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Sunday, February 06, 2011

Reagan Scentennial

For a long time the dumb-dumb brigade were agitating to put a statue of Saint Ronnie in every county in America, the better no doubt to help the dumb-dumbs ignore the uncomfortable reality that, what with the tax increases reality forces on him and his genuflections to nuclear disarmament, awful and destructive and bonkers as he was, Reagan would no longer pass muster as a Republican according to the batshit crazy neo-feudal gun-nut warlordism purity standards of contemporary conservatism. But, come what may, that little cheerleading enterprise of theirs doesn't seem to have gotten anywhere, the very idea of public monuments apart from billboards and restaurant statuary logos being possibly too civic-minded in spirit for murcan patriots who know deep down that white muscular baby Jesus cries his baby blue eyes out whenever government is up to anything at all other than killing foreigners in wars and punishing women who have sex with preventable diseases and unwanted babies. Despite all that, I do not doubt that even to this day, so many long years later, there might still be found in every town, in every county across America a human being freshly dead or miserably dying as you read these very words, who would be alive and well and bringing instead a real measure of joy and aid to the world, were it not for the immiserating meanness of policies originating in the Reagan Administration, still ripening like sweet wet sparkling sulphurous farts into the air of the present for us to smell, a more fitting tribute by far than campy statuary could ever manage to be.

For perspective:

Larry Kramer on the Grim Gipper.

And, after all, how encouraging it is to realize that even the Reagan epoch had the stuff of a poem for the ages in it:

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

He wouldn't have passed the Tea Parties purity tests but he had a talent for making racism acceptable so he'd be welcome in the Republican party of today. He did have a talent for this although it was a seemingly guileless approach it did involve a certain comic routine.

Sarah Palin tries to achieve something similar albeit with the mama grizzly shtick but it doesn't work nearly as well mainly because she doesn't so much as tell jokes as become the butt of them.

And nowadays the bar is a little bit higher in terms of how much racism is allowed in politics not by much though.