Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Poor Ron is dead

Oh, it's just so sad, isn't it? Poor Ronny Reagan is dead. He 
will be missed, won't he?

And not just because He Made America Great Again or because He 
Won the Cold War. But because he epitomised the fact that, in 
America, any schmuck can become President.

All it takes is wealthy corporate support, a thick skin, a 
careless attitude with the truth and total contempt for your 
constituents/voters. Ronny had spent his life cultivating just 
those attributes.

Before he went to Hollywood on the strengths of his physical 
charms, he was in sports reporting — a form of journalism only 
slightly better than writing the social pages.

In Hollywood he was revealed as an actor of very limited talent 
indeed. But he did not let that stop him.

Like two other right-wing actors, John Wayne and Gary Cooper, he 
simply played himself in every film regardless of the character 
or the role. And a couple of his roles, in major films of the 
early '40s, actually drew laughs even though they were supposed 
to be dramas.

Desperate Journey was a ridiculous piece of rah-rah 
propaganda about three escaped POWs fighting their way across 
Germany and back to Britain that stretched credulity to breaking 
point. It is so preposterous, and departs so completely from 
reality, that in its own way it becomes rather fun.

King's Row was adapted from a novel which the film's 
script-writer, Casey Robinson, described with disgust as "an 
absolute piece of trash". But he wrote a film treatment anyway 
and it emerged as a technically accomplished but absurd hot-house 
melodrama.

In Ronny's key scene, he wakes up in bed just after having both 
his legs lopped off by an insane doctor. He takes one look at the 
unnatural shortness of the bed clothes and exclaims (with such an 
inept attempt at passion that it never fails to send audiences 
into gales of giggles): "Where's the rest of me?"

Ronny may have been a rotten actor, but he knew who ran the 
studios. The studio bosses wanted the left-wingers who headed the 
film industry unions ousted, and, at least in the Actors' Guild, 
Ronny was their man.

Once the War was over and had been replaced by the Cold War, 
Ronny really got into union politics. Helped by the black-list 
and Red-scare tactics of Richard Nixon and the House Un-American 
Activities Committee (HUAC), Ronny became the Secretary of the 
Screen Actors' Guild.

The Guild is still apologising for its lack of support for 
members targeted by HUAC (and the studio bosses) at that time. 
But Ronny was On His Way.

He used his contacts and his accumulated expertise as a public 
speaker to become the mouthpiece for some big California-based 
corporations. As a former union leader he was a persuasive 
speaker against the "excesses" of "big unions".

He was eloquent in condemning government interference in 
industry, in ridiculing "big government" and telling business 
people how much money they could save if only tax dollars did not 
have to be spent on social welfare, the environment and 
industrial health and safety.

That the numerous factual examples he trotted out, with back-up 
statistics, were frequently misquoted or even irrelevant, did not 
bother him. They worked at the time, no matter what the 
occasional alert journalist might point out about them.

He clipped innumerable reports of useful "facts", from papers and 
magazines, and filed them in shoeboxes. If they were effective 
anti-Communist, anti-Soviet or anti-union "facts", then to Ronny 
they were true.

He was a plausible speaker who early mastered the advantages of 
the teleprompter over hand-held notes. By the time journalists 
had nailed down one of his erroneous "facts" he had long since 
moved on to new topics and even new audiences.

The corporations loved him. Later, they and the Republican Party 
would run him for Governor of the State.

As Governor, he put into practice in California the same "voodoo 
economics" that he would later impose on the country as 
President. California workers saw their wages fall, their 
government services slashed, their working conditions savaged.

In their place they got tax cuts for corporations and the 
wealthy, who in turn paid for an avalanche of pro-Reagan bullshit 
in the media. At the same time they foisted all manner of 
economic gobbledygook on the public to show that the good times 
were just around the corner and the bad times were not Ronny's 
fault.

Such a good job did our boy do in California on behalf of 
corporate America that they ran him for President. Half the 
electorate were too disgusted to vote, but Ronny got slightly 
more than half of those who did. In American terms it was a 
landslide.

So there they were the other day, filing past his flag-draped 
coffin, tears in their eyes, their heads full of media beat-up 
about how "He Made America Great Again".

I remembered the words of Jane Fonda when he got elected (she 
still had a social conscience at that time, unlike now): "He was 
a lousy actor", she told reporters, "and he'll make a lousy 
President".

Which he did.