A State Of Prosperity, 1954

Spotted at a used book sale:A 74-page booklet featuring 50s bounty, in one part of the country.

Michigan, USA; the 1950s: paragraph after paragraph noting the strength of industry—There are plenty of sections on touring the outdoors and state parks ("more than any other state"). There's also an entire page devoted to sightseeing opportunities here—
With the state booming, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the country, and this was pointed to with pride—The booklet's history suggests some facts that made prosperity possible—And: "We led the nation with a broad program, launched in 1928, to establish county and district public health agencies, which became a model for the nation and which provide 92 per cent of our population in 70 Michigan counties with full-time public health service."An educated, healthy population? Stopping that sort of thing has taken decades, but, we're pretty much there.

And then, there's what had to be stopped most of all— Another quaint point of pride: Michigan's labor history—

Labor Organizes—1818

... Some mistakenly regard the rise of unions as a recent development. Actually, Michigan has been a leader in the organized labor movement ever since its first union, the Detroit Mechanics Society, was founded in 1818.

Trade unions were born and flourished in Michigan in the decade before the Civil War. These groups, in turn, led to the formation of the Michigan Federation of Labor in Detroit in 1889.

The Federation of Labor undertook to organize auto workers as early as 1903, and founded a formal auto workers union in 1916.

And so on, about a history unknown to most Americans.

Which makes it all the easier to stamp out those pesky union elections, along with unseemly things like "free schools for all"; "public libraries"; "public health service"...

Start with Reagan's preaching government hate; add thirty years of right-wing activism. At the state level you get this year's crop of CEO governors installed to do what CEOs do: fire workers, hire cronies, and strip the place of the remaining assets.

In Michigan today, Rick Snyder's particular angle on this is to replace the ballot box with "financial martial law."

The promise of trickle-down prosperity is the public face of this stuff, pitched to a country that didn't exactly learn its lesson in the 80s.

The new tactic in Michigan is also a handy means of dealing with black people living on overly valuable real estate.

With another front being used to shut down public schools and opportunity for the poor.

Ronald Reagan: The Art of Governance

Thirty years on, the "government is bad" crowd gets ever more blatant in pursuit of their (publicly unspoken) condition of "good" government: that it serve the interests of the rich.

In just one example of undoing what once would have been considered an obvious public good, Republicans use the holiday for the latest in their war on consumer protection.

After thirty years of Reaganism, it's always instructive to look at the record of wealth's greatest front man.

Quotes from Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s:

[1981]
8/19 Ed Meese sees no need to wake President Reagan just to tell him the Navy has shot down two Libyan jets. Defending Meese's decision, Reagan explains, "If our planes are shot down, yes, they'd wake me up right away. If the other fellows were shot down, why wake me up?"

8/31 "He acted like there was nothing else in the world he had to do, nothing else on his mind."
—Former movie actor Rex Allen, who spent 45 minutes with President Reagan after presenting him with four pairs of free boots

"There are times when you really need him to do some work, and all he wants to do is tell stories about his movie days."
—Unnamed White House aide on President Reagan's detachment from his job

11/23 President Reagan vetoes a stopgap spending bill, thus forcing the federal government—for the first time in history—to temporarily shut down. Says House Speaker Tip O'Neill, "He knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can't even carry on a conversation about the budget. It's an absolute and utter disgrace."

[1983]
3/8 President Reagan tells a national convention of evangelicals that the Soviet Union is "the focus of evil in the modern world ... an evil empire." Says historian Henry Steele Commager: "It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all."

9/1 A Soviet fighter mistakenly shoots down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it strays into Soviet airspace, killing 269, including right-wing congressman Larry McDonald (D-GA). George Shultz calls Tip O'Neill to tell him about the incident.

"What does the President think about this?" asks O'Neill.

"We'll tell him when he wakes up," says Shultz.

Dan Rather returns instantly from his vacation upon hearing the news and—after CBS shows him on horseback at the ranch as the crisis unfolds—so does President Reagan.

6/7 "It was really funny. I was sitting there so worried about throw weight, and Reagan suddenly asks us if we've seen War Games."
— Unnamed congressman describing a White House meeting about arms control at which the President revealed that averting a movie nuclear catastrophe was far more interesting to him than the nuts and bolts of preventing a real-life one

10/2 At a White House briefing with Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan is asked how his MX missiles will be deployed. "I don't know but what maybe you haven't gotten into the area that I'm gonna turn over to the, heh heh, to the Secretary of Defense," he says sheepishly.

"The silos will be hardened," Weinberger says, then nods approvingly as Reagan volunteers, "Yes, I could say this. The plan also includes the hardening of silos."

