Henry A. Wallace Warned of the Coming of Reagan

As the Ronald Reagan Centennial celebrations continue to pay momage to the departed dear leader, Super Bowl tributes, birthday cake in the snakepit formally known as the U.S. Senate and testaments to his much hyped greatness warbled out by the likes of Sarah Palin and other opportunists it must be understood what Reagan really was. Ronald Reagan was first and foremost a virulent, red-baiting, money-hungry, human-rights abusing fascist. With a country licking the wounds of the twin blows to the religion of American exceptionalism that were Vietnam and Watergate it was imperative for the American fascists to build an iconic figure to restore America. With the administration of poor old Jimmy Carter who forsaw the coming of the day when the bill would have to be paid for U.S. imperialism and reliance on Middle East oil (two never-ending wars and a series of uprisings as in Egypt that threaten regional destabiliztion) the pigs who really own the system needed a champion. That man was Ronald Wilson Reagan, a failed B movie actor who saw that there was no monetary upside in staying with the Democratic party and bolted for the GOP and the monumental opportunities that would present themselves to join the anti-commie jihad of the McCarthy era.

Reagan’s transcendance allowed for him to curry favor with the political and criminal establishments (see Dan Moldea’s Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob), as president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, St. Ronnie ratted out fellow actors to the House Unamerican Committee to clean up the unions. Reagan also brokered favorable deals for ogranized crime by using his Hollywood influence and insider clout. The rise of Reagan is completely omitted as the far-right and the criminal oligarchy that it has long served roll out their massive propaganda campaign to celebrate Reagan’s 100th birthday. With it becoming obvious to even those who have been blindered that American has been slowly transformed into a fascist country, aided by an avaracious and ruthless overclass and a high-tech police state infractucture that is now fully in place it is of the utmost of importance to revisit the real history of this country, some obscene thing now called the Homeland in order to examine just how a man such as Ronald Wilson Reagan could ever rise to the brink of godhood.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

-Henry A. Wallace

Henry A. Wallace was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vice President from 1941-1945 who actually knew a thing or two about the menace that fascism posed to liberty and democracy. I would also strongly recommend that people take a look at Naomi Wolf’s now legendary 2007 article for The Guardian entitled Fascist America, in 10 easy steps which removes all doubt as to the very dark road that we as a nation are headed lest we draw upon the wisdom of those from the past who tried to warn us, men like Henry A. Wallace in this oped from the NYT.

The Danger of American Fascism

By Henry A. Wallace

Sunday 09 April 1944

On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

What is a fascist?

How many fascists have we?

How dangerous are they?

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after “the present unpleasantness” ceases:

The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler’s game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini’s vaunted claim that he “made the trains run on time.” In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler’s claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to “make the trains run on time.” It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:

Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique. Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and “with malice toward none and charity for all” go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

After Germany and Japan were defeated in World War II and the reviled FDR was finally dead, the fascist/corporatist right in America went about the business of mounting a withering campaign against their true enemy – an egalitarian society in which individual prosperity trumped corporate profits and robber barons. As I stated above this was a gradual process but it was essential to first sow the seeds of discontent by poisoning the discourse. As Wallace stated in his New York Times column that I included above: “American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”. In this sad and sorry era of reich-wing message control and full spectrum dominance provided by the goose-stepping mouthpieces of corporatism and fascism in the mainstream media he has become nothing less than a modern day prophet. He was intimately familiar with a particularly vile piece of work named Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin was a raging demagogue and tool of the fascist oligarchs who took to the airwaves to foment hatred for FDR and The New Deal (often referred to as the “Jew Deal” by the miscreants inspired by his ravings) by utilizing such successful right-wing tactics as Jew baiting, attacks on Communists and general rabble rousing to fan the flames of discontent that were sweeping a country ravaged by the grossest excesses of looter capitalism that resulted in the Great Depression.

