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The Cult of the Reagans
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35853-the-cult-of-the-reagansReagan 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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