By William Kleinknecht, AlterNet
Posted on February 6, 2009, Printed on February 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125575/Ronald Reagan's 98th birthday is being celebrated today at a time that should be a cause for soul searching among his admirers. The conservative revolution that Reagan unleashed upon the nation and much of the world lay in ashes, and Washington is embarking on a new epoch of government intervention to eradicate the excesses of free-market purism. One would expect liberals to be out in the streets looking for statues of the Gipper to topple from their pedestals.
But nothing of the kind is happening. While George W. Bush is now the bane even of many conservatives, a Marine Corps contingent will lay a wreath at Reagan's gravesite safe in the knowledge that much of the nation holds his memory in a warm embrace.
Historians may one day view this as an odd historical conundrum, since Reagan's legacy is so clearly imprinted on the myriad of forces that have vitiated the American dream for millions of working people and brought wreckage to the world economy.
The continuing fallout from Reagan's policies – the meltdown of the financial sector, widening income inequality, the emergence of lockdown America, the obscene inflation of CEO compensation, the end of locally owned media, market crashes, blackouts, drug-company scandals, rampant greed and materialism -- is all around us. As D.H. Lawrence once wrote in another context, "The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins."
The subprime mortgage crisis, the root of the chaos in the financial sector, is a case in point. Its antecedents clearly lay within the Reagan administration, beginning with an appearance by Donald T. Reagan, Reagan's first treasury secretary, before the Senate banking committee in early 1981, when he laid out a detailed vision for near-complete deregulation of the financial industry.
Here is another good one.....
Tear Down This Myth: How Reagan's Legacy Haunts Our Future
By Will Bunch, Free Press
Posted on February 4, 2009, Printed on February 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/124855/Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Tear Down This Myth, by Will Bunch. Copyright © 2009 by Will Bunch. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc.
<snip>
This landmark was now ground zero for the Ronald Reagan myth, where the Great Communicator still speaks in an odd kind of way from the Great Beyond to a new generation of American families, hundreds every day, from moms and dads who were still watching The Smurfs during the years of Reagan's presidency to their offspring, born when the eighties lived only on VH1. Simply put, Ronald Reagan is about as real to this generation as George Gipp and Knute Rockne were to moviegoers in 1940, and his saga has been increasingly repackaged in that same kind of cleaned-up and reshuffled Hollywood biopic style, except now in living Sunbelt-Big Sky Technicolor. Seemingly every artifact of Reagan's ninety three years on Earth has been arrayed in Simi Valley with the same storytelling skill that Operation Serenade brought to the funeral week that concluded here. Visitors are told that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and brought respect back to the American presidency. Inside the giant hangar of the Air Force One pavilion, the outer walkway is divided down the middle by a replica of the Berlin Wall. On the west side of the mock wall are Reagan's freedom exhortations, while east of the wall are written the worst of "We will bury you"-style commie propaganda. That's just a facsimile, but outside on the grounds is the real deal, a towering 6,668-pound graffiti-covered monolith that was picked up in 1990 from some newfangled German capitalists selling pieces for $125,000 each; the purchaser was hamburger mogul Carl Karcher of Carl's Jr. restaurants fame. (Karcher died in 2008; some of his other contributions to the cause of freedom included bankrolling a failed 1978 California measure called Proposition 6, which would have fired all gays and lesbians working in public schools, and also major fund raising for John Schmitz, a far-right Orange County congressman by way of the John Birch Society.)
Karcher is just one of the big-name donors whose names and plaques are strewn around the library building and grounds like so many rocks and boulders left behind by a glacier; the first thing a visitor to the complex notices are the signs along the walkway proclaiming "The Freedom Path ... Provided by the Generosity of Harold Simmons." (So it's true what they say, that freedom isn't free.) Simmons is a Texan who got rich as a corporate raider in the Reagan-led 1980s economy and is now a billionaire whose company backed the legal defense fund of two Iran-Contra figures and later gave $3 million to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which targeted John Kerry, and then nearly $3 million to a group running ads linking Barack Obama to a once-violent 1960s radical. The donor plaques from mostly Republican bigwigs and a few Hollywood stars like Merv Griffin and Bob Hope assault the visitor, who is also asked at several spots along the way to make his or her own donation, on top of the twelvedollar admission fee. It doesn't escape notice that there are several donor citations either for Rupert Murdoch or his "fair and balanced" News Corporation, which includes the Fox News Channel, where top-rated host Sean Hannity is prone to ask viewers "What would Reagan do?" The library's "Founders" also include four sovereign nations that prospered mightily during the Reagan years: Japan, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
<snip>
There's no note for visitors about Reagan accumulating more debt in real dollars than all the presidents who came before him combined, or about the fact that the federal payroll increased from 1981 to 1989. Amazingly, there is also no mention anywhere of the Iran-Contra affair, the scandal that almost toppled his presidency. (The executive director, Duke Blackwood, told an interviewer in 2007 that some Iran-Contra material was taken out during some renovations and that "at some point in time, we hope to bring it back. But again, that's the fluidity of a museum. You can't have the same thing, you know, for ten, fifteen, twenty years.") The few nods to "balance" are so obscure they surely sail right over the heads of most casual visitors. A wall at the rear corner of the first big room does show some editorial cartoons criticizing Reagan (in bed with an MX missile, for example) but no captions to explain them to tourists, including those not yet born at the time. You would be shocked, shocked to learn that a Reagan museum seems to place a higher value on imagery and on symbolism than on facts; while there's no room for Iran-Contra, there's plenty of space for sculptor Veryl Goodnight's The Day the Wall Came Down, which shows a stampede of wild western horses toppling ... well, by this point you can probably guess what they were toppling. "Today history is what we decide it is."
Since Reagan died in June 2004, visits to the library have soared. More than one million people passed through the front entrance over the next four years, passing the denim-clad bronze cowboy of Reagan in the After the Ride statue, originally created for the Cowboy Hall of Fame, but instead standing guard at the library entrance. Needless to say, most don't come for the politics, but for the celebrity factor or simply the "wow" factor of walking through Air Force One. As I listened to the chatter of the visitors, mostly seniors or families with school-aged children, it was the pop culture stuff that always got the most commentary, especially for an exhibit of the former first lady's White House-era dresses and the like, called "Nancy Reagan -- a First Lady's Style." The din grew as the summer crowd filed past the fiery hues and frills of Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta. "Oh man, that is classy!" I heard one elderly man exclaim as he was wheeled past.
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