Father Coughlin was the prototype for an overweight, mean-spirited loser of a gasbag named Rush Limbaugh who would rise from obscurity nearly a half century later. Limbaugh, like Coughlin would capitalize on the misery of others by tapping into the anger and alienation of those who were ravaged by the farm crisis by taking advantage of the desperate victims in order to offer up convenient scapegoats (liberals, minorities, women and gays) to poison the heartland and become a political kingmaker. The ultimate success of Limbaugh and the crowning of George W. Bush eerily parallel Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here where the rise of a conservative southern politician was facilitated by the virulence of a radio demagogue and the implementation of a flag wrapped authoritarian regime who brought fascism to America long before it officially became known as The Homeland. In fact it was Lewis who was responsible for the quote: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross”. The fascists do their homework, Joseph Goebbels was a huge fan of the extremely influential father of public relations Edward Bernays whose contributions to the big lie that capitalism and democracy are one and the same can’t be understated.  While Bush is now gone, the damage that he did was immense and will never be prepared until the Reagan myth has been debunked as the Hitlerian big lie that it always has been.

But I digress….

After serving one term as Vice President, Wallace was thrown under the bus by the moneychangers in the Democratic party and the ruling oligarchy for his outspoken views and vision for the future – especially after a Latin American tour during which he championed fair wages and good working conditions for those who would in the future be deemed dangerous by the filthy thugs who run the looter capitalist system and would be slaughtered by the thousands by U.S. supported goons but that is a story for another time.

He was replaced by Harry Truman, a man of contradictions who was the first world leader to use nuclear weapons on civilians, a man who launched a purge of ‘Communist sympathizers’ in the government ranks and kicked off the Cold War with the Truman Doctrine while also pushing for desegregation in the military, universal health care and the rights of labor with the Fair Deal. Truman also presided over a regime that served as a midwife during the birth of the state of Israel and created the CIA which would later become a veritable Gestapo for Wall Street. It’s really no wonder that Truman is the president most often invoked by the pocket media in these troubled times (other than the hallowed ‘Gipper’ of course). Intrestingly, Ronald Reagan once campaigned for Harry Truman – this link is priceless to hear Reagan denouncing the Republican swine that he would soon determine that joining was a great career move.

Wallace, after being unceremoniously dumped as Commerce Secretary (a consolation position for the former V.P.) by ‘Give ‘Em Hell’ Harry ran as a Progressive party candidate in 1948 on a platform of ending segregation, giving voting rights to blacks and providing universal health care – that certainly didn’t go over with the American fascists seeking to reshape the post WW II world into a Gilded Age style paradise. He was of course denounced as a Commie, a dangerous leftist and a potential enemy of the nascent looter capitalist empire that having dispatched Hitler was now moving on to an even more challenging long-term enemy: the American working class.

Wallace also accurately denounced the Truman Doctrine that laid the blueprint for state sponsored repression and murder that would accompany the Cold War and the ‘ends justify the means no matter how savage that the means may be’ policy of rolling back Communism both abroad and at home through subterfuge, sabotage, destabilization, intimidation, red baiting, blacklisting and ultimately torture and death squads as “the beginning of a century of fear”.

In Wallace’s time he also said that: “Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion”.

Times changed

Happy 100th Birthday to Ronald Reagan!

Reagan Idolatry, the Super Bowl and American Fascism

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.


-H.L. Mencken

The Super Bowl pre-game party nacho cheese dip had hardly been touched before the FOX Republican propaganda megaphone, taking full advantage of the largest viewing audience of the year to exhume the rotting, smirking carcass of Ronald Wilson Reagan and park it in the luxury suites at Jerry Jones’ Texas Palace like some sick morphing of Weekend at Bernie’s and Groundhog Day. Or maybe it was one of those forced worship sessions of long dead ideological leaders that were regularly dredged up by despots, murders and U.S. puppet banana republic dictators and their Eastern Bloc Communist counterparts. The Super Bowl, already being the most grotesque public consumption of the rotted fruits of bastardized American looter capitalism is the ideal place to honor Ronald Reagan, an odd synthesis of warmed-over nostalgic yearning for a bygone past that never really existed (outside of TV that is) and pure corporate marketing that would give Don Draper a hard-on and has the newest version of the product, Barack Obama likely spending many a sleepless night in trying to tap into that same sort of serendipitous magic that has made Reagan second to only Jesus Christ in our putrescent Empire. A putrescent empire that was on full global display on Sunday, in what very well be the Empire’s Last Supper party.

