reporter would absolve us of our callousness by uttering the ritual words: "Police described the shootings as drug-related." Then people didn't care as much. It was like Mafiosi dumping each other in the Hudson River.

The carnage got blamed on greed, poverty, frustration, racism, single-parent families, lack of job training, Republican Get-Mine-ism, Democratic If-It-Feels-Good-Do-It-ism, slums, the clearance of slums, the presence of the Mafia, the lack of a mafia keeping an orderly market, the National Rifle Association's opposition to gun controls, white flight to middle-class suburbs, black flight to middle-class suburbs, homelessness, violence on television, decay of rundown neighborhoods, gentrification of rundown neighborhoods . . .

When you got down to it, though, usually it involved one or more pieces of metal, a quarter to half an inch wide, moving through the air at 800 to 3,000 feet per second until blocked by between 50 and 300 pounds of human flesh whose temperature declined from 98.6 to room. It made you feel bad. Then it made you feel bad that it didn't make you feel so bad anymore.

What made you feel a little better was a thrill of hope, a weary America quietly rejoicing when it turned out that white people would vote for Jesse Jackson in presidential primaries, for David Dinkins as mayor of New York. And Virginia -- Virginia! The Old Dominion! "Fergit, hell!" Stars and Bars flying from the pickup-truck aerial! Cradle of the Confederacy! (Or was that South Carolina?) -- elected Douglas Wilder governor. Happily for him and his supporters, he had Marshall Coleman to run against, a Republican of the soulless, palm-pounding new breed.

Photographs of a decade. It's interesting: When you go back through the files, picking out the images that evoke the spirit of 10 years of Washington life, you find the reality of chemically fixed light turning into the melodrama of symbols, icons, fantasies, nightmares and dreams, and then back again to the grittiness, preposterousness and purity of reality.

Dreams or realities -- either way you want it, these images get the job done. But if the camera doesn't lie, truth must be very complicated indeed.

Henry Allen writes for The Post's Style section.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.