It is the centenary of Reagan's virgin birth in a manger back in the old West, where the bed of straw converted into pure gold upon his entrance into our fallen world.
That sentimental crooner, Alexander Cockburn, turns back the hands of time to those thrilling days of yesteryear.
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 tortured 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 I can think of is the hysteria over Princess Di.
And Di at least wanted to ban landmines, evincing an awareness of the real-life toll of war and lower intensity conflicts that for Reagan were fuddled together with the winning of WWII on the studio backlots.
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.
Of course the rhetorical steroid pump-up of Reagan as "the greatest president of the 20th century" by conservatives is winged to their primary mission to devalue and demote the legacy and reputation of the president truly deserving of that title, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each time they shine the sun brighter on Reagan, their intent is to wheel FDR deeper into the Gipper's shadow. I await the day when Glenn Beck tells us how Reagan defeated Hitler, unless he already has documented that on his chalkboard--I'm a little behind in my lunatic viewing.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/02/reagan-reagan-reagan--that-was-the.html
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