New Reagan documentary unveils ugly reality

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6. Some meaty excerpts:

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.... ... In one scene, we hear Reagan, then a sitting governor on a private call with Nixon, refer to African UN delegates as “monkeys”. As he conducted his research, the director was surprised by how open the uglier sides of Reagan’s personality were permitted to be. “It was very informative about how the press covered Reagan that all the archival materials – even the unflattering ones – were on the record and quite available,” Tyrnauer says. ....

... The most lasting, deleterious lesson of the Reagan tenure was that it doesn’t matter if something is true or not, so long as enough people believe that it is. As daily life continued to worsen for every American not lucky enough to be on Wall Street or run a business, Reagan’s own words assured his constituency that they were actually enjoying the greatest surge in prosperity that the nation had ever seen. In conversation, Tyrnauer speaks more candidly about Reagan’s failures than the professional decorum of his work can allow.

“He knew what he knew,” Tyrnauer says. “He wasn’t intellectually curious. He wasn’t a deep thinker. He was, at heart, a reactionary. He was given the nuclear codes and the Oval Office and the greatest bully pulpit in the world, and what did he do with it? He tried to short-circuit the federal government in really detrimental ways. He implemented policies that hurt African Americans and economically disadvantaged minorities. He believed things that weren’t true and repeated them publicly. He was into science denial, he was a seeming believer in creation theory over evolution, he ignored and denied the Aids pandemic. He said trees cause pollution, which reminds us now of Trump saying wind turbines cause pollution.”

The actor who became the most powerful man on earth remains a potent Republican fable, in part for how it suggests that a lack of experience can be a strength rather than a weakness. The inexplicable ascendancy of Trump re-established that a total absence of political bona fides will pose no impediment to success, instead plowing through criticisms and obstacles a more knowledgeable candidate would be expected to address. A noisy, ultraconservative, often racist razzle dazzle proves more than sufficient to get the job (of hoarding and exploiting clout, not safeguarding American citizens) done. ....

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