reality check?

Hi JIm & all,

I watched a documentary last night about Gil Scott heron, who of course
has written some excellent tunes in his time - one of them is B-Movie.

I listened to B-Movie again from my own collection, bit scratchy now -
but the lyrics are still so on ther spot today - which is of course a
very sad state of affairs. The over-pompus, pretentious send off, of
Reagan, serves more as a propaganda/promotion/distraction form the
slack, phoney war for oil and empire-making.

Gil Scott Heron's lyrics tell the story how it is - still is. You can
even replace the Reagan name with Bush, in the lyrics and unfortunately
will understand the issues that have not gone away but actually have now
got worse.

marc…

*B-Movie*

Well, the first thing I want to say is…"Mandate my ass!"

Because it seems as though we've been convinced that 26% of the
registered voters, not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the
registered voters form a mandate - or a landslide. 21% voted for Skippy
and 3, 4% voted for somebody else who might have been running.

But, oh yeah, I remember. In this year that we have now declared the
year from Shogun to Reagan, I remember what I said about Reagan…meant
it. Acted like an actor…Hollyweird. Acted like a liberal. Acted like
General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted
like a republican. Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him
for president. And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is
actually a mandate. We're all actors in this I suppose.

What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from
a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer
names the tune…the consumer has got to dance. That's the way it is. We
used to be a producer - very inflexible at that, and now we are
consumers and, finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and
minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the 3rd World.
They have bought the 2nd World and put a firm down payment on the 1st
one. Controlling your resources we'll control your world. This country
has been surprised by the way the world looks now. They don't know if
they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan. They don't know if they want
to be diplomats or continue the same policy - of nuclear nightmare
diplomacy. John Foster Dulles ain't nothing but the name of an airport now.

The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want
to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week.
Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was
the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible
moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white
horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment -
someone always came to save America at the last moment - especially in
"B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the
future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was
no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan - and it has placed
us in a situation that we can only look at - like a "B" movie.

Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren't zeros.
Before fair was square. When the cavalry came straight away and
all-American men were like Hemingway to the days of the wondrous "B"
movie. The producer underwritten by all the millionaires necessary will
be Casper "The Defensive" Weinberger - no more animated choice is
available. The director will be Attila the Haig, running around
frantically declaring himself in control and in charge. The ultimate
realization of the inmates taking over at the asylum. The screenplay
will be adapted from the book called "Voodoo Economics" by George "Papa
Doc" Bush. Music by the "Village People" the very military "Macho Man."

"Company!!!"
"Macho, macho man!"
" Two-three-four."
" He likes to be - well, you get the point."
"Huuut! Your left! Your left! Your left…right, left, right, left,
right…!"

A theme song for saber-rallying and selling wars door-to-door. Remember,
we're looking for the closest thing we can find to John Wayne. Cliches
abound like kangaroos - courtesy of some spaced out Marlin Perkins, a
Reagan contemporary. Cliches like, "itchy trigger finger" and "tall in
the saddle" and "riding off or on into the sunset." Cliches like, "Get
off of my planet by sundown!" More so than cliches like, "he died with
his boots on." Marine tough the man is. Bogart tough the man is. Cagney
tough the man is. Hollywood tough the man is. Cheap stick tough. And
Bonzo's substantial. The ultimate in synthetic selling: A Madison Avenue
masterpiece - a miracle - a cotton-candy politician…Presto! Macho!

"Macho, macho man!"

Put your orders in America. And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate
with the accent being on the nukes - cause all of a sudden we have
fallen prey to selective amnesia - remembering what we want to remember
and forgetting what we choose to forget. All of a sudden, the man who
called for a blood bath on our college campuses is supposed to be Dudley
"God-damn" Do-Right?

"You go give them liberals hell Ronnie." That was the mandate. To the
new "Captain Bly" on the new ship of fools. It was doubtlessly based on
his chameleon performance of the past - as a liberal democrat - as the
head of the Studio Actor's Guild. When other celluloid saviors were
cringing in terror from McCarthy - Ron stood tall. It goes all the way
back from Hollywood to hillbilly. From liberal to libelous, from "Bonzo"
to Birch idol…born again. Civil rights, women's rights, gay
rights…it's all wrong. Call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception
of freedom gone wild. God damn it…first one wants freedom, then the
whole damn world wants freedom.

Nostalgia, that's what we want…the good ol' days…when we gave'em
hell. When the buck stopped somewhere and you could still buy something
with it. To a time when movies were in black and white - and so was
everything else. Even if we go back to the campaign trail, before
six-gun Ron shot off his face and developed hoof-in-mouth. Before the
free press went down before full-court press. And were reluctant to
review the menu because they knew the only thing available was - Crow.

Lon Chaney, our man of a thousand faces - no match for Ron. Doug Henning
does the make-up - special effects from Grecian Formula 16 and Crazy
Glue. Transportation furnished by the David Rockefeller of Remote
Control Company. Their slogan is, "Why wait for 1984? You can panic
now…and avoid the rush."

