Ronald Reagan (1911-2004): An Obituary

[Euphen]

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004): An Obituary
By David North
9 June 2004

His Grace! impossible! what, dead?
Of old age too, and in his bed! ...
Twas time in conscience he should die!
This world he cumber’d long enough;
He burnt his candle to the snuff;
And that’s the reason, some folks think,
He left behind so great a stink.”

Jonathan Swift, from A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

It was inevitable that the death of Ronald Reagan, when it finally came, would be greeted with an effusion of saccharine tributes to the 40th President of the United States. But nothing could have quite prepared the innocent bystander for the eruption of dishonest, cynical and preposterously stupid propaganda with which the media and political establishment have responded to the death of Reagan. Of course, given the unending stream of bad news pouring out of Iraq and other parts of the real world during the past year, the Bush administration and its friends in the media were looking desperately for some way to change the subject and counter the increasingly depressed and surly mood in the country. The memorial celebrations of the 60th anniversary of D-Day were intended originally to create that diversion. But the timely death of Reagan has provided an even greater opportunity for an explosion of media-sponsored hero-worshipping, flag-waving and mythmaking.

One is compelled to admit that there is nothing quite so awesome to behold as the total mobilization of the American media. Since the announcement of Reagan’s death on Saturday, the massive weight of this propaganda machine has been set into motion in what amounts to a vast exercise in historical falsification. The modern media version of the air brush is being applied to the years of the Reagan administration. The social misery in the United States caused by Reagan’s policies; the tens of thousands of lives lost in Central America at the hands of fascist death squads funded illegally by his government; the rampant criminality in an administration that was the most corrupt in 20th century America—all this and other similarly smelly details are being more or less ignored. One reads nothing of his defense of apartheid in South Africa, his funding of countless right-wing dictatorships, or even of his tribute to SS soldiers buried in a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. The media strives not only to suppress any objective appraisal of Reagan’s life and political career, but even to censor reference to the more unsavory elements of his administration’s policies.

The aim of this unrelenting propaganda is not only to mislead and confuse, but also to intimidate public opinion, that is, to foster a sense of political and social isolation among countless Americans who despised Reagan and everything he represented, to create in their minds, if not doubt about their own judgment, then at least a sense of futility about the prospects for dissenting views in the United States.

But the entire affair—the five days of official mourning, the endless media coverage, the spectacle of a state funeral—leaves the country cold. On Monday morning, in the schools, in offices and factories, there was little indication that the citizenry felt that they had witnessed the passing of a great and significant man, that they, as individuals and as a people, had suffered a genuine loss. For those old enough to remember the death of Roosevelt, let alone that of Kennedy, the contrast could not have been starker. Yes, those men, too, were bourgeois politicians and defenders of the existing social order. But Roosevelt and Kennedy had with genuine eloquence given voice, at different stages of their political careers, to the democratic aspirations of the working class and other oppressed strata of American society; and won for themselves an affection that was deeply felt. Real tears were shed when those men died.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/reag-j09.shtml