Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, in a way Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and that government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. He tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want spirit, we want likability, we want a return to the sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.We know better.
-- Barry Obama
America's Big Dark descended (and continues to deepen) on November 4th, 1980 -- the night Reagan was elected President. It was the beginning of everything that WASP devil brought to the "spirit" of the country, as one-by-one the lights went out: the demonizing of all things communal, subtle, kind, and modest; the hatred of one’s own government, local, state, or national; the solidifying of the malignancy known as American Exceptionalism; the collapse of Hollywood and the takeover of genuine anti-Hollywood independents (do we need even ten fingers to count the number of great American movies since the early 80s? Five fingers?); the destruction of unions; the destruction of anti-trust laws, financial regulations, and the Fairness Doctrine; the transformation of “Christianity” into a theology of corporatism, violence, and privatization; the destruction of Liberation Theology (his time begins with the assassination of Archbishop Romero and ends with the massacre of the Salvadoran Jesuits); the worship of the psychopathically ambitious over the human. He oversaw an Administration of sex haters, race haters, Christ-Firsters, America-Firsters, Israel-Firsters, oil junkies, S.S.-worshipers, mob guys, fascist intelligence agents, military dictators, tweed-covered garbage such as Bill Casey and George H.W. Bush, death-squad commanders, right-wing publishers and editors, drug executioners, psychopathic politicians, Birchers and Goldwaterites. Mister Conservative opened the floods for the wounding and murder of the local, the varied, the traditional, the patient, the folk, the truly mythic – for all that cannot be commodified. He turned the mythic into the Mythomaniacal, style into Styling, the rooted into MadAve-stroked envy. He was the set-designer for the workplace and schoolplace massacre. (The best book ever written on Reaganism is Mark Ames's Going Postal.) After 40 years of moral vomit, we have yet to turn away. Far from it. We celebrate him. So in our Obama-ian/Trumpian/BiteMe culture, this incubus haunts us more than ever. Every busted highway and closed library: Reagan. Every crappy little product we take home and swear at: Reagan. Every over-crowded classroom: Reagan. Every price we can't find as we move through the grocery store aisles: Reagan. Every second of air-time spent on meaningless celebrity. The suffocations and anxieties of the office. The humiliations felt by all who must face every day the sniffers capable of judging only by externals and bizniz cards. The somnolence and passivity in the face of endless war. The narcissism which has narrowed US politics to the range of A to B, FoxNews to MSNBC, DailyKos to the Drudge Report. And the lies. The endless lies!
Reagan walks through The Killers (1964), his last movie, with a look of little but lemon-sucking petulance on his face. Even without having to confront Lee Marvin, it is a face Reagan would often make throughout the 1980s, for he was a monster of sexual sterility. Far more than Nixon (within whom one can feel a deep sexual and emotional longing, unmet), Reagan was the political equivalent of a sex doll without organs, the sire of our current corporate environment where there’s about a 1% difference between the sexes. Reagan, the first Metrosexual. Not even that. He was the Anti-Man. Take responsibility for nothing. When caught, exposed or challenged: lie and forget. Never admit a mistake. Never show regret or remorse. Demonize all who disagree with you or get in your way. Demonize your own past, if it suits the needs of your endless present. He was the ultimate confabulator. The huckster who made his political bones by dumping on imaginary welfare cheats and “professional victims” is the one who made permanent a national belief in victimization: we do nothing to others – it’s all done to us.
While he roasts for eternity over on open Hades fire, Reagan continues to choke us every day. So on the 110th Anniversary of his spawning, let us celebrate him for what in fact he is: The Father of the Great American Shitpile.
Lee Marvin for President.