[1986]
6/11 President Reagan distinguishes himself at his 37th press conference by:

• Responding to a question about abortion with an answer about an unrelated case
• Displaying a certain confusion about whether or not the SALT II treaty exists and about whether or not he plans to order construction of another space shuttle
• Claiming that the government is providing 93 million meals a day to hungry Americans.

9/1 "Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere."
—President Reagan, as quoted in a Fortune interview for its cover story "What Managers Can Learn from Manager Reagan"

Compare And Contrast

Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest describes his success in writing for television in the late 1950s—and entry to the top tax bracket—

The confiscation of one's hard-earned money did not drive me into the right wing, as it did Ronald Reagan, who was as indignant as I but chose to blame it all on a vague nemesis called "big government." I started to turn left. If the government was going to take so much of our money, then let the government give us health care,education, and all those other things first-world countries provide their taxpayers... My real political education began when I made money only to have it confiscated by a military machine. As the age of McCarthy dawned, I would soon be taking a crash course in "radical" politics.

William Kleinknecht's The Man Who Sold the World notes how "Reagan was candid in his memoirs about having had a gripe against government tax collectors"—a "gripe" originating in his post-war Hollywood career, when the country's highest earners were taxed to pay war debt.

As president of the Screen Actor's Guild, Reagan's

...frustration prompted him... to propose that Congress approve a "human depreciation allowance" for actors and athletes, since their earning power had a short shelf life, but the proposal went nowhere…David Stockman, the budget director in his first term, remembers Reagan saying that taxes had been so onerous in his Hollywood days that actors could afford to make only four movies a year before they crept into a punitive tax bracket. "So we all quit working after four pictures and went off the country," Reagan told him...

Of the same period—and SAG president Reagan's conflict-of-interest deal with his own agency, MCA—Kleinknecht adds, "It is not going too far out on a limb to suppose that his later experience with the Justice Department antitrust lawyers... only deepened his enmity toward government."

With Reagan finally in a position to do something about his combined hatred of government and taxes (on the rich, anyway), by early 1982 there was this, cited by Paul Slansky:

2/27 The Congressional Budget Office finds that taxpayers earning under $10,000 lost an average of $240 from last year's tax cuts, while those earning over $80,000 gained an average of $15,130.

During the 80s Reagan would slash taxes for the richest—while raising payroll taxes for average workers, and taxing unemployment checks.

But, no problem with the latter two: those affected no one who mattered.

Armageddonists

Mailed to my zipcode, a few months ago.

This having been a five-day event, the inside of the flyer offered more End Times clip art illustrating the scheduled topics:

Revelation's Final Glimpse of Things to Come
The Next New World Order is Coming
The Longest Time Prophecy in the Bible Reveals the Judgment Hour
Whatever Happened to Right and Wrong?

That was Friday through Monday. For the last day:

The Mark of the Beast — 666, Part I

How clever: Part I must have left the crowd waiting for the circus' return to town!

Now this was thoughtful—

With so much to peruse, I missed the gem of (precise? symbolic?) scheduling that Clever Sister pointed to—
Yes, the end of the world has long been a favorite of hucksters in the religion biz.

But it wasn't until the 1980s when it began being inserted into politics. And among the many other dubious innovations of his two terms, Reagan became the first president to publicly talk it up.

A couple of quotes from Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor:

12/6 [1983] "[Not] until now has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this."

10/23 [1984] The Christic Instititute releases a statement from close to 100 religious leaders who find President Reagan's belief in the imminence of Armageddon "profoundly disturbing."

Gore Vidal writes in a 1987 essay, "Armageddon?" (included in his collection, At Home)—

For those, and I am one, who have been mystified by this president's weird indifference to the general welfare at home and the preservation of peace abroad, the most plausible answer has now been given in a carefully documented and deeply alarming book called Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War. [Grace Halsell, 1986]

Halsell covers the right-wing evangelicals who were coming to prominence in the 1970s-80s and their Rapture scenario. In the environment of continued Cold War, they rooted for nuclear war to bring about their predictions.

Halsell notes: "A Nielsen survey released in October 1985 shows that 61 million Americans (40 percent of all regular viewers) listen to preachers who tell them that we can do nothing to prevent a nuclear war in out lifetime." But do the 61 million believe what they hear? I suspect that they probably do on the grounds that so little other information gets to them. They are not book-readers (The United States has dropped to twenty-fourth place among book-reading nations); the public educational system has been allowed to deteriorate as public money goes mostly to defense; while television news is simply entertainment and the principal entertainer... is a trained actor who knows very little about anything other than his necessary craft, which is to sell emotions—and Armageddon. But, again, does the salesman believe in the product he sells? Halsell believes that he does.

Vidal goes on to describe the accounts of Reagan's meetings with evangelicals while governor of California in the early 70s. Led by George Otis, a delegation introduced Reagan to The Rapture—and "prophesized" his election to the presidency. A year later, Reagan was gushing to the president of the California senate about the signs of Armageddon, coming soon.

