Here You Come Again, And There I Go
In case any clarification is necessary in re. my post from yesterday (which is been helpfully linked elsewhere, ensuring that I'll be having oodles of fun reading e-mail and comments in the coming days), I have a real problem with (a) people who are two-faced, and (b) people who have the power to help others and do nothing with it. That's Reagan all over. Behind the scenes he was transforming the economic landscape to give amazing gifts to the wealthy (who have since decided that they have no obligation to give anything back to the workforce on their own, ostensibly the point of trickle-down theory), but on the surface he was always all effusive warmth. People didn't realize for a moment that he could knowingly be hurting people, but that's exactly what he was doing. And he got away with it every single day of his Presidency.
He made us all feel good about ourselves and our country, even dumb little kids like me. And it was all a lie--that lovable man was one of the most manipulative, dishonest people ever to hold the national stage. He used patriotism and piety as cynical ploys to win sympathy--and there was, you know, a time before that was commonly done.
Some may think that the day of his death was an inappropriate time for me to say so. I think it's the most appropriate time, to counter the insane deification going on in the popular press right now. Do we not remember what happened when Nixon died? It was difficult to tell from anyone's public comments that he had been anything less than a model President. Well, I'm pretty confident that history's going to weigh in a little closer to my side of the story.
The only reason I might have considered being more polite would be to spare the feelings of the family. But Reagan's surviving immediate family members, four of five of whom (Michael excepted) have proven to be fundamentally decent people, almost certainly aren't going to be seeing this, so fuck it. The rest of you hysterics can just get lives.
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I believe Brad and Michael have said what needs to be said on the passing of Ronald Wilson Reagan. There... Read More
Liberals, conservatives, libertarians and others can disagree vehemently on just about everything on which reasonable people can disagree, and then some. Often discussions get heated, partisans bear their teeth, and it becomes exceedingly difficult to... Read More
The late President Ronald Reagan is being remembered as prophetic for his views that the Soviet empire would collapse upon its own weight. He was also prophetic in a 1980 debate against Jimmy Carter: While campaigning against Carter, whose term... Read More
The faux reverence for dead politicians annoys me. I made my own post about RR's passing this morning. No one in my lifetime did more to link the Christian Right to the Republican Party.
I didn't hate him but I sure won't miss him.
(This would've been my first time using my TypeKey ID but the delay was just intolerable.)
And now we have George Bush and the rest of the radical right-wing Republicans fighting the research into Alzheimer's (which contributed to Reagan's death) and diabetes and other diseases.
Seems fitting in a macabre sort of way, doesn't it?
I personally think he was a miserable son of a bitch and don't feel inclined at all to spare anyone's feelings on that point. Throughout his presidency he was the consummate actor, which is a) amazing since he was so bad at it in Hollywood and b) why so many people were fished in. I'm just sorry he didn't die sooner, like back in 1981.