That Old, Familiar Feeling

This year, I'll be citing Paul Slansky's invaluable guide to eight years of Reagan & Co.: The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s (1989).

Read almost thirty years later, Slansky's introduction is indeed heavy on the déjà vu.

There's the familiar reaction to White House tenure of someone whose residing there was once unimaginable —

This book is a work of self-defense.

It is the response of one observer who realized that his perception of the truth - an actor is playing the President - was a distinctly unpopular one. An observer who saw his nation's history being fictionalized as it occurred - an actor is playing the President! - while the ratings race turned media "watchdogs" into accomplices, bit players in the hit TV show the Presidency had become. An observer whose very sanity was threatened by the ease with which illusion - an actor is playing the President! - was embraced as reality.

I did not find the President's ignorance charming. I was unwarmed by his genial headwaggling, unreassured by his stern frowns of manly purpose, uncheered by his hearty waves as he strolled to and from his limos and choppers and jets.

His smooth purr did not soothe me. His nostalgic fables about an America that never was did not inspire me. And his canned one-liners, perversely celebrated as "wit" ("If I'd gotten a hand like that in Hollywood, I never would have left") definitely did not amuse me.

... To me, the President was a pitchman who seemed not to exist when the camera light was off, a front man so personally invisible that he'd actually called his autobiography Where's the Rest of Me?, an aging star who'd spent way too much of his time watching his own movies, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

There's the familiar compulsion to record what's really happening—

Astonished that so few seemed to share my vision, I was compelled to document it. Armed with scissors, file folders, yellow highlight pens and a bank of VCRs, I embarked on an eight-year quest, gathering evidence to prove my case: AN ACTOR IS PLAYING THE PRESIDENT!

I began reading four, then six, then eight papers a day (and five, then 10, then 20 magazines a week), seeking out the absurd and the outrageous, clipping and filing everything that confirmed my sense that standards were falling across the political, social and cultural landscapes. I became a media prospector, mining vast acres of ink in search of the perfect details and telling quotes that held the golden nuggets of truth. I began a video file, recording the evening newscasts - first one network, then two, then three - and dubbing the key soundbites onto meticulously logged master tapes. The events of the decade were like a surreal novel unfolding in the media, and I found myself scrambling to get it all down, compiling a memory for a nation that clearly didn't want one.

Ah yes: it brings me back to 2000, and the eight long years that followed...

But I had the Web for finding information. With so many online sources trying to get out the truth, plus my own compulsive urge to record the history, I printed and accumulated file drawers full of paper.

Then, as blogging came along in the years after 2000, I found more online writers who gave voice to my anger and frustration. The Bush administration launched—if not a thousand blogs—plenty; and plenty of talented writers who felt compelled to track what was happening each day.

Blogs provided even more stuff for me to print and save, what with their astute commentaries and links to even more sources of information.

I still spend far too much time trying to clear my living space of the volume of paper left over from those years. But, I finally put a lot of the 2004-2008 material to use when, just before Obama's inauguration, I started writing about life in an office full of right-wingers during Bush's second term.

Slansky ends his 1989 introduction with a prediction—

Yes, The President Reagan Show is off the air now, but a similar entertainment - Dan Quayle's Playhouse - is waiting in the wings. As we head into the '90s, the powers that be are working overtime - with the complicity, once again, of segments of the media that surely know better - to lull us into thinking that our Vice President is "growing" into his office and will soon be ready for bigger things.

Do not assume that this lightweight can never be elected to the White House. Back in the '60s, we knew the very notion of "President Reagan" was preposterous.

If he was wrong about Quayle in particular, he was of course correct about the general principle at work.

And certainly correct about who could be "electable"; or, eligible for insertion into office—especially with a little nudge from the extra-electoral help always available to Republicans.

2012 looms, and considering the dizzying speed at which the "how low can we go?" standard keeps dropping... The easy marketing target that is a segment of our low voting population... How good the Republicans are at foisting their creations on the country...