When the expression, "Plastic People" came into being, describing
those people who had no real depth to them, I always had a mental
picture of the great "B" actor, Ronald Reagan in mind.
While I must admit, I had no idea the Gippers Brain had deteriorated
to the point of being challenged by basic information, I still knew
that he was all front with nothing behind that familiar face. I will
have to admit that Ronald Reagan did his Handlers good, playing the
part of President of the United States of America with more ability
than he ever showed in his "also ran" movies. He gained popularity
by hosting the Death Valley Days, a popular TV show of the day. "At
General Electric, Progress is Our Most Important Product", became his
most often spoken line. And he had it down pat, proving to the Ruling
Class that he could be a very manageable shill.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/20/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Obama has cited Reagan's greatness. Hillary praised Nancy the other day,
apparently telling an untruth which she had to walk back.
Miriam
Excerpt: "The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he 'ended
the Cold War'. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's sclerotic
economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president."
Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
The Cult of the Reagans
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
20 March 16
The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan’s General Electric
Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
Hollywood.
It’s one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
wrote
on the centenary of Reagan’s birth. –JSC
he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
the Gipper’s straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
terms,
Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
vigor
of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
Staff
mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
launch-pads,
with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
Reagan’s brain, most of them to the effect that “we need more money”. The
president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
fiction
in the early 1940s when his studio’s PR department turned him into a war
hero, courtesy of his labors in “Fort Wacky” in Culver City, where they
made
training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.’s first wife,
Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.’s hatred of the foe.
“She’d seen Ronnie’s sick face,” Modern Screen reported in 1942, “bent over
a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
Poland. ‘This,’ said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, ‘would make it
a pleasure to kill.’” A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
“hero’s” garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
decides
to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
for
Reagan on those chilly grounds.
The problem for the press was that Reagan didn’t really care that he’d been
caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
Iran/contra
scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
of UPI, “I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
happened. And so far, I’ve told you all that I know and, you know, the
truth
of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I’d told
you.” He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn’t tell a
lie and he couldn’t tell the truth, since he couldn’t tell the difference
between the two.
His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
magazines (the origin of “Star Wars”, aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader’s Digest and the Sunday
supplements.
Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
being
the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the “free market,”
with
whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
right
around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
once
said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
Reagan’s view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
his infamous declaration: “Once you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them
all.” That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan’s
philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
photo-ops,
just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
series
that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
politician.
To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
Mountain
States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as “The Colorado
Crazies.” Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
These
thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
Watt’s message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
kindly,
avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
so
profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
blink
and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
tormented Tantalus.
It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan’s casket. How could any of
them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
hysteria over Princess Di.
The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
thus: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and ‘slipped
the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’.”
In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
presidential
greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
through
a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
bed. He couldn’t recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan’s sons,
Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer’s began when he
was president. “Normalcy” and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
As an orator or “communicator” Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
artifice was terribly limited.
The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he “ended the Cold War”.
He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union’s sclerotic economy having
doomed it long before Reagan became president.
He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
It was a straight line from Reagan’s crude attacks on welfare queens to
Clinton’s compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR’s) as he
swore to “end welfare as we know it”. As a PR man, it was Reagan’s role, to
reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
on
their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
malign.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/http://www.co
unterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/
The Cult of the Reagans
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch
20 March 16
The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up girl
for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack actor Peter
Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagan’s General Electric
Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best blowjobs in
Hollywood.
It’s one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who saw
herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan years,
an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the manufactured
history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander Cockburn and I
wrote
on the centenary of Reagan’s birth. –JSC
he script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging: with
the Gipper’s straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style
the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering
terms,
Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American
national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the
vigor
of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of
concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of
Staff
mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with
simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan
found these briefings much too complicated and dozed off.
The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The
balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with
Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
launch-pads,
with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon
bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into
Reagan’s brain, most of them to the effect that “we need more money”. The
president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
fiction
in the early 1940s when his studio’s PR department turned him into a war
hero, courtesy of his labors in “Fort Wacky” in Culver City, where they
made
training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.’s first wife,
Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.’s hatred of the foe.
“She’d seen Ronnie’s sick face,” Modern Screen reported in 1942, “bent over
a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
Poland. ‘This,’ said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, ‘would make it
a pleasure to kill.’” A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that,
unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in
“hero’s” garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in
full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death
camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to bestow
presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final
resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan
possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to
the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley ever
decides
to disgorge his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph
for
Reagan on those chilly grounds.
The problem for the press was that Reagan didn’t really care that he’d been
caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth,
for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the
Iran/contra
scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas
of UPI, “I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has
happened. And so far, I’ve told you all that I know and, you know, the
truth
of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I’d told
you.” He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn’t tell a
lie and he couldn’t tell the truth, since he couldn’t tell the difference
between the two.
His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
magazines (the origin of “Star Wars”, aka the Strategic Defense Initiative)
lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader’s Digest and the Sunday
supplements.
Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
being
the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the “free market,”
with
whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
right
around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a
school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle
once
said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
Reagan’s view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was governor
of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him into making
his infamous declaration: “Once you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them
all.” That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan’s
philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis
that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For
Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for
photo-ops,
just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV
series
that served as a catwalk for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national
politician.
To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his Interior
Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the planet seethed
with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of
libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Adolf Coors-funded
Mountain
States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as “The Colorado
Crazies.” Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were
transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal
prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in
public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic
scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
These
thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized
welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and
obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind soft,
made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions,
ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James
Watt’s message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so.
Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the
experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
kindly,
avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference
to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
so
profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest
circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a TV set on the
blink
and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that
tormented Tantalus.
It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people
sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan’s casket. How could any of
them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it was the
hysteria over Princess Di.
The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that
was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation
thus: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and ‘slipped
the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’.”
In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her
companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event
required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his
head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his
spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a
presidential
greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning
launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the
Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
through
a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
bed. He couldn’t recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog.
Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from
time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Reagan’s sons,
Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer’s began when he
was president. “Normalcy” and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The
official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.
As an orator or “communicator” Reagan was terrible, with one turgid cliché
following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical
artifice was terribly limited.
The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and
his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he “ended the Cold War”.
He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union’s sclerotic economy having
doomed it long before Reagan became president.
He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided
over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after
the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of
triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position.
It was a straight line from Reagan’s crude attacks on welfare queens to
Clinton’s compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR’s) as he
swore to “end welfare as we know it”. As a PR man, it was Reagan’s role, to
reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was
on
their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly
malign.
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http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
