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| Daddy Issues |
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| Ronald Reagan |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, June 09, 2004. I don’t like drop-kicking the dead. But the reverence with which Ronald Reagan is being escorted to Parnassus is revolting by any standard. Since I started on KGNU in 1981, I’ve said that Ronald Reagan is not just the stupidest person who ever lived in the White House, he’s one of the stupidest to ever see it. There is ample reason to think he was insane, if living and saying complete nonsense is any indication. For example, he said he had assisted personally the liberation of the Nazi death camps. During the war, Ronald Reagan made movies in Culver City, and he made it home every night to be with his first wife. Reagan was a posturing liar and fraud; would that his example hadn’t influenced so many. And, if he wasn’t a liar and a fraud, he was insane. My deep lack of respect for Reagan has little enough to do with him and much to do with the very small, venal, and unqualified Sun Belt thieves and petty thugs, most in the defense industry, he elevated to a prominence under his gossamer of movie star glamour. Liberals and moderates are hard put to formulate an understanding of how such an apparent moron could get elected, transparently and incoherently lie, financially kick the working class in the stomach, and be so popular with them at the same time. It’s not that hard. In 1980, when Reagan took office, John Wayne had only been dead a few years, Vietnam was still an embarrassment and wound, and Jimmy Carter had proven too naïve to be President. Reagan had no great idea or policy. Instead, he appealed to the generations that deeply believed in the myths of our nation, of the Horatio Alger stories of bootstraps firmly gripped and lifted, of fictional homes of hearth and family and the deep bonds of friendship. He said we were special, he saw it in us, and who could argue? Reagan was, in fact, the epitome of the angry child of alcoholism. His father was a noted drunk, his mother a shrill scold, and the spongy distances he put between himself and others to his death reflect a child who had to imagine other things than that which surrounded him. It made him a good actor. Liberals have taken a perverse delight in calling Reagan a crappy actor, but Gore Vidal, who is very liberal and has written many movies and acted in a few, says bunkum. Ronald Reagan was a good actor. In fact, it was this great acting skill that made Reagan one of the best speech givers of the last two hundred years. Reagan knew a great turn of phrase when he heard it, and although he wrote precious little himself, he knew what worked for him. It didn’t work for me. Except for his shining city on a hill, and his elevating speech about Barry Goldwater in 1964, Reagan’s alleged rhetorical magic was a mystery to me. His speech about how his heart told him he hadn’t committed treason and traded weapons for hostages and used the proceeds to buy guns for armies against the will of Congress, but that the facts suggest otherwise, should have propelled him into the dock or at least impeachment right there. But people ate it up as it ate up his demented and senile story-telling during debates with Mondale. In Reagan’s eyes, ballistic missiles could be recalled, names of nation’s leaders weren’t important, trickle down makes sense, and that Edwin Meese – who professed not to know a $15k interest free loan to himself might be considered something of value and that putting the family of the lender on the federal payroll was unseemly – that Edwin Meese was not only a bad Attorney General but a borderline thug himself. He thought it made sense to build Star Wars and share it with the Soviets, revealing a deep understanding of technology transfer and the Soviets all at once. Reagan thought trees polluted, James Watt human, ketchup a vegetable, AIDS was divine punishment, and the End Time was near. He was a divorced man with alienated children lauded by creatures of Family Values his own popularity elevated. He was a noted Hollywood bore who had few if any friends. But Reagan was Daddy to a nation of men and women with Daddy issues. He was the face on the memory of being tucked in and read a story by an actual father dead in one of the three horrible wars since Roosevelt. He assured us that things were going to be all right, and that our nation was not only important but something of which to be proud and glad, and when we wake up we’ll feel better and it will be better. He mostly believed his own blarney, and insane or not, we did feel better for experiencing it. It was positive thinking taken to the armed border with Cloud Cukooland, where it may have engaged in illegal trade. At the public’s request, the Special Prosecutor – and there were lots in his administration – declined to proceed. |
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