"There you go again!"

[Keaney Michael <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The cult of Reagan

The Reagan Legacy Project is hell-bent on securing a prominent memorial for
Ronnie in the US capital. Martin Kettle in Washington argues that posterity
should be doing the hard work

The Guardian, Friday September 15, 2000

The cult of the individual is normally part of the political culture of
communist regimes or other dictatorships. But the supporters of Ronald
Reagan are doing their best to install just such a cult at the heart of the
world's most powerful democracy.

Not content with ensuring that Washington's domestic airport is named after
their hero, or with renaming the capital city's international conference
centre after him too, supporters of the former president are now poised to
win congressional approval for a law that would instruct the US government
to erect a Ronald Reagan memorial on the Mall, right in the centre of
Washington.

The plan to honour a living politician in this way would not seem out of
place in North Korea or Iraq. But it is unprecedented in all American
history and it would place Reagan among the most publicly esteemed and
honoured of all US leaders.

Only George Washington, who founded the nation, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote
its constitution, Abraham Lincoln, who saved it, and Franklin Roosevelt, who
led it through economic depression and world war, have been thought worthy
enough to merit national memorials on the Mall.

In each case however, the memorials to these presidents were only proposed,
approved and erected long after their deaths and after later generations had
had time to weigh the leaders' long-term legacy more dispassionately than
their immediate contemporaries could trust themselves to do.

The Washington Monument was not begun until 1848. Work on the Lincoln
Memorial began in 1912. Authorisation for the Jefferson Memorial was enacted
in 1934, while the Roosevelt Memorial was opened only in 1997. In each case,
nearly half a century had passed since the death of the memorialised
president - and more than a century in the case of Jefferson.

The idea that Reagan is uniquely entitled to more privileged treatment is
bizarre. Now stricken with Alzheimer's, Reagan was a personally charming
president whose principal achievement was to make a generation of Americans
feel good about themselves.

His substantive legacy is much harder to quantify, and the idea that he
should be numbered among these other indisputably historic leaders - and in
his own lifetime too - owes nothing to consensus or objectivity, and
everything to a fanatical campaign among conservative Republicans determined
to raise Reagan into this select company.

The Reagan Legacy Project, which has its headquarters in Washington, states
without any qualification that "Ronald Reagan was America's greatest
president". Its aim is to ensure "naming something significant after
President Reagan in each of the 50 states and in every county of America."

Among the achievements it claims so far are everything from a US Navy
aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, which is due for completion in
2002, to the Ronald Reagan Fundamental school in Yuma, Arizona.

Other commemorations include the Ronald Reagan professorship at California's
Pepperdine University, the college which invited the former independent
counsel Kenneth Starr to become its principal, and the Ronald Reagan
Foundation for Conservative Studies at the Texas A&M University in Bryan,
Texas, also home to the George Bush Presidential library.

Some supporters of the project make clear that they will not be truly
content until they have had a head of President Reagan added to the Mount
Rushmore monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where Presidents
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt are commemorated.

Full article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,368743,00.html