I'm avoiding the TV this week. Just seeing the CNN coverage on mute at the gym was more than enough... though the few minutes of Reagan's speech at the 1992 "Culture War" Republican convention in Houston on C-SPAN last night was pretty interesting. I felt like I've seen Reagan's face caricatured and cartooned so many times that it was almost difficult for me to process seeing the real thing.
Anyway, the best assessment of the man's life and legacy I've yet seen is this piece by William Rivers Pitt. A taste:
Reagan was able, by virtue of his towering talents in this arena, to sell to the American people a flood of poisonous policies. He made Americans feel good about acting against their own best interests. He sold the American people a lemon, and they drive it to this day as if it was a Cadillac. It isn't the lies that kill us, but the myths, and Ronald Reagan was the greatest myth-maker we are ever likely to see.
It's a devastating piece of rhetoric: Pitt starts with a well-deserved salute to Reagan's farewell from public life, the 1994 letter in which he revealed he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Then he adds a personal note about a relative who similarly saw her life eroded by that disease. Then he unloads with a critique far more effective for the kind words he preceded it with.
(Another Reagan song worth giving a listen: "If Reagan Played Disco," by the late, great Minutemen.)
Meanwhile, with the campaign suspended for the week and the Phillies too phrustrating for me to really say anything coherent or useful about them, not sure what will show up on the blog this week. This might temporarily turn into Dave's Movie Moot-a-thon, as I've seen more films than Phillies wins over the last couple weeks (admittedly, that's not saying much).
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