Re: [blind-democracy] Re: The Cult of the Reagans

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@freelists.org> 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@freelists.org
> 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 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.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>