As you know, I keep reading non fiction books, many about history, many
about current events. Just now, I'm reading Operation Troy which is Scot
Shane's book about Amwar alar Alaki, or however, his name is spelled, the
American Muslim cleric whom Obama executed by drone. I've read articles
before, and then an account of the incident in Dirty Wars. Now, here's an
even more detailed book. My conclusion is that history, as we read it, is
only an approximation of reality told from the perspective of the person who
reports it, even when that person is as thorough an honest, as possible.
There are always these extraneous facts, these surmises, hypotheses,
theories. The story of this man is a lot more complicated than appears on
the surface.
Miriam .
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2016 10:43 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Cult of the Reagans
On 3/24/16, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So here's a good example of the shaping of history for the purpose of
serving the current Ruling Class. The question is not whether you
loved the glitter and gilding that was Ronnie and Nancy, or whether
you bought hook line and sinker the Reagan approach to government, or
whether you believe that Ronald Reagan was a major player in moving
our American democracy toward that of an Oligarchy.
(Oligarchy: a form of government in which all power is vested in a few
persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.) The
question is whether or not we can trust our historians to accurately
present events in an open forum and in a way that the students of
history are able to come to their own conclusions, rather than those
of the writer.
I grew up in a world that still worshiped Kings and Royalty, and
Captains of Industry, and Generals and the Great Wars of history. The
backbone of America, the Working Class was barely mentioned in the
books I learned my history from. Some mention of the brave explorers
and pioneers, but little was mentioned regarding the events that drove
these people out into the Wilderness.
Howard Zinn does as fine a job as I've read, in putting together his
report of American history in, A People's History of the United
States.
But even so, Zinn's work should be read with an open mind, exploring
rather than taking as Gospel.
So called historians who simply pander to the current Ruling Class, do
serious students a major disservice by attempting to precondition the
student's thinking.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/24/16, Charles Krugman <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
definitely an accurate portrayal of Reagan as well as Nancy. I wonder
if Donald Trump studied Reagan at all as they're not much different.
Chuck
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2016 6:45 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Cult of the Reagans
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 Reagans
General Electric Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the
best blowjobs in Hollywood.
Its 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 Reagans birth. JSC he
script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging:
with
the Gippers 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 Reagans 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 studios 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.
Shed seen Ronnies 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 heros 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 didnt really care that
hed 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, Ive 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 Id told you. He went one better than
George Washington in that he couldnt tell a lie and he couldnt tell
the truth, since he couldnt 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 Readers 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.
Reagans 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 youve seen one
redwood, youve seen them all. That Zen koan-like pronouncement
pretty much summed up Reagans 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 Watts 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 Reagans 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 couldnt 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. Reagans sons, Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or
not his Alzheimers 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 Unions 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 Reagans crude attacks on welfare queens
to Clintons compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as
RRs) as he swore to end welfare as we know it. As a PR man, it was
Reagans 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 Reagans
General Electric Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the
best blowjobs in Hollywood.
Its 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 Reagans birth. JSC he
script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging:
with
the Gippers 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 Reagans 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 studios 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.
Shed seen Ronnies 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 heros 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 didnt really care that
hed 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, Ive 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 Id told you. He went one better than
George Washington in that he couldnt tell a lie and he couldnt tell
the truth, since he couldnt 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 Readers 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.
Reagans 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 youve seen one
redwood, youve seen them all. That Zen koan-like pronouncement
pretty much summed up Reagans 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 Watts 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 Reagans 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 couldnt 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. Reagans sons, Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or
not his Alzheimers 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 Unions 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 Reagans crude attacks on welfare queens
to Clintons compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as
RRs) as he swore to end welfare as we know it. As a PR man, it was
Reagans 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
