In today’s movie bin, a post-Eternal Sunshine Jim Carrey returns to hamming it up in the full trailer for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Sean Penn (with the aid of 21 Grams co-star Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle) resurrects Samuel Byck (also featured in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins) in the international teaser for The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
Category: The Conservative Era
Landslide?
“The president — highly intelligent, personally flawed, detested by many, a man who was first elected in a narrow three-way race and then reelected easily — had faced impeachment. In the following election, his vice president, a decent man with decades on Capitol Hill, was beaten by an inexperienced governor from the South. Four years passed. The economy weakened and oil prices soared. Crises in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan eroded our national confidence. Clearly the president was in trouble. Yet many were not comfortable with his opponent. Yes, he was effective on television. But was he a steady hand? Was he trustworthy? Would the country be safe in his hands? The year was, of course, 1980.” James K. Galbraith makes the case for a decisive Kerry-Edwards victory in November.
Gipperpalooza.
So…you might’ve missed this little story in all the D-Day hullabaloo, but apparently former President Ronald Reagan died. Due to my cable issues, I’ve thankfully missed much of the canonization and hagiography of the past few days, although I’m sure the GOP will repeat it all at their upcoming convention anyway.
I know it’s bad form to speak ill of the recently deceased, so I’ll let others handle straightening the record about Ronnie’s not-so-stellar presidency. But, given all the revisionist history out and about at the moment, I do think this is a good time to consider the thesis of Reagan’s America by Garry Wills:
| Much of Garry Wills’s argument in Reagan’s America can be encapsulated by George Costanza’s advice to Jerry Seinfeld, prior to Jerry’s being polygraphed about his Melrose Place viewing habits: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Over and over again, Wills scrutinizes the tales and myths told by Reagan about himself in his private speeches, public addresses, and autobiography, and finds them to be embellished, exaggerated, and – more often than not – patently false. And therein lies his uncanny appeal for so many people: Reagan’s myths are America’s myths…As Wills puts it, “the truth about [America’s] actual behavior, whether on the old frontier or the new, is as threatening to our sense of identity as the terrorist himself.” (452) And because Reagan believes so thoroughly in his own American myths, many Americans could join him in believing them as well…[Wills writes,] “Visiting Reaganland is very much like taking children to Disneyland…It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better is one immunized against any troubling cursions of a real [American past.] If capitalist ‘conservatism’ canoot be rooted in the real past it works to obliterate, then it will invent a deracinating past, a nostalgia for the new, a substitute history to lull us in the time machine that travels on no roads, reaching goals no one could plan.” (459-460)
In sum, “Reagan gives our history the continuity of a celluloid Mobius strip. We rides its curves backwards and forwards at the same time, and he is always there.” (440) Put differently, the appeal of Ronald Reagan for so many is that he offers us a simulacrum of American history that is both appealingly mythic and appallingly untrue. |
Well, at the very least, the effusive eulogizing going on right now may help topple barriers to stem-cell research. And, no matter what one’s political persuasion, I think we can all agree that helping to eliminate scourges like Alzheimer’s Disease would make a wonderful asset to Ronald Reagan’s legacy.
Technical Difficulties.
Well, between Tenet’s resignation and Reagan’s end, my cable modem picked an eventful few days to give up on me. More to come next week, after the Time Warner technicians have ascertained and corrected the problem.
Iraq-Contra?
“Woodward reports that in July 2002 Bush ordered the use of $700 million to prepare for the invasion of Iraq, funds that had not been specifically appropriated by the Congress, which alone holds that constitutional authority. No adequate explanation has been offered for what, strictly speaking, might well be an impeachable offense.” Sidney Blumenthal sees the behavior underlying Reagan’s Iran-Contra fiasco revived, while law professor Cass Sunstein delves deeper into the illegality and unconstitutionality of Dubya’s likely misappropriation of funds.
President Potty-Mouth?
The White House tsk-tsks John Kerry for the F-word. C’mon, now. Kerry’s youth-targeted outburst in Rolling Stone undoubtedly has a whiff of Gore-like “let-your-hair-down” calculation/desperation about it, but let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill here. We all know good and well that our presidents and political leaders have been swearing up a blue streak since time immemorial. (Richard “expletive deleted” Nixon is just the most notorious example.) And it wasn’t all that long ago that George “Major League” Dubya and Big Time needed their own mouths washed out with soap. So let he who is without sin cast the first #$%@ stone.
Ghost in the Machine.
Historian David Greenberg and the Washington Post examines Dubya’s stylistic debts to Richard Nixon.
Don’t Know Much About History.
Sorry about the lack of updates since Sunday….As it happens, encroaching November has frightened me into working harder on my US history orals site. My note-taking is still two months or so behind my reading, but – in case you’re interested – I’ve recently put up notes and reviews on the following books:
| John Morton Blum, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974. William Leach, Land of Desire, Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975. Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Gary Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. |
Updates to the orals site should come relatively frequently for the next few months, so expect more to come.
Building Back to Basics.
Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta aims to resurrect the progressive think tank, using the rise of similar conservative organizations in the ’60’s as a model. This sounds like a great idea, although, if the Center for American Progress is in fact serious about re-contemplating the party’s first principles, I suspect it’ll be only a matter of time before they run into trouble with the DLC establishment.
Shades of Watergate.
From out the mists of history, Watergate figures weigh in on Felonygate and this administration’s total lack of credibility: Nixon counsel John Dean calls the Bushies worse than his old employers, while Daniel Ellsberg argues that the Plumbers are back. Says Ellsberg of the Plame situation, “I see an almost identical pattern here [between his own experience and Plame’s]. Really, I don’t know of any analogy so close in the 30 years between now and then. This is not an everyday occurrence.” In related news, it turns out that the Bushies have lied again — this time, Wolfowitz & co. drastically overstated the health of the Iraqi oil industry, despite a Pentagon report to the contrary, so as to minimize the cost of Iraqi reconstruction for American taxpayers. Typical.