Opinion: Celebrating Reagan’s 101st Birthday

Ronald Reagan’s acting skills didn’t land him roles in great films, yet his audition for the presidency was successful.

Reagan began his movie career by narrating films that simulated firebombing raids over Japan. These films spliced recon footage of burnt cities with studio footage of model cities. Military generals couldn’t distinguish between the raw footage and the studio footage. Reagan said this was “the true magic of motion picture making.” Right from the start, Reagan’s experience of war and politics fused reality and illusion.

Reagan entered the White House when VHS and Nintendo entered everybody’s homes. Between television, video cassettes and archaic video games, living rooms were constantly flooded with a culture of violence and consumerism delivered by the byte. A large part of people’s reality was colonized by virtual reality as they were led by a president whose mind edited clips of Hollywood fantasy and political reality into a seamless narrative.

The word “idiot” originated during the peak of ancient Athenian democracy. An idiot (ἰδιώτης) was a person who didn’t participate in public politics. Idiots were private, egoistic people in contrast to citizens who were public and communal. Given this etymology, it’s fitting that television is called the “idiot box.”

The public experienced the president via television, and the president experienced the public via television. And so the president, who is supposed to represent the public, represented a representation of a televised public.

In a democracy, politics is im-media-te rather than media-ted. But under Reagan, politics consisted of images transmitted by satellites and cathode rays; political dialogue was reduced to cliché quips and movie quotes. This tele-politics wasn’t immediate in terms of being local, but it was immediate in terms of being broadcast on a live feed through analog audio/video signals.

Reagan’s producers created the Office of Public Diplomacy which used taxpayer money to brainwash taxpayers by using “perception management”. Since the realm of sensory experience was increasingly confined to television, Reagan’s scriptwriters targeted TV audiences with fictional dramas designed to achieve remote control over public thought. Psy-ops units drafted storylines that made the American public view the Contras (pro-dictatorship guerrillas with a grisly record of slaughter, rape, and torture who were trained by Argentinean neo-fascists and supplied with cash, weapons, and intel by the United States) as “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers”, to quote Reagan.

The President’s stage directors also sketched a plot for his State of the Union address. They story-boarded a shot where Reagan could salute the Challenger space shuttle as it blazed through the exosphere, thus adding spice to his teleprompted speech. His special effects team pressured NASA to ready-for-launch before safety protocols were met. Even though the astronauts had “the right stuff,” this political stunt was sabotaged in pre-production due to its hasty showtime, leaving the O-ring compromised and dooming the crew – a small price to pay for the privilege of being used as a prop in a living biopic. And despite the fact that this tragedy proved spaceships are accident-prone, Reagan’s backstage managers still advocated the placement of laser platforms in orbit around earth, which was given the cinematic title of Star Wars.

Gary Sinise, another Republican actor, said of Reagan, “I’m in awe. The life story of Ronald Reagan is truly worthy of its own 10-part miniseries.” If they ever greenlight that project it should include a dramatic reenactment of an episode from 1982 when Reagan removed Saddam Hussein from the official U.S. terrorist list and then began supporting him diplomatically, financially, and militarily while he annihilated Kurds. It could also include a montage of Reagan’s repeated support for Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge throughout the 1980s as it butchered countless Cambodians. An early segment could depict Reagan’s attempt to cover-up the El Mozote massacre where death squads that were trained, funded, and armed by the United States murdered hundreds of Salvadorans which, according to forensic analysts who recently surveyed an unearthed mountain of skulls, included many children.

As TV cameras rolled, Reagan was shot by a guy who tried to imitate the assassination attempt in Taxi Driver so he could impress Jodi Foster… or was it a teenage prostitute named Iris? A president who schizophrenically confused his movie roles with his actual self was shot by a guy who schizophrenically blended movies with reality.

After all, Reagan said that “Politics is just like show business.” But perhaps it’s worse than that: Fred Thompson, another actor-turned-Republican presidential candidate, said that “After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.”

Instead of a real democracy, Reagan gave us a reel democracy. He blurred the lines between statecraft and stagecraft and glutted TV junkies on a surfeit of jingoism and slogans. He was the blockbuster president in a celluloid politics that treated the voting booth like the box office. It wouldn’t be surprising to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and discover it was a video store.