Arguably, there's been one good side effect of the chaos in Cairo and the horrible blizzard. Had it been the kind of slow news week you'd normally get in the early February dead of winter, your TV set might have been overrun with a cavalcade of stars from the presidency of Ronald Reagan as well as assorted friends and family. (I mean, it's not like Peggy Noonan and Pat Buchanan would get airtime otherwise :-) If you haven't been paying close attention, and no one will blame you, this Sunday would have been the 100th birthday of the Gipper, and an American right wing that's been lobbying for the last 15 years to build a continuous Ronald Reagan Boulevard from gated exurb to shining gated exurb will take a break to throw itself a big party.
Here's some details from the New York Times:
Along with the requisite speeches and academic panels, the festivities include: a Rose Parade float, a six-foot-high cake, commemorative stamps and jelly beans, a Beach Boys concert, a tribute from the Jonas Brothers and a video homage at the Super Bowl, which is also on Sunday. The memorials, including a 21-gun salute and a graveside wreath-laying by Nancy Reagan, are expected to draw hundreds of former aides and supporters.
The article states that $5 million will be spent on the Reagan extravaganza -- or more than 10 times what was spent on the Lyndon Johnson centennial a couple of years ago. I'm sure they had no problem raising the cash -- the Reagan Library in Simi Valley that I visited a couple of years ago is backed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, right-wing burger king the late Carl Karcher, corporate raider and Swift Boat Veteran for the Truth backer Harold Simmons, and the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Japan.
The millionaire backers, who saw their U.S. tax rates plummet while Reagan was in the Oval Office (unlike blue-collar workers, who actually paid more to the government by the time Reagan left office, thanks to a hike in the payroll tax), are just one part of the most calculated myth-making machine in American history. During his time in office, Reagan was a divisive figure with very average approval ratings, who started his eight-year run with a surge in unemployment and ended with a scandal so serious that nearly a third of Americans thought he should resign. It was the 1980s, when the fictional words of Gordon Gekko that "greed is good" rang true for too many Americans, when a disastrous deregulation of the savings-and-loan industry foreshadowed the financial mayhem done in his name.
Today, with Reagan dead for nearly seven years after a decade out of view due to Alzheimer's disease, the Republican Party has sold a huge chunk of the electorate -- many too young to remember Reagan's presidency -- on a man who did not exist: A man who only cut taxes (he raised them almost every year of his presidency); who shrank the size of government (he increased it); who caused an American economy revival (while turning the nation from a creditor nation into a debtor nation); and who single-handed won the Cold War (although in a 1989 USA Today poll, before all the myth-making, 43 percent of Americans credited Mikhail Gorbachev for the collapse of the Berlin Wall and just 14 percent credited Reagan). Simply put, a myth.
As I wrote this week in an op-ed for CNN.com:
Both the towering slab of stone -- and the untruths told in its shadow -- epitomize what Ronald Reagan has become as the nation prepares to celebrate his centennial on February 6: Not a real flesh-and-blood man, but a myth. And this is not a harmless myth, but a political fairy tale that has brought disastrous real-world consequences for America and its citizens for more than a decade.
In the name of the Gipper, the nation has not only encouraged unbalanced budgets and corporate greed beyond anything that Reagan would have imagined or condoned, but waged a bloody war in Iraq that Reagan biographers such as Lou Cannon, who covered him for three decades, agree he would have never supported.
Instead of acknowledging that Reagan's 1980s presidency has been misrepresented to create disastrous policies in the 21st century, the body politic is doubling down on the Gipper -- on both sides. The Republican presidential sweepstakes for 2012 is shaping up as a competition for who can cite Reagan most often, while the Obama has been said to be engrossed in Cannon's exhaustive and balanced portrayal of Reagan's up-and-down presidency, "Role of a Lifetime."
Two years ago this week, alarmed by what was going on in this country, I published a book called "Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy." (Yes, I'd be very flattered if you used the Reagan birthday hoopla as an excuse to check it out.) Because of my ongoing interest in the topic -- and because Republicans are gearing up to deify Reagan in 2012, well beyond his mere canonization in 2008 -- I've written a couple of more pieces this week, including the one now up at CNN and also one that will run Sunday in the Washington Post, "5 myths about Ronald Reagan." I'm not alone -- other progressives are publishing articles this weekend trying to remind America that the real Reagan was a man, and a flawed one -- not a myth.
But the few of us can't do it alone. It's important for all of us who want a progressive vision to prevail in the 21st Century to learn the facts about Ronald Reagan and then to share his real history -- this is why God or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever invented Facebook and Twitter, is it not? -- with friends, family, whoever. We can't allow a new generation of voters to be seduced by a fairy tale. Although many of us here have bitter political memories of the 1980s, we also shouldn't deny that there also were a few good aspects to the very human Reagan. Most importantly, he was sincere in working hard to reduce nuclear weapons, with a dream of abolishing them altogether. We should not be afraid to bring up that very real aspect of the Reagan record (the right-wingers certainly are!) and more than we should be afraid of dredging up the darker side. John Adams said famously (and Reagan famously botched it) that "facts are stubborn things."
It's time to teach America the facts about Ronald Reagan.