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United States News Title: New John Dolan Article: Reagan’s Cheshire Snarl February 5, 2011 New John Dolan Article: Reagan’s Cheshire Snarl By John Dolan I’ve had Reagan all my life. In 1967, 13 years before the rest of you got President Reagan, he became governor of California. It was the terrarium in which Reagan’s tinkerers figured out how to stimulate the beasts in the tract houses to hatred and bathos, the tools with which they ruled and destroyed the nation. Nixon usually gets the blame for that, but I’ve always found Nixon a rather sympathetic figure: wretched, ugly, and without much malice for either the forests or the ordinary American. Nixon didn’t even share the worship of “business” forced on us all in Reagan’s reign. Nixon’s dreams were old-fashioned Soviet machinations, full of maps and coups; he was willing enough to toss the rest of us a few bones if we’d let him play with his schemes undisturbed. And some of the bones he tossed us were rather significant. It was Nixon who created the EPA and OSHA. Reagan would have strangled both in the cradle. Reagan did it often enough once he had power, in a thousand blunt, cruel mandates that no one ever mentions. The one I always remember is one of the more trivial: he vetoed the airbag requirement Carter planned to introduce for all 1980 cars sold in the US. Everyone who died in a head-on crash during the next decade can thank Reagan. And you know, they probably would thank him. There is no end to the groveling masochism of this nation where Reagan is concerned. All his victims love him. No wonder the checkers at Safeway wear nose rings; they belong to the world’s biggest submissive website, “Reagan’s Slaves: Real Submissives, Live 24/7.” Before Reagan they would have had decent blue-collar jobs—there really were such things back then—and bought a house of their own. Now they share garage apartments with the scum of the earth and are saving up for a car that runs. That’s why it always shocks me when I see another manifestation of the consensus view that Nixon was the evil Republican. I just saw a Futurama episode with Nixon’s head in a jar, planning to take over the world. Reagan never gets that treatment; he’s a god. I suppose it proves what I knew already: he was good at what he did. After all, if he really was the perfect evil spirit for this tribe, why should I be surprised or disgusted that we worship him? Like I once said to this Women’s Studies professor, “Why get upset at all this sexism? It’s your living; it’s like a marine biologist getting furious at all the salt water on the planet.” But she was still mad—and she was goddamn well right to be mad. And I’m still sick every time I see headlines like the one I just caught: “Ronald Reagan: How Do GOP Candidates Measure Up?” The sad thing is, they don’t really have to “measure up.” Reagan transformed this country; that much of what his adorers say is true. His successors only have to hit the same notes to make their zombie army move in the desired manner. Reagan and his stage managers did the difficult part, experimenting relentlessly until they found the notes that worked. When you say “Reagan,” you’re using a synechdoche of the classic container-for-the-contained sort. Reagan was the face of a little clique who were the essence of California plutocracy. They took shares in him, the way poorer folk do in a racehorse, funded his campaigns, and stayed with him all the way to the presidency. They were remarkable only for their lack of any distinction. Perhaps the most typical was Holmes Tuttle, a car dealer who came from Oklahoma to get rich. He did, but not the way Bill Gates did. Tuttle was so dumb that he turned down a chance to have the first Volkswagen dealership in California because he was sure no American would ever buy a car made by our erstwhile enemies. Like many successful Californians of his generation, he got rich because he was there, on the spot while the population of California exploded, and the average income soared—and because he had the perfect pathology for a rising tide: unreflecting, smug self-confidence. Tuttle made his money in cars, then picked Reagan as his new product and marketed him like a Ford, using Reagan’s front-man status as a selling point: “[Wouldn’t] you rather have a candidate who is backed by very successful capitalists who have created dozens of companies and tens of thousands of jobs, people who know what it takes to attain success within our system?” Reagan’s other backers were even less distinguished. There was Alfred Bloomingdale, who inherited his money and made the papers in his own right only by buying an underage prostitute, Vicky Morgan, making her his ponygirl, complete with saddle, then dumping her when she was of boring legal age. Bloomingdale died before the palimony suit, but his wife fought to the end not to give the wretched girl a cent. Vicky Morgan was eventually beaten to death with a baseball bat; Bloomingdale was mourned by all of Reagan’s America. Then there was Charles Wick, Reagan’s communications guy, the man who taught the Great Communicator how to communicate. Reagan made Wick director of the US Information Agency, but before that, he’d made his bones as a “very successful capitalist” by producing one film: Snow White and the Three Stooges. The most grotesque of Reagan’s owners was Joseph Coors, an outright lunatic whose family money is behind nearly every sleazy fascist initiative in recent US history. Coors was Reagan’s mentor on campus radicalism. Coors even had his own hilarious stint on the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, doing his best to destroy that institution before he realized that it was better to work through the camera-ready Reagan. He made sure Reagan’s hatred of the public universities never let up, but stepped back to let the group refine its techniques for stirring bile among the sullen majority. It’s tempting sometimes to think what one grenade, detonated at one of this “kitchen cabinet’s” meetings, could have done to change history. California could have been, was on the verge of becoming, something truly extraordinary. It’s no accident that Philip K. Dick’s Martian colonists in their hovels choose to dream of San Francisco in the mid-1960s, out of all the fantasylands they could visit. All the worst of America seemed to be melting away. The South of evil memory: melting away, not without blood and horror, but melting, doomed. The mean, stupid bullies’ world of jocks and losers to which all American children were violently introduced at an early age–melting away in a warmer and more humorous pantheon of possible identities. The dullards’ worship of Coolidge’s “business,” melting away in contemptuous laughter. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
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The best take down of America’s most despicable villian (Ronald Reagan) ever.
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