[Marxism] Vintage Cockburn

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, June 11, 2004

Ronald Reagan in Truth and Fiction (and Yes, He Doomed the Crew of the
Challenger)
Jayson Blair, Alive and Well at the New York Times
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Pentagon Cartoons

They keep talking about Reagan being a "big picture" man, indifferent to
petty detail. The phrase gives a false impression, as though Reagan
looked out at the world as though at some Cinemascope epic, a vast
battlefield where, through those famous spectacles (one lense close-up,
for speech reading, the other long-distance) he could assess the global
balance of forces. Wrong. Reagan stayed awake only for the cartoons,
where the global balance of forces were set forth in simple terms, in
the tiffs between Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, or Tom and Jerry.

When he became president, and thus "commander in chief" the Joint Chiefs
of Staffs mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him,
replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in
simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed
off. The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists.
The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature,
with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
launchpads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shrivelled in their bunkers.
Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted
to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need
more money". Reagan really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked
for repeats.

There was no internationally recognized border in Reagan's own mind
between fantasy and fact, the dividing line having been abolished in the
early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war hero,
courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they made
training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first
wife, Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home
by suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe. "She'd
seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over a
picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in
Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make
it a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later
that, unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his
lense in "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his
front step in full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.

Reagan had absolutely no moral sense about truth or falsity. Forty years
after Fort Wacky, as commander-in-chief, R.R. told Yitzhak Shamir, then
prime minister of Israel, that he had helped to liberate Auschwitz, had
returned to Hollywood with film footage of the ghastly scenes he had
witnessed, and if in later years anyone controverted the reality of the
Holocaust over the Reagan dinner table, he would roll the footage till
the doubts were stilled. He said the same thing to Rabbi Martin Hier of
Los Angeles. It was all fantasy, but I'm sure Reagan believed it, the
same way he regarded his trip to the SS cemetery in Bitburg as a useful
reminder to Europeans of the great days of World War II, when the people
of the Free World-American, British, French and German-fought shoulder
to shoulder against Soviet totalitarianism.

The problem for the press (which groveled before him, at least until the
Iran-contra scandal broke) was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd
been caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote
about Auschwitz. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at
the time. When the Iran/contra scandal broke, he held a press conference
in which he said to Helen Thomas, "I want to get to the bottom of this
and find out all that has happened. And so far, I've told you all that I
know and, you know, the truth of the matter is, for quite some time, all
that you knew was what I'd told you." He went one better that George
Wasdhington in that he could't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the
truth, since he couldn't tell the difference between the two.

His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science , SF
magazines (the origin of Star Wars) lines from movies and homely saws
from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday supplements. He had a stout
belief in astrology, the stars being the twinkling penumbra of his
incandescent belief in the "free market," with whose motions it was
blasphemous to tamper. Astrologers exulted when they saw his visit to
Bitburg was timed to coincide with a concurrence of a full moon while at
its perigree with the earth, along with a total eclipse of the moon.
Elsewhere in the heavens Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto appeared to
move retrograde. The same four planets appeared retrograde a year later
when Reagan bombed Libya.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06112004.html
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