It was a full two years since the King David Petraeus strutted out to midfield, to stand upon the NFL logo in Tampa in full dress regalia to flip the coin for Super Bowl XLIII, at the time the gold standard for American fascist shamelessness. Now the deification of the Gipper, on the world’s largest HDTV screen and broadcast to billions is the ultimate con job, at a time when the ruinous nature of the scurrilous policies and pandering to half-wits drunk on Jesus juice poured through the blessed American flag are on full display for the monstrous failures that they always were (see the streets of Cairo) it is truly a crowning moment for America. Despite his Reagan idolatry, Obama, the new Pope of Hope has nothing on the finely-tuned public relations machine that has turned Ronald Reagan into a transcendent life form even while his criminally degenerate carcass is  roasting on a spit in bowels of Hades. Perhaps he can invite Nancy Reagan to the White House for a seance and a game of Ouija, with Obama already on record as admiring Reagan and now splitting time with the old dead phony on the cover of Time Magazine, Reagan’s stock is as high as ever and with generations of indoctrinated suckers, schmucks and chumps he is salivating at a shot at grabbing a ride on the gravy train. If one thing can truly be said about BOTH Obama and Reagan is that they are exquisitely marketed corporate products, teflon slick shit salesmen for the oligarchy with a built in customer base clamoring for a messiah.

Yesterday in frigid Arlington, Texas the national orgy of gauche consumerism, idiocy, militarism, celebrity worship and a little football mixed in took place and with a global viewing audience in the low hundred millions, FOX also made sure to kick up the fascism a notch or three. Never shy about wrapping their propaganda in a flag and getting right into the faces of Americans that Goddamn it! We are more fucking patriotic than you!, the early Super Bowl coverage was a magnum opus for that conniving foreign pig Rupert Murdoch, water-carrier for the fascist Republican party. From the FOX blowhard demagogue Bill O’Reilly interview with Obama, through the blood boiling intro by Gordon Gekko himself featuring scenes of flag worship insterspersed with historic iconic images of 9/11 first responders raising up ole glory among the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center (and of course shots of The Gipper) and continuing on through a gut churning shot of still at-large war criminals George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice partying in Jerry Jones’s suite it was a Roger Ailes production for the ages. Nicely timed to coincide with what is now going to likely become an American holiday, Reagan’s Birthday, hell, give it a while and the cult of Reagan will have him right up there neck and neck with Jesus Christ. The Michael Douglas video has to be right up there with one of the most dastardly pieces of propaganda ever made for the diabolically cunning mixture of American exceptionalism, war worship and raw post 9/11 fascism interspersed with clips of FDR, JFK and the decidely anti-war Martin Luther King. Goebbels would have gotten a boner watching it.

The cult of Reagan has a kick-ass public relations machine, always has and always will, thanks to the love child of tax chiseler Grover Norquist The Reagan Legacy Project that was created with a duty to promulgate the big lie of Reagan the Great and a dedicated army of flacks, shills, foot soldiers and clueless dopes and sycophants whose fervor towards Dutch as a messianic figure is right up there with worshippers of Mao. There is nary a conservative running for office who can go three minutes without invoking the name of the hallowed Reagan as an inspirational figure despite the fact that the GOP post-Gingrich and now owned by the Alaskan murder inciter Sarah Palin would oust the real Reagan about a quickly as they would send Barry Goldwater and Dick Nixon packing for their anti-American liberalism. We live in a society that today has been tipped on it’s head, turned inside out and then pushed through the looking glass where illusion is reality, war is peace, slavery is freedom and pretty much damned near everything works exactly in the opposite way that it should. A large amount of credit goes to the cult of Ronald Reagan that emerged from the rubble of Vietnam and Watergate, took on career parasites like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney as power-crazed, bittermen with a bloodlust to avenge the takedown of Nixon, engaged in a longtime period of hot and nasty fornicaton with the Religious Right and with longtime Eastern Establishment operative and former CIA director George H.W. Bush playing hardball in the backtround hijacked the country. The now rising force of the Ronald Reagan Centennial takes the false idol and using emerging technology, the near total corporate fascist takeover of the U.S. government and an increasingly dumbed down public (Dostyevsky once famously said that one could judge the degree of civiliation by entering the prisons in a society, here in USA we could easily do the same by watching the Super Bowl commercials) to push for actual godhood for the Gipper, the idea is being floated that his ghoulish mug should be featured on Mount Rushmore. The pre-kickoff Reagan video that was shown before Super Bowl XLV is the logical next step towards the United States of Ronald Reagan.

