Sometimes the ignorance, bigotry, and hatred in this country is so overwhelming it breaks your heart.
Exhibit A- This morning, my wife's slightly redneck but usually decent cousin posted on Facebook actually begging ISIS to kill President Obama. Really. My hands literally shook with rage and shock. After all, I knew he was a conservative, but I really never associated such levels of hatred with him. What the hell is the matter with these people? What the hell happened to make this type of thing respectable in certain circles?
Well, Ronald Reagan happened. And he is still with us.
Reagan has been called the "Great Communicator." But what exactly did he communicate? That
it is OK to indulge in your hatreds and your selfishness. Reagan made it respectable to be a racist. Reagan made it respectable to be selfish and greedy. Reagan made it respectable to be a warmonger. In short Reagan made it respectable to indulge in sin as to your public actions. We still live in Ronald Reagans dictatorship of the national soul. My entire adult life has been spent in utter disgust of the coarseness and cruelty of our national discourse. My entire adult life has been spent in the fruitless hope that this national nightmare might end. And I am always disappointed. The middle class being strangled to death? It is the result of Reagan's ideas, and they still prevail. Endless, fruitless, war? Reagan paved the way with his belligerence. After the Masters of the Universe nearly tanked Western Civilization in 2008, I thought people would finally wake up and smell the coffee. We finally elected a Democratic President without the support of the South. Finally, I thought, we have finally shrugged off the poisonous legacy of Ronald Reagan. No such luck. The hatred and ignorance is still with us, only stronger and harder than before. Fox News, Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Rick Scott. and many more. They are all the bastard children of Ronald Reagan. All they do is follow Reagan's ideas to their viscous and poisonous extremes. They would not exist without Ronald Reagan. Uncle Ron's superficial charm is long gone. The meanness and hatred is still with us. And millions of white conservatives proudly sprew out his hatred, pleased as punched with themselves, blissfully unaware of the shriveling of their immortal souls.
How can this be so? One of the reasons is that liberals are blissfully unaware of Reagan's total triumph. It is often said that today society is the result of a deal between liberals and conservatives. Liberals got the culture while letting conservatives run the economy. But as David Sirota explains in his book Back To Our Future, the liberals never got the culture either. The ideas of the Reagan Decade, the 1980's, still have a stranglehold on our soul. This is because of the reinforcements of pop culture. The so called hippies of the 60's have been totally demonized by characters such as Forrest Gump and Michael J. Fox's Alex Keaton in Family Ties. War has been glamorized by movies like First Blood, Top Gun, Red Dawn and too many others. Pop Culture has totally glamorized the myth of the Lone Hero against the Evil, Stupid Bureaucrat. Finally we accept black people only if they no longer act black. Bill Cosby's Cliff Huxtable. Oprah Winfrey. Michael Jordan was able to bleach himself in white people's eyes. LeBron James has not. Barack Obama thought he bleached himself enough to be accepted by whites. But it turned out that Reagan's America still thinks he's a nigger. So much for "hope" and "change". Reagan's America never changes. David Sirota is an expert an pop culture as only a child of the 80's is. Read his book. You will be both greatly entertained and greatly angered. Freaking Ronald Reagan never dies.
I write this four days after the ISIS terrorist attacks on France. But I don't worry about ISIS destroying America. I'm afraid Ronald Reagan has already managed it.
No comments:
Post a Comment