At 02:30 PM 9/15/00 +0300, you wrote:
>The cult of Reagan
>
>The Reagan Legacy Project is hell-bent on securing a prominent memorial for
>Ronnie in the US capital. Martin Kettle in Washington argues that posterity
>should be doing the hard work
>
>The Guardian, Friday September 15, 2000
>
>The cult of the individual is normally part of the political culture of
>communist regimes or other dictatorships. But the supporters of Ronald
>Reagan are doing their best to install just such a cult at the heart of the
>world's most powerful democracy.
However, you've got to admit that a cult of personality around a dead
person (or a brain-dead person) is better than one around a living one.
That's because it can't go to the leader's head or encourage her or him to
utilize the cult for personal purposes.
The Ronnie-lovers are of course pushing his free market/supply-side and
militarist ideology, which they share. There's a freeway here in Los
Angeles named after him: appropriately, it goes to Simi Valley, the
almost-entirely whites-only suburb where the 4 cops who beat Rodney King
were acquitted (and where lots of cops live).
Of course, we used to have a freeway named after Richard Nixon, so the
Ronnie-mania can be rolled back. (BTW, that freeway really goes nowhere,
connecting the main freeway with Marina del Rey, where the yachts are.)
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