The Cult of Ronald Reagan’s Aged Government Cheese

BIG, HARD MASS; A BLOCK OF ORANGE-YELLOW PROCESSED “USDA CHEESE FOOD” ISSUED BY “DA GUBMENT” United States GOVERNMENT to aid needy families by supplementing their food resources. Used for making Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Macaroni & Cheese but ALSO CAUSES severe, bowel obstructing constipation, silent but deadly stinky gas, and / or “the runs” diarrhea in those who are lactose intolerant


-Government Cheese Definition: The Urban Dictionary

Ronald Wilson Reagan was a fraud while he walked the planet and as all myths and legends, his iconic status years after he was officially planted the falsehoods only grow stronger. As in the old western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance starring another dude ranch desperado named Marion Morrison but more famously known as John Wayne, the classic line is “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The ultimate phony, was of course John Wayne, a rabid right-wing freak whose celluloid heroics belied the truth that while starring in multiple war movies never actually fired a shot in anger while in the uniform for his country and while being a rip-snortin, Injun bashing iconic American cowboy was a tenderfoot. The western imagery would come to serve Reagan well, is there a more famous picture of the old charlatan than the one of his leather-faced, beaming smile shining out from out from under a cowboy hat? It was such a great shot that after his death in 2004 both Time and Newseek featured the exact same picture on the cover of their weekly editions. Later, George W. Bush would also go to the bread and butter of the cowboy mythos, prior to his successful 2000 presidential bid (thanks to a rigged Florida vote and an assist to the Supreme Court) Bush’s image makers purchased a piece of ranchland in Crawford, TX and began to cultivate the image of their ass kicker in a Stestson. The whole cowboy thing was bullshit of course, just as it was with Wayne and Reagan; Bush though took it to the next level in that he was actually afraid of horses, did you ever see a picture of him riding one? Give it to Reagan, he blew Bush away when it came to being a real actor. Ronald Reagan would grab hold of the tits of the false legend of the great western manly man and milk the bitch for all that it was worth. Note that Reagan curried favor with the risign menace of the uber-fascist right by turning fink and ratting out leftist Hollywood peers during the great scourge of the McCarthy years that served as a shining example for today’s “unpatriotic” jihadists in screaming traitor at anyone who dares to question the growing authoritarianism of the U.S Empire, now with Obama as caretaker.

But this all plays into something much bigger, the necessary destruction of the scourge of the Ronald Reagan idolatry among Americans because let’s face it, every stinking rotten problem that we face today originated with Reagan. The Egyptian uprising that is roiling the Middle East is directed at the puppet dictator and thug torturer Hosni Mubarak whose presidency began during the early days of the Reagan administration. The economic crisis and coming global collapse can be attributed to the deregulatory looting spree presided over by Reagan whose corrupt cronies flipped the latch on the gate and unleashed the pigs, how very apropos that Michael Douglas would be the one giving the benediction at Super Bowl XLV yesterday, “Greed Is Good” as proclaimed by his Best Actor award winning Gordon Gekko was the ethos of the Reagan era. The police state that has decimated traditional American liberties and is now a money-sucking monstrosity run amok in the fear sodden era of post 9/11 America had roots in the Reagan administration with Ollie North and his REX 84 progam that laid out plans for the suspension of the Constitution and the implementation of martial law including the roundup of American dissidents. The Continuity of Government (C.O.G.) programs that would be implemented as an emergency on 9/11 by embeds Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in defense against Reagan’s “freedom fighters’, the Mujahadeen who were ostensibly behind the plot and to this day provide justification for both the Homeland fascist police state as well as the ongoing and never-ending wars abroad. The deregulation under Reagan may have had many an American shrieking in approval as if cheering on their team in the Super Bowl when their hero emphatically fired striking air traffic controllers and issued his open declaration of war on the unions that were so instumental in building a middle class that once the envy of the civilized world has now had it’s back broken by three decades of plunder and undermining of the very legal protections that built it. You name it and it either had a genesis in the Reagan administration or was made much worse during those years.

