A noted fantasist, Reagan is perhaps best remembered for the eight years he spent believing he ruled an entirely fictional United States. To the old trouper's delight, this was a delusion shared by most of his compatriots, which is why his imaginary nation still subsumes ours to this day.
...
It helped that, just like a play, nearly all the worst stuff happened discreetly offstage, as far as most of the American public was concerned—like the thousands who died of AIDS on his watch or the 20,000 casualties in the Nicaraguan civil war Reagan promoted, illegally, when Congress tried to thwart him. I can still remember my patriotic thrill when he pronounced the thuggish Contras "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers"; so far as I know, George Washington never went in for mortaring hospitals, but that may only be because he didn't have mortars.
Sure, the Iran-Contra scandal was a worse threat to American democracy than Watergate—short-circuiting our whole system of government, as opposed to diddling an election that was a lock anyway. But nobody was about to impeach smiling Ron over it, partly because nobody really understood how it worked. Something people did understand, but noticeably couldn't get outraged about—for many go-getting American psychos, it was part of the turn-on—was the callousness that the Reagan administration's social Darwinism urged all good citizens to see as a virtue; even allowing that Democratic social programs hadn't fixed the inner cities' problems, why it was either more humane or more sensible to let them rot was never explained. But after all, if urban African Americans wanted to escape gangs, poverty, and despair, there was always the army.
At the core of the Reagan legend is the mantra that his presidency made America feel good about itself again—an interesting claim for Republicans to make, since it sounds like just the sort of self-esteem therapy they snort at when say, first-graders are the beneficiaries. Not entirely inappropriately, the picture it conjures up is of a commander in chief playing Julie Andrews as the governess in The Sound of Music: "You've brought music back into the house, Ron." In individual cases, bucking up a patient's spirits when his or her material situation isn't improving—or is, in fact, deteriorating, as ours was from infrastructure to multitrillion-dollar deficitis to yawning disparities between rich and poor—is usually accomplished with drugs; Reagan was one. In a wonderful Herblock cartoon from 1986, a headline reporting that the U.S. has just become the world's leading debtor nation is greeted by hordes of celebrating Americans all holding up proud forefingers: "We're number one!"
och...
Mystique he undeniably had. No other chief executive has been so at ease with his own preposterousness, baffling everyone who ever tried to analyze him. The formidable Garry Wills wrestled the enigma in Reagan's America: Innocents at Home, and emerged never having laid a glove on the man; indeed, Wills has never been the same since. Nixon is comprehensible; Reagan is not. He was affable but remote, folksy but not human, so completely the actor that his fraudulence was his integrity; unlike poor Nixon, who couldn't ask for the time without raising the suspicion that he meant to steal your watch, Reagan was at his most convincing and disarmingly sincere when he was spouting transparent balderdash. Up to a point, anyhow—in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells a remarkable story about watching a presidential speech in a roomful of people with severe aphasia, a condition that impairs or destroys understanding of verbal content but leaves its victims preternaturally alert to the authenticity of facial expressions, mannerisms, and tone. Every solemn, ringingly earnest sentence out of Reagan's mouth had the patients rolling on the floor laughing.
James Ridgway i samma tidning påpekar att Reagans agenda:
called for doing the unthinkable: grabbing control of Congress and smashing the New Deal, while leaving a token "safety net" in its place. It was in the early days of Reagan that the homeless began to appear in growing numbers on the streets of American cities, an early sign of the slow process of turning over the functions of the federal government to companies through such ideas as privatization.
Richard Goldstein i samma tidning har följande superba titel på sin artikel:
Gipper-dämmerung
Reagan leaves the building. He put a smiley face on cruelty, but at least he chose mammon over god.
Those who thought Karl Rove would keep Ronald Reagan on life support until election eve were proven wrong when the Gipper died on Saturday. In TV terms, he showed very bad timing.
Och om Reagan och dagens president:
It's a trope of mourning to intone, "We will not see his like again." But Reagan's death evokes more tangible feelings. Much of the praise is laced with implicit disparagment of Bush. In stark contrast to Ron, Dubya isn't a very loveable guy. He's rigid where Ron was loose; pissed-off instead of happy-go-lucky. And as for his intellect, the best his supporters will say is that Bush isn't the dummy he's made out to be. He actually reads briefing papers.
The fascinating thing about postmodern nostalgia is that it elevates the bottom, thereby placing the present on even lower ground. The fuss over Reagan's speeches and letters reminds us that, if the current occupant of the White House ever writes a memoir, even his commas will be ghosted.
Guardian har också en mycket bra artikel om Ronard Reagans mörka arv, saker som SvD inte pratar om i sina landssorg-betondade ledare.
Guardian Unlimited | Economic dispatch | Reagan's taxing legacy
The anti-government rhetoric of [Ronald Reagan och Margaret Thatcher] did a lot of damage to the very concept of public service. In front of cabinet ministers and officials, Mrs Thatcher used to rail against government as though she were an outsider from another planet, not at the head of it.
And the anti-government rhetoric of both was overdone. Of course, governments and officialdom have to be watched at every turn. But it is impossible to run large democratic societies without a considerable degree of government - the real point being that the emphasis should be on good government, not no government.
There was a fundamental flaw at the heart of Reagonomics, namely the idea - epitomised by the famous Laffer Curve - that tax cuts would pay for themselves via greater incentives.
The truth was that the supply side doctrine was a crude and intellectually shabby attempt to justify tax cuts for the rich. For those with incomes above $250,000 (£135,879) a year, taxes as a percentage of income came down from 48.6% to 38.9% between 1980 and 1984.
The way in which certain tax exemptions were removed actually led to a rise in the proportion of income paid in tax by the lowest income groups. In most of the eulogies for Reagan this week, all those cuts in government expenditure on food stamps, school lunches, welfare Medicaid and subsidised housing have been forgotten.
The great economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it in a nutshell when he said there was something strange about a doctrine holding that the rich would work harder if they had more money and the poor would if they had less.
Det är intressant att se att moderaterna under Bo Lundgren försökte "göra en Reagan" genom att imitera hans Reaganomics vid förra valet. Vi vet av erfaraneheterna från USA att detta koncept helt enkelt inte fungerar. De svenska progressiva bör imitera den svenska nykonservativa rörelsen och studera och lära sig av USA. Genom att studera det progressiva USA skulle de kunna upplysa det svenska folket om de fruktansvärda resultaten av den amerikanska nykonservativa politiken.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar