- The best commentary I have read on the death of Ronald
Reagan came from Christopher Hitchens at Slate: http://slate.msn.com/id/2101842/
I liked it for two reasons: 1. Hitchens makes a point I like to make to
many people with simple minded political opinions about "the need
of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing
that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power..." and; 2. He
identifies Reagan as "a cruel and stupid lizard." I don't know
if Hitchens consciously invoked David Icke's imagery of world political
leadership as shape-shifting reptilians, but the reference does reinforce
Icke's over-arching theme that such leadership is never what it seems.
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- I would have been more generous about Ronald Reagan.
I think he was funny and charming, only moreso because he was so disconnected
from the actual parapolitical reality of his administration. One TV news
feature tried to make the point that the true Ronald Reagan was inaccessible
even to his wife Nancy, that he kept some deep inner core always to himself.
This was a stretch, of course, to fill the 24/7 television time devoted
to Reagan until after his state funeral. Most viewers know he was a shallow
Hollywood guy as was often parodied. Self-professed shallow, in fact, in
that he trumpeted an administrative style that supposedly provided broadstroke
values while letting bureaucrats execute the details.
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- Americans like a good show and Reagan gave them one.
He was affable and articulate and he presented a picture of the country
that it really wanted. But the October Surprise brought him to office,
a deal made with Ayatollah Khomeini to hold on to the famed 52 American
hostages until Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 election. The pay-off for delivering
that ransom-an opportunity to illegally profiteer from the super-surveillance
PROMIS software-went to a man whose name Reagan conceivably didn't know.
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- The sleeping-with-the-enemy pattern it established
led to the Iran-Contra deals, the US/CIA build-up of Saddam Hussein and
the pre-al-Qaeda mujahadeen, on up to the present awful time of reckoning
America now confronts.
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- Reagan's motorcade delayed the arrival of the doctor
when my daughter was born. My then wife considers it the only favor he
ever did for her, since she chose to have the baby using the non-interventionist
Bradley method. Somehow Tim Leary got thrown in jail just before his gubernatorial
campaign in California could compete with Reagan's. Leary took it as a
great opportunity for a break from public life and a chance to work on
what turned out to be his greatest writings.
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- Governor Reagan refused to extradite Edgar Eugene
Bradley from California when Jim Garrison sought to prosecute him for involvement
in JFK's murder. It helped cause Garrison to lose the case against the
other defendant, Clay Shaw, but Garrison went on to be more-or-less vindicated
in the popular culture and became a great folk hero to many people.
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- I feel very sad for Nancy Reagan. They were a couple
that lived in a little bubble and I am sure their relationship was more
real than anything they supposedly believed in or restored to American
culture, like limited government. Americans had to wait for Dubya to look
at spending deficits as big as Reagan's. And I feel very sad for Americans
shedding tears now for the Gipper, made more poignant by the contrast between
the feel-good image he transmitted and the hell wrought by the same men
who used him as what Bob Dylan called "a front man for a diseased
cause."
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- The new issue of Steamshovel Press is here. Copies
would be ready to ship Friday if the post offices weren't closed for Reagan's
funeral!
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