Who values Ronald Reagan over Abraham Lincoln?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 27, 2024 – The sand castle of the American establishment rests upon such sand as Ronald Reagan threw in Abraham Lincoln’s eyes.
Abraham Lincoln is the only man with mind and soul great enough to both write and deliver The Gettysburg Address. In 1863, he memorialized both Confederate and Union dead at Gettysburg, by reminding the world that the United States won the Civil War to bring about “a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
In 1986, using his Irish tenor and aw shucks demeanor, Ronald Reagan said what a hired pen wrote for him to say, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
With his adopted party now facing its sand castle fate, Reagan’s legacy is as flimsy as the thread that connects his fellow former democrat, Strom Thurmond, with Traitor Nixon, Pardon Ford, Bush and the Shrub.
It wasn’t until Hollywood so valued his ability to animate a fiction and do what a script tells him to do, that Reagan felt the pinch of the IRS, and abandoned his devotion to his first idol FDR, then to his colleagues in the Screen Actor’s Guild, then enrolled in GE’s corporate pitchman college.
GE transformed the democrat into a republican as easily as it transformed some of America’s greatest rivers into permanent PCBs dumps. Just as the EPA was signed into law by a republican, by republican dentistry, it has been rendered toothless.
Nixon won the presidency in 1968 after sending his hired man, Kissinger, to Paris where he convinced the North Vietnamese to reject the American peace plan, and wait for what a Nixon administration would deliver. The Nixon administration delivered six more years of profit to the republican donor base of Pentagon contractors.
But Nixon never would have won in 1968 if, in 1964, someone hadn’t convinced Thurmond, the nation’s most prominent segregationist, that he was more welcome on the republican side of the Senate than he was on the other side. That single act of treachery is the core of the southern strategy that carried Nixon into office.
Whether or not it will be sufficient to keep the current republican candidate out of prison, remains to be seen. Whereas it was Hollywood’s silver screen that carried Reagan to fame, the Yonkers felon owes his notoriety to realiTV, where he was hired to act like a big shot. Meanwhile his pals in popular media kept the people in the dark about the mess of his life. (Access to power makes a temporary nihilist even out of actual/former altar boys.)
That he already was so addled, in 2015, as to announce his climb into the republican clubhouse by riding a gilded escalator downward, should have been sufficient proof of his unfitness to serve in the presidency. But far too few voters knew what qualities of soul and mind a great nation requires. Dear readers, unless we resume reading and writing our own scripts, and get back to the same work as the man who also wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, our descendants will never forgive us.
Of course, we must add humility to Abraham Lincoln’s resume, because the Gettysburg Address includes these ominous words, which must echo in the hollow space under all those red ball caps: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here…”