"Very Date Sensitive," indeed—even if this never happens on the date promised.
Instead, they hang on, and on: tax-free and "non-profit."

This Day In Reagan: May 9, 1984

PBS timeline:

May 9, 1984

In a televised speech, Reagan makes a case for helping Contras in Nicaragua. "The Sandinista rule is a Communist reign of terror. Many of those who fought alongside the Sandinistas saw their revolution betrayed. They were denied power in the new government. Some were imprisoned, others exiled. Thousands who fought with the Sandinistas have taken up arms against them and are now called the Contras. They are freedom fighters."

Reagan's public PR was an attack on Congress'previous attempts to limit US involvement in Nicaragua.

Behind the scenes—with no public scrutiny until an event late in 1986 —the administration would continue doing their workarounds.

Poster: Robbie Conal

Paul Slansky, quotes Conal on creating this image and posting it around Los Angeles in October 1987:

"In this one, I think of him as a little paranoid, a little hurt and maybe a little confused... and that's the way he's made me feel for years."

Nothing To See Here

A romantic view of some Victorian-ish architecture...
A closer look:
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Abandoned mail order house.
John Vachon, 1939.
Library of Congress FSA/OWI photographs

It used to be that scenes like this were made by a Depression
(or at least, one publicly acknowledged).

In our time—after thirty years of Reaganomics—Think Progress snoops around the CIA Factbook to uncover the not so secret fact that income inequality now ranks us with Uganda...

And, worse than Pakistan and Ethiopia.

May 5, 1985: Wrong Script

Sets of quotes from Paul Slansky:

1) Ron watches a movie inside his head.

12/6 [1983] The Israeli newspaper Maariv reports that during a meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, President Reagan—who spent World War II making training films in Hollywood—claimed to have served as a photographer in an army unit filming the horrors of Nazi death camps. Shamir says Reagan also claimed to have saved a copy in case there was ever any question as to whether things had really been so bad. When asked just that question by a family member, Shamir quotes him as saying, "This is the time for which I saved the film, and I showed it to a group of people who couldn't believe their eyes."

2/16 [1984] Welcoming Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Rabbi Marvin Hier to the White House, President Reagan again claims, according to Hier, to have "photographed Nazi atrocities while he was with the Signal Corps." When reporters question this account, James Baker elicits from Reagan the clarification that he "never left the country" during the war and "never told anyone that he did." As to how Shamir and Hier—in two separate meetings—could have come away with the same wrong story, Baker has no explanation.

2) Spring, 1985: Ron's people make plans.

4/11 The White house announces that President Reagan will lay a wreath at the Bitburg, West Germany, military cemetery housing the graves of both American and Nazi soldiers. Oops! Correction: no Americans are buried there.

4/13 WHITE HOUSE RECONSIDERING REAGAN'S VISIT TO GERMAN WAR GRAVES
—The New York Times

4/17 REAGAN GOING TO DEATH CAMP
—New York Newsday

4/18 Michael Deaver—who somehow failed to notice Nazi gravestones last time he was there—is back in West Germany searching for an appropriate concentration camp to add to the President's itinerary. Asks Rep. Pat Schroeder, "What are they looking for? The right light angle?'"

Meanwhile, Reagan defends his visit to Bitburg by claiming the German soldiers "were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." Says an aide,"Oh my God!"

4/19 Elie Wiesel—fortunate enough to be accepting a medal from the President on the same day The New York Times carries the headline "Reagan Likens Nazi War Dead to Concentration Camp Victims"—tells his host, "That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS." Reagan puts on his sad face.

4/26 257 IN THE HOUSE BID [Helmut] KOHL CANCEL CEMETARY EVENT
—The New York Times

4/27 82 SENATORS URGE REAGAN TO CANCEL HIS BITBURG VISIT
—The New York Times

4/29 President Reagan defends the Bitburg visit as "morally right," adding, I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform for four years myself." He does not claim to have filmed the death camps.

3) Ron takes a trip.

May 5 Having atoned in advance with a visit to the Bergen-Belsen death camp, President Reagan spends eight minutes at Bitburg, where cameras are forced to shoot the ceremony from poor angles. He ctes a letter from 13-year old Beth Flom who, he claims, "urged me to lay the wreath at Bitburg cemetery in honor of the future of Germany." In fact, she urged him not to go at all. Summing things up, he says, "It's been a wonderful day."

The Enemy

In the last couple of days—during the reaction to a bit of news—this is among the most eloquent (and disturbing) pieces I've come across.

I've been hearing comments about the age of the revellers: that they grew up hearing Bin Laden's name, and his serving as our national boogeyman goes back as far as they can remember.

