Reagan era

The Reagan era enters the novel as both a prediction and a developing political reality. In conversation with Zoyd Wheeler, Mucho Maas imagines a successor to the Nixon era in which the state will regulate not only drugs but pleasure itself; later, anti-drug politics become a vehicle for Hollywood ambition and electoral rhetoric, while REX 84 gives the era a machinery of covert action. The movement from joking forecast to military mobilization makes the period feel less like a clean historical boundary than an intensification of powers already taking shape.

From the Nixon Era to a Forecast of Control

Mucho places the Reagan era in a sequence: the Nixon era is the present, and Reagan’s is the coming age. The exchange follows Zoyd Wheeler’s account of a brief, educational detention in a federal prison after Hector Zuñiga tried to entrap him. Mucho’s warning therefore grows out of a concrete encounter with federal authority, even as its broadest claims take on the comic scale of prophecy. Zoyd doubts that Reagan will ever become president; Mucho insists that caution will soon be necessary.

The imagined future extends far beyond the prohibition of drugs. Mucho predicts restrictions on beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, and fats, describing a state intent on controlling anything that gives the senses even modest pleasure. His inventory then veers into comic fantasies of anti-cookie and anti-perfume units, anti-television and anti-music policing, and even a department charged with regulating bodily functions. The joke depends on escalation: once control is understood as an appetite of government rather than a response to one particular danger, no private pleasure appears safely outside its reach. Mucho’s absurd examples make the forecast funny, but the federal detention that prompts it gives the humor a harder edge.

Anti-Drug Politics and Hollywood

The era also appears through a film deal built around the War on Drugs. Sid Liftoff and Ernie Triggerman agree to make an anti-drug picture with Hector Zuñiga, who secures the title he wants. The project is announced just as fear of a grand jury is nearing its peak, and its publicity gives the pair renewed standing in Hollywood. Skywriters send celebratory slogans over Sherman Oaks, only for guerrillas to add an S to the word DRUG, reversing the patriotic message into a declaration that drugs liberate America. The sky becomes a space where official promotion and counter-speech contest the same words.

The campaign quickly travels beyond publicity. After Reagan’s men hear of the arrangement, Sid and Ernie’s names begin appearing in campaign speeches. A candidate invokes them as examples of the kind of Hollywood figures who, had there been more of them in an earlier period, might have left fewer communists in the unions and made his present task easier. The passage links contemporary anti-drug campaigning to the older politics of anti-communism and union purges: the film is not simply entertainment, but a credential in a political story about who should be excluded from cultural institutions.

That story is contested. Veterans of the film industry’s left-wing unions denounce Sid and Ernie as strikebreakers, Nazi collaborators, and useful instruments of neo-McCarthyism. Their accusations do not stop the production. The pair press on, convinced that the film may protect them from the approaching darkness, while the city watches with a mixture of unease and cruel amusement. Yet the production remains curiously undefined: crews assemble, hotel rooms are reserved, postdated checks are issued, and weather reports are consulted, although no one knows what kind of film is actually being made. Hector says its strength will be Frenesi Gates, who is in Las Vegas working as a waitress and knows nothing of the commotion gathering around her name. The era’s political image-making thus puts a real person at the center of a project she has not even been told about.

REX 84 and Executive Power

The more coercive dimension of the Reagan era comes into view through REX 84, identified as an exercise associated with Reagan’s preparation and linked to Brock Vond’s operation. When Flash pressures Roy Ibble, the agent admits that he does not know what Vond is planning; the only connection he can identify is to the exercise. He shows Flash a teletype report concerning Flash and Frenesi, but uncertainty about the plan does not prevent the machinery from implicating them. The episode makes secrecy consequential even where its participants lack a full account of what is underway.

The operation’s status is especially troubling because its concealed contents can be denied. When Reagan officially ends REX 84, the order also ends everything kept silent and undocumented within its cover. Tents are to be struck, convoys returned to their bases, action teams demobilized, and personnel assigned to special units sent back to ordinary posts. Vond loses his authorizations. The exercise has functioned as an administrative envelope for action that can remain unrecorded and deniable, while its termination demonstrates how much depends on executive authorization.

The Recall of Brock Vond

The shutdown reaches Vond while he is still in the helicopter. He protests and waves in his harness, but his remote control no longer works: Roscoe has taken command at the main control panel. On the return flight to Vineland Airport, Roscoe counsels patience and obedience while Vond insists that their opponents are acting together and that they cannot be allowed to escape. The change in command turns the end of the exercise into a direct reversal of Vond’s immediate power. He is not persuaded to stand down; he is physically carried away from the operation as his authority is withdrawn.

This ending gives the era a double image. Mucho’s predicted control expands toward the smallest pleasures, while REX 84 reveals the more specific reach of emergency organization: special units, concealed plans, and powers that can be switched off by command. The recall does not establish that every underlying capacity has disappeared; the evidence shows orders to demobilize and Vond’s removal, not a permanent dismantling of the apparatus. The Reagan era is therefore marked both by the extraordinary scope imagined for state control and by the instability of the authority that activates it.