FUCK REAGAN

I was reading a post at Hullabaloo a couple hours ago about former president and now conservative mythological godhead Ronald Reagan, and how for about a decade now right-wing activists have been making a concerted and somewhat successful effort to cast the Gipper as "greatest president ever" to a much larger portion of the US population. Needless to say, the context here is that Reagan not only wasn't the "greatest president ever," but he may very well have been one of the worst: out of thousands of conservatives who have been trying for years to dismantle the New Deal programs that literally created the middle class in this country, Reagan was probably the most successful in that he almost single handedly got the philosophical ball rolling on this grand right-wing project. But here in the 21st century, we're supposed to think he's like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

I know it seems like everybody fucking worships Ronnie these days, and that conservatism appears to be triumphant as a philosophy, but back in the day, back before the extended advertising and PR campaign, back when Reagan was doing his deeds, there were large percentages of Americans who hated him. Indeed, when he left office in January of 1989, he had very low approval ratings, down in the thirties, coming off the heels of the Iran/Contra scandal.

That is, in the days that preceded hard core conservative media action, many Americans were fully aware that Reagan had ramped up the class war to late 19th century levels, and were furious about it. I mean sure, Reagan won reelection to his second term in an electoral landslide, taking forty nine out of fifty states, but won the actual vote by less than twenty percent, and that was with a pretty shitty blast-from-the-past candidate, Carter's veep Walter Mondale, one of those sacrificial lamb candidates periodically offered up when party bosses don't want to try, you know, like Bob Dole in '96.

Anyway, all this made me remember a rather remarkable music video from 1986, Genesis' "Land of Confusion." Remarkable for several reasons. For starters, the video just slams the fuck out of Reagan, portraying him as a dottering fool who accidentally blows up the world. But Genesis is/was a fairly apolitical band. Even when they were being political, their art-rock lyrical stylings were usually so vague and abstract that you couldn't tell. Throw into the mix that MTV, also apolitical, put the video into heavy rotation. That is, people who usually didn't sully themselves with partisan politics felt like it was okay, desirable even, to bash the Gipper mercilessly.

This is the "greatest president ever"? Check it out. Now that we have a sense that Ronnie probably did have Alzheimer's his last few years in office, the video appears to be prescient:



Anyway, fuck Reagan. I was a fool to have ever liked him.

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