Sam Seder has some discussion of that here. He also points out how much Bin Laden really did "win"—considering a goal of his was to bankrupt the US.

Of course, deficit—which "matters" only when a Democrat is in office—is also an excuse to force the policies a minority has alway wanted. The true bankruptcy is the moral one Sam notes; our bankruptcy as a culture is shown in ways from post-2001 approval of torture to absurd airport security to this week's young crowds, celebrating a death as a mass pop culture event.

Despite Bin Laden's sudden end, the usual crowd has not missed a beat in commencing the history rewrite: from claiming credit for Bush, to pretending the needed intelligence was obtained through water boarding.

The end of the Cold War created an Enemy vacuum for those profit centers and political interests that need one. Bin Laden came to the rescue; with his demise, new boogeymen will be found.

Yes, he was a terrible person responsible for many deaths—including those of fellow Muslims. If we limit ourselves only to what most Americans bother thinking of: the Bush administration ignored all warnings until they had themselves a situation to exploit without limit.

Threats... Enemies...

The ones most likely to harm us are always those close to home.

An ideology of greed marching us backward politically is the most basic one—pretty much everything else stems from that.

Pogo had it right—

May Day: Cult of Personality - Precedents

I have in my possession a 2003 Reagan Ranch calendar, on the theme: "Lessons In Character From A Great American Leader."

Seeing as the ranch is operated by "Young America," our country's youth sure must be flush with cash.

Back of calendar text:

In 1998, Young America's Foundation saved the Reagan Ranch – Ronald Reagan's home fro 24 years and his favorite place on earth. This historic presidential property will be kept exactly as it was when the Reagans lived there.

Ronald Reagan worked with Young America's Foundation since his days as governor of California. He wanted to ensure his pro-American values – especially free enterprise, personal responsibility, limited government and a strong national defense – would be passed on to young people. With help from generous supporters, Ronald Reagan's beloved Rancho del Cielo and the new Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara will serve as the focus of continuing the Reagan Revolution for generations to come.

Those "youth" are a very thinly disguised version of the original YAF. While I've seen some conflicting information as to whether the groups are independent of each other, that seems an intentional obscuring for tax/political status purposes.

Not only do the Jungend seek to inspire their fellow Youths with such well-funded, slick [if lame] PR, but the subject of their adoration provided the paint-by-numbers for a certain successor to follow—and to do up Texas-style.

Just compare: 345 days of "work"/vacation?

A mere piker, compared to someone else's 487 + 490...

Reagan, at least, really liked horses.

While that other guy had to acquire a ranch in time for his campaign.

We are asked to believe that Reagan spent much "leadership" time on his "favorite form of relaxation" Fast forward to "brush cutting"... (A manly activity the WaPoo endorses.)

Considering all these books—and some of the types who wrote them—how could Reagan's intellectual stature ever have been in doubt?
Some 2008 news from the WaPoo's Richard Cohen: based on the most reliable of sources (Karl Rove), Cohen reports that "Bush is a prodigious, industrial reader, and this does not conform at all to his critics' idea of who he is."

Exactly as government stopped being evil for as long as he could run it, Reagan was no phony politician... No, he was a humble man who appreciated simple, presidential-branded clothing ... like the humble President jacket (left) and The White House polo shirt (right).

Well, whaddaya know: today is the flight suit anniversary, which rolls around every May 1.

That particular eight-year PR production—with its logo apparel for every photo op—took its lessons from the master.

And there's this item...Make that: the Cowboy Chapter of the FCA...

Hanging around an "open cathedral"? That sure saved Reagan from actually setting foot in church; see, for example, quote at end of this.

If this advertising his "faith" didn't exactly set a precedent in American politics, Reagan got his party's connection to fundamentalists underway.

Among other abuses in this century (so far), we've had a Republican administration install theocrats at every level of government, while laundering money to "faith-based" political allies.

Just a small sampling (through about half of the second term) is here.

Ronald Reagan: a man you'd like to share a stein with So like the other guy.

May Day: Cult of Personality - Performance

1986: Oliver Sacks' book on patients with unusual neurological disorders, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, spends
26 weeks on the NYT best seller list.

Paul Slansky says:

One highlight is an account of oppositely impaired patients—aphasiacs who can't understand words but do take in information from extraverbal cues, and tonal agnosiacs who understand the actual words but miss their emotional content—watching a speech by President Reagan.

"It was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice," writes Sacks, which caused the word-deaf aphasiacs to laugh hysterically at the Great Communicator, while one agnosiac, relying entirely on the actual words, sat in stony silence, concluding that "he is not cogent ... his word-use is improper" and suspecting that "he has something to conceal."

"Here then," writes Sacks "was the paradox of the President's speech. We normals — aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled were indeed well and truly fooled ... And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remain intact, undeceived."

A longer excerpt: The President's Speech