So much for the good news…

As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation. And here's a look at the
closing numbers - racism's up, human rights are down, peace is shaky,
war items are hot - the House claims all ties. Jobs are down, money is
scarce - and common sense is at an all-time low on heavy trading. Movies
were looking better than ever and now no one is looking because, we're
starring in a "B" movie. And we would rather had John Wayne…we would
rather had John Wayne.

"You don't need to be in no hurry.
You ain't never really got to worry.
And you don't need to check on how you feel.
Just keep repeating that none of this is real.
And if you're sensing, that something's wrong,
Well just remember, that it won't be too long
Before the director cuts the scene…yea."

"This ain't really your life,
Ain't really your life,
Ain't really ain't nothing but a movie."

[Refrain repeated about 25 times or more in an apocalyptic crescendo
with a military cadence.]

"This ain't really your life,
Ain't really your life,
Ain't really ain't nothing but a movie."

>Living in Canada, we see a lot of media from the USA. The mainstream USA
>media is currently absolutely saturated with celebration of the
>'achievement' of Ronald Reagan. I haven't seen any comment on this. To me it
>seems like macabre Orwellian propaganda under a heavy dose of hollywood? but
>then the reagan folks, with their actor-puppet president, harnessed the
>dreamtones of hollywood in the service of political propaganda. i read in
>time magazine that reagan was the greatest president of the second half of
>the twentieth century because he won the cold war and returned the usa to
>prosperity (as in 'american psycho').
>
>does this max hyperbole in the usa going on at the mo about reagan seem to
>americans as strange as it does here? mostly it seems like a chilling
>reminder that the same beasts are in power now.
>
>ja?
>
>
>+
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Its been a trip.
Everyday, what else is going on and how long has the Gipper been on ice for
this one. The neo-con trump card. Fresh off life support. I wonder what was
in that casket that was marched and paraded back and forth across the US for
seven days in the summer.

The conservatives are up to something very spooky.
Cross between Brave New World and 1984. Is this the beginning of the future.

What is the next step?



On 6/12/04 4:35 AM, "Jim Andrews" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Living in Canada, we see a lot of media from the USA. The mainstream USA
> media is currently absolutely saturated with celebration of the
> 'achievement' of Ronald Reagan. I haven't seen any comment on this. To me it
> seems like macabre Orwellian propaganda under a heavy dose of hollywood? but
> then the reagan folks, with their actor-puppet president, harnessed the
> dreamtones of hollywood in the service of political propaganda. i read in
> time magazine that reagan was the greatest president of the second half of
> the twentieth century because he won the cold war and returned the usa to
> prosperity (as in 'american psycho').
>
> does this max hyperbole in the usa going on at the mo about reagan seem to
> americans as strange as it does here? mostly it seems like a chilling
> reminder that the same beasts are in power now.
>
> ja?
>
>
> +
> -> post: [email protected]
> -> questions: [email protected]
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>

On 6/12/04 4:35 AM, "Jim Andrews" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Living in Canada, we see a lot of media from the USA. The mainstream USA
> media is currently absolutely saturated with celebration of the
> 'achievement' of Ronald Reagan. I haven't seen any comment on this.

Yeah, it's freaking eery. But here's one comment in today's Times ("Arts &
Leisure"?!) I thought worth reading.

best,
j

////////////////

FRANK RICH
First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double
NYTimes
Published: June 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/arts/13RICH.html

BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" after
he brings out the actual Marshall McLuhan to silence a pontificating
McLuhan expert with whom he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend
life was like that.

George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat Ronald Reagan's
1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy
Noonan). It was not the first time that the current president had taken a
page from his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the most
humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death had pushed the replay
of his original oration to center stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is
yanked on screen in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks
away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque speech atomized
into white noise, to the limited extent that it was broadcast at all.

ome would argue that no politician in his right mind would even invite
comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the aftermath of Reagan's death,
his fans and foes alike remain agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may
have brought the Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived
there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer. They were a
product of training, not accident. He had first performed as a child in
church skits put on by his mother. Later came the legendary path through
baseball announcing, 52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the
conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became known as the
Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned politicians, whether George
Murphy before him or Arnold Schwarzenegger after, can match this rsum. To
see the difference between an acting professional and an aspiring amateur,
just look at the one recent president who had show business on the brain,
Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's act may be better than any Reagan
successor, he nonetheless lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit
his mark, not to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.

Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate Reagan ideology
("The era of big government is over") for political expediency. But no one
has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and
substance than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed
Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I
don't know how you miss them." Yes, the parallels are there hammered in
by Mr. Bush's packagers so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and
company may have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of
Reagan's presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood epic that has
glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the retreat from Lebanon with
impressive ease, has brought into clear focus the size of the gap between
the two men. To say that difference in stature is merely a function of an
actor's practiced skill at performance is both to understate the character
of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the art of acting.

The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing
if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut
ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their
construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his
administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a
practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on
camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara.
In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil"
with the "evil empire."

Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone of Reagan's.
Mr. Bush is always characterized by his associates as a "big picture" guy
who leaves any detail that can't be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As
Donald Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "This president
has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan did where he'd look out,
way out to the horizon and plant a standard out there and then point
toward it."

