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Danny |
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This past week America said good-bye and shed
a tear for one of its true greats- -a man born of humble beginnings who
rose to the very tippity-top. A
man with the ability to communicate to the very soul of human existence.
A man who stirred people across all boundaries, all races and
creeds and, in fact, all the world. His
death was inevitable and had been predicted for quite some time by those
closest to him. But that
doesn’t make losing him any easier.
He was one of a kind- -some say a genius- -a man like no other in
this past century, the last fifty years of which he dominated. I
speak, of course, of Ray Charles- -a man loved by millions who changed
popular music forever. A
singer friend of mine was once asked in an interview who his
favorite singer was and he replied, “You mean besides Ray Charles?”
There was no one like him. He
was probably the most imitated vocalist and yet no one achieved his
musical prowess. He could
sing anything. It
turns out that last week this country was taken over by a death march
frenzy unlike any seen since perhaps the death of Princess Diana or John
F Kennedy. It was unreal.
The man being eulogized from sunup to sundown on every TV outlet
imaginable and on every front page was also a one-time entertainer, but
with nowhere near the skills. But
his snake-oil charm had fooled most of the people most of the time and
he had climbed the ranks from light bulb pitchman in the early days of
TV all the way to the Presidency of the United States.
Imagine the Tidy Bowl Man doing that?
Or the Pillsbury Dough Boy?
The thought is just as ludicrous.
During this man’s tenure in the office to which he was twice
elected he managed to pull the wool over more people’s eyes than just
about anyone ever in that office. A
half-dozen years ago, after National Airport was renamed for President
Ronald Reagan, writer David Corn came up with 66 points by which to
remember the Great Communicator. A few of them bear repeating as the
media deification of him continues relentlessly this week: “The firing
of the air traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear
missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress,
ketchup as a vegetable . . . redbaiting the nuclear freeze movement,
James Watt . . . “constructive engagement” with apartheid South
Africa, United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers,
attacks on OSHA and workplace safety, the invasion of Grenada,
assassination manuals, Nancy’s astrologer . . . Fawn Hall, female
appointees (8 percent), mining harbors, the S&L scandal, 239 dead
U.S. troops in Beirut, Al Haig “in control,” silence on AIDS,
food-stamp reductions, Debategate, White House shredding, Jonas Savimbi,
tax cuts for the rich, “mistakes were made.” Michael Deaver’s
conviction for influence peddling, Lyn Nofziger’s conviction for
influence peddling, Caspar Weinberger’s five-count indictment . . .
200 officials accused of wrongdoing, William Casey, Iran-contra.
“Facts are stupid things,” three-by-five cards, the MX missile,
Bitburg, S.D.I., Robert Bork, naps, Teflon.” And
this from writer Marc Cooper: “The
list goes on. But make no mistake. Ronald Reagan deserves admiration for
his tenacity and his political skill, if not for the outcome he
produced. He took the fringe Goldwater movement and carried it into the
mainstream of the GOP, thereby remaking his own party and, with it,
American politics. He catapulted nutballs like Jerry Falwell and the
Moral Majority into positions of national legitimacy and trashed his own
party’s Main Street traditions of fiscal responsibility. “His
two biggest political promises — to break up big government and to use
military power to bring ‘freedom,’ as Lou Cannon surmises, to the
rest of the world — were but empty bluster. Tripling the national
debt, doubling the deficits, cutting taxes while bloating the military,
he left government at the end of his tenure 30 percent bigger than he
found it. And for all his saber rattling, he cut and ran in Lebanon
after 239 Marines were killed in a car bombing, and the only country he
directly confronted with U.S. troops was the hapless Disneyland-size
island of Grenada.” As
Josh Green pointed out in a Washington
Monthly piece last year, "A