Ronald Reagan’s single-handed defeat of those evil Commie bastards and the winning of the Cold War is the single greatest myth of those eight years after the post-Vietnam/Watergate era when America cavorted with it’s failings, began to recognize the worms in the apple and rather than to become a better nation chose the wrong fork in the road. The toppling of the USSR and the Gipper getting credit is like adage about Paul Revere’s horse: the horse did all the work and the guy riding it got all of the credit. Note that Mr. Reagan’s messianic anti-Communism (he was linked to the notorious World Anti-Communist League or WACL – an organization so extreme that it was shunned by the John Birch Society) that had roots in a festering, deep-seated contempt of egalitarianism among the elite had as much to do with this falsehood than anything that Reagan himself actually did.

Reagan’s Early Contibution to the Phony Tea Party Movement

Buying The Myth, Selling Our Souls

The idle rich, the chiselers, the corporatists, and of course the Wall Street grifters were looking for a champion and in Dutch they found one and they crowned him for his efforts. The hatred of having to share the wealth contributed to the wars at home against labor and the middle class as well as a series of brutal U.S. backed extreme right-wing regimes putting down `leftist’ movements in Central America. The horrors of the torture states and blood soaked counterinsurgencies sponsored by covert CIA operatives and cowboys like Ollie North are an ugly blight upon our history that will never be removed.

The Reagan era also institutionalized the freewheeling style of fuck you anything goes vulture Capitalism that has gutted today’s economy, destroyed our manufacturing capability, wrecked the regulatory agencies that were created to keep corporations and Wall Street looters at least somewhat honest and the environment clean, seriously undermined the public education system, crippled organized labor and made the Social Darwinist race to the bottom line the nation’s economic religion. CEO’s became folk heroes and the poor were shamed into blaming themselves for losing the birth lottery.

Ronald Reagan also blamed government for all social problems, he often invoked the crowd pleaser that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Truthfully Reagan and the so-called conservatives love government – as long as it is government that works to further their own self-interests and to keep the rabble in their place. Reagan style government consists of an exponentially growing military machine, a surveillance industrial complex, agencies that bestow taxpayer money to radical religious groups (Christian Socialism), corporate welfare and an enforcement arm that allows the government to meddle in every aspect of the lives of Americans who don’t share the same `values’ of the ruling elite.

Reagan style conservatism wants to invade citizen’s homes, regulate what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms, meddle in the education of their children by deliberately undermining the public educational system, promote a virulent state favored religion that has been hijacked by fanatics, destroy social programs like Medicare and Medicaid and of course that crown jewel of leveling the playing field Social Security. Reagan was able to successfully dupe the people that big government was the problem, the unspoken caveat being that only those governmental agencies that served the people, held industry accountable and protected the rights of the American worker were evil. Big government is even better when it is used as the foundation for a police state that acts to crush dissent and political opposition to Anti American, neo-fascist policies.