To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr. Bush's
certitude about his war on terrorism matches Reagan's unyielding
anti-communism. Both presidents made a religion out of big tax cuts,
talked of curbing government even as they increased spending and then
serenely ignored the daunting deficits that ensued.

Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels. Both presidents
tried every stunt imaginable to create the illusion that their wartime
service had not been confined to the home front. Both pandered to the
religious right by impeding urgently needed federal medical research that
would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with stem cells). Where
Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as refreshingly disdainful of
intellectuals, critics see a smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their
own. The ur-text of today's profuse Bushisms can be found in such
Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to South America:
"Well, I learned a lot. . . . You'd be surprised. They're all individual
countries." Both presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their
endless vacations.

But whether one likes either president or not, the difference between them
remains far greater than any similarities, and that difference has more
ramifications during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an
actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the heartwarming
role of himself." Though he never studied with Lee Strasberg, he practiced
the method; his performance was based, however loosely, on the emotional
memory of a difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes
unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this background during
the Depression, developing the considerable ambition needed to work his
way through college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the
sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his vision of America
as a place where perseverance could pay off for anyone. It was indeed the
heartwarming role of himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own
biography eventually stripped out).

Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger success story.
Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during the war, but as a teenage
riverfront lifeguard in Illinois, he rescued 77 people, demonstrating
early on the physical courage that would see him through an assassination
attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business, he was always
engaged in politics (to the point of alienating his first wife, Jane
Wyman, who found his preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen
Actors Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce labor and
blacklisting battles.

Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond Hollywood. A contract
player who became "Errol Flynn of the B's," he wasn't a big enough star to
merit all the perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career
dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to serving (at age 42)
as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy, showgirl-laden revue at the Last
Frontier casino on the Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E.
spokesman, he spent years meeting workers in the company factories that he
repeatedly toured when off camera.

Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as
president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The
script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he
invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a
"welfare queen") and preached family values he didn't practice with his
own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from
experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of
a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades
when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred
Bloomingdale.

Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been manufactured from
scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured out of the cocoon of privilege.
He "lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business," said Ron
Reagan Jr. in 2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an
obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his imagination to
improvise play-by-play radio accounts of baseball games based on sparse
telegraphic accounts, Mr. Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the
help of cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of engagement with
either issues or people beyond big oil or the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit
until he belatedly went into the family business of politics.

He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part. In the new
issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes to James Fallows that Mr.
Bush, a smoother speaker in his Texas political career than now, may have
"deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne" since
then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type manliness." It's as if
he's eradicating his patrician one-term father to adopt the two-term
Gipper as his dad instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the
prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a
jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone
threatens to keep him from getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine
Reagan countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes like
John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has done in the heat of
close campaigns.

Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an interview in which Tom
Brokaw challenged his efforts to pull off a bigger flimflam than
impersonating Ronald Reagan the conflation of the Iraq war with World War
II. "You referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack on
America' that we went through during our time," Mr. Brokaw said. "But that
wasn't Iraq who did that, that was al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the
World War II dead behind him, the president retreated to his familiar
script ("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think the
lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did not sound like
someone who had ever experienced pain of the life-and-death intensity that
comes with war. The problem is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's
lilting vocal delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no
performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it doesn't contain at
least a kernel of emotional truth.

> … Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I don't know how you miss them."

Dubya ran in 2000 as a "Compassionate Conservative". Doesn't this suggest he was different from the uncomapssionate conservatives before him?

J

Hit the nail right on the head.
But he will forget that he talked about that.
And you know since 911, America is no place to be compassionate.

On 6/13/04 10:03 AM, "Jason Van Anden" <[email protected]> wrote:

>> … Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I
>> don't know how you miss them."
>
> Dubya ran in 2000 as a "Compassionate Conservative". Doesn't this suggest he
> was different from the uncomapssionate conservatives before him?
>
> J
>
> +
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I dunno if this is the place to discuss Dubya who is behaving
like a King. Other than one can see he is screwing up the lives
of Artists via the Patriot Act. Fortunately or Unfortunately I
have never had to try to get a posting as an Art Professor. So people
like poor Steve Kurtz could not have known that Buffalo is not
like a freedom friendly place. And if you look at the Art Department
of our branch of UC they are pretty Classical Canon types.

But I'd certainly feel safer on the West Coast than in other places
in the US. Although Dubya claims he can pretty much hold a US Citizen
without charge indefinitely on his word alone. I hope we do get rid
of him in November, well make him a lame duck and then can go back
to Texas in January.

But part of the problem I suspect is Americans don't really understand
the freedoms they have. I mean one can quote the Bill of Right to them
and ask them without telling them it was the Bill of Rights and they
are sure "you can't say or do that". So I think the problem might be
ourselves and that for ome reasons most Americans are willing to forgive
their police even the most egregious zcrew-ups. It's hard to talk about
your rights with guns pointed at you. Oh sigh…

Have Fun,
Sends Steve



>> … Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are
>> there. I don't know how you miss them."
>
> Dubya ran in 2000 as a "Compassionate Conservative". Doesn't this
> suggest he was different from the uncomapssionate conservatives before
> him?
>
> J
>
> +
> -> post: [email protected]
> -> questions: [email protected]
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
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> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>