And the Star-Bellied Sneetches were exalting the coronation of their new king from the very beginning. In January 1981 the Washington D.C. air was filled with the musk of greedheads in heat, their delight in having a fox as the henhouse gatekeeper bordered on orgasmic. Haynes Johnson’s excellent book on the entire sordid Reagan era, Sleepwalking Through History describes the atmosphere at the inauguration as follows:

It was an outpouring of wealth and privilege. At National Airport, corporate jets were parked wing to wing on the tarmac. The airport was unable to accommodate the private planes seeking space. They touched down, dropped off invited inaugural guests, then departed to bring back more. One group of Indiana Republicans traveled to Washington in an elegant railroad car once owned by J.P.Morgan. Limousines were the preferred symbol of status. “They give you a feeling of pride and accomplishment,” explained a Republican national committeeman from Salt Lake City, “They give you a feeling of enthusiasm for your leaders”

So brisk was the limousine business that all available ones in the capital were quickly leased. Calls went out to dispatch others from as far south as Atlanta and as far north as New York. They poured into the city, vanguards of a new era bearing special inaugural plates with names of the corporations that had leased them. Gliding up to museums and galleries and other public buildings, they discharged women in designer dresses and diamonds and men in formal wear. Society page writers, with press entry credentials to the private festivities, strained for metaphors to describe the display of affluence. Hotel coat racks, laden with mink, “looked like furry beasts.” At Sunday brunches in Georgetown, “furs swallowed the beds.” At a black-tie-and boots Texas party, “a perfumed herd of thousands drank beer and wore emeralds.”

The catering business had never been better. “There are ten times as many parties this inaugural as last time” said Jeff Ellis of Ridgewell’s, a firm that had been waiting on Washington’s social-diplomatic set for generations. Ridgewell’s alone served more than four hundred thousand hors d’oeuvres during the pre-inaugural parites. “I’ve never seen anything like this” Ellis remarked happily. “These people have really fine taste. Rather than shrimp salad, they want the whole shrimp.”It was the costliest, most opulent inauguration in American history, and some of the scenes gave credence to critics who likened it to “a bacchanalia of the haves”.

It was indeed a feeding frenzy, a gathering of pigs at the trough to worship at the altar of unfettered greed based dogma of monopoly capitalism and this was six years prior to Gordon Gekko’s oft-repeated commandment that “Greed Is Good” was chiseled into stone inside the temple of the moneychangers. The Reagan administration went for the throat right out of the gates. The return of the wealthy elite and robber barons to power and prominence was facilitated by the ability to distract and deceive. Karl Marx was only partially right when he stated that religion was the opiate of the masses, it is but that was prior to the advent of television and when the two are combined the potency is jacked up to the highest possible level, like black tar heroin. The elitist power brokers knew this and with his Hollywood background Ronald Wilson Reagan was the perfect front man for the myriad of their ideological schemes and voodoo economics that would wage war on progressive society and deal a staggering blow to fairness and equality in the land of plenty. It was the great national regeneration decade and that fabulous and almighty leader was our champion, the iconic president who would make things right, who would deal harshly with those bastards in Iran unlike his milquetoast predecessor, who would restore the national glory and make us that shining city on the hill. After a prolonged darkness clouded by nuance it was morning in America again, black was black and white was white it was Pleasantville in the US of A and as the they say in the movie “what’s outside of Pleasantville?” – it was perfect, it was Americana and it was Ronald Reagan was our national treasure.Were Jerry Jones at the time anything but an obscure social climber yet to ascend to the summit of the American capitalist money pile before he bought the Dallas Cowboys then he would have been there to worhip his hero firsthand rather than to just drool over the fawning tribute broadcast on his grand stadium’s gargantuan HDTV.

Yes indeed, those were the days, the 1980s, the demarcation point from reality and the base camp for our national descent into the abyss of post the 9/11 world of fear and globalist economics. But I am getting ahead of myself here. The Reagan years were the period when America went back to the future in pursuit of that mythical period of greatness and nostalgia that Kevin Phillips wrote about in Post Conservative America. It was a time where a nation wounded by the twin betrayals of Vietnam and Watergate failed the test and rather than gathering together to shape a future that would prevent the amoral interest of a greedy ruling class and their corrupt system from ever again resulting in such disaster we as a nation looked into the mirror and were horrified at the monster glimpsing back, we were in denial and in desperate need of a return to better days. As Phillips so aptly put it:

“More precisely, the 1980s must be considered a decade following a twenty-year period of turbulence in which the American people lost their first war, saw a number of prominent leaders assassinated, their first President forced from office, their currency at one point lose 95 percent of its value against gold, and generally came to feel that their “Heaven-bless’d nation” was somehow no longer favored.”

The possibilities were infinite, an increasing prosperity for the well to do and government cheese for the rest. The days of ketchup as a school lunch vegetable, Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, Rambo and Chuck Norris exacting blood vengeance in Vietnam to finally WIN the war, Sonny and Rico, stylishly kicking ass clad in Armani, Marty McFly and Doc Brown time tripping in a flying De Lorean, J.R. and Alexis flaunting wealth and power, MTV in every household through the miracle of cable, televangelism exploded and took the first steps towards allowing video preachers to become political kingmakers and the personal computer became a force that would eventually transform every aspect of our lives and society. We were mesmerized by the images on the tube, the VCR made available fantasy at the fingertips in your very own living room and the bread and circuses made it all the easier to ignore the looting and dismantling of the infrastructure in the background.

Again I quote from Johnson’s Sleepwalking Through History:

“In the eighties the symbiosis between Reagan and television raised new questions. Was it possible the predominant values of success, winning, fame, and fortune that television transmitted into American homes had begun to manifest themselves in the character of the country? Were Americans becoming what they saw? Were they being held hostage by the miracles of their own technical inventions? Did their repeated exposure to fictional happy endings create an appetite for more of them in real life and make it more difficult for them to face lifes realities?”

“Reagan affected television and the viewing public in two significant ways. First, and most important, was the power of his own soothing personality. Both he and television offered new opportunity for diversion and helped breed a new passivity in public life. Under Reagan’s lulling spell and the television trance, increasing numbers of Americans became spectators instead of participants. Politically and personally they were couch potatoes.”

Couch Potatoes Who Bought The Myth and Continue to Do So.

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and class less and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

-John Lennon –
Today the cheese dip has been eaten and the leftover lil smokies and meatballs put away, the hangovers ministered to and those who are still employed in this dessicated land of once plenty shuffle off to work. The Super Bowl is over yet the Reagan myth endures and will continue to endure for as long as it serves the needs of those who in the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson stand for nothing but:

… the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”

Grand poobah host Jerry Jones’guests including the aforementioned war criminals Dubya and Condi have now departed the mothership of the stadium that has yet to generate a sufficient bidder for corporate naming rights. In an interesting footnote there were 400 poor schmucks who shelled out big bucks for tickets to the big game and then were denied access to the JerryDome, the additional perches were solely added to ensure that the attendance record for the great game would be set in the temple of Jerry and then commoditized as just another selling feature. Welcome to Chumpland!

As for the Super Bowl itself it was amazingly under-whelming for a 31-25 score that would indicate much more excitement, truthfully it was blasé beyond belief. That it was played inside of a climate-controlled tomb with ugly turf that made it hard to tell the difference between the playing surface and the green jerseys of the Green Bay Packers and a top attribute that is the world’s largest indoor Jumbotron probably played a part. I suppose that the FOXed up coverage that was more focused on pimping phony patriotism and the big lie of the Reagan legacy along with millions of dollars in shitty commercials that glorified misogyny, drunkenness, debauchery, consumerism, junk food, movies, homoerotic finger-sucking, baby smashing, cars that nobody but the rich can afford to buy (or qualify for financing for) and the endless promos for FOX’s electronic buffet of idiocy. And then there was the sales job that continued to exalt American exceptionalism, the war machine and the violent culture that supports it, this is why FOX is so very valuable to the oligarchy. Newt Gingrich understood that back when he took 4.5 million dollars from Rupert Murdoch for a book deal back in 1994 – the same year that the fledgling network hit it big by securing broadcast rights for National Football League games.

I suppose that it is somehow poetic justice that the Super Bowl XLV winner, The Green Bay Packers are technically a socialist entity, public owned and now, for the day at least honored heroes in Ronald Reagan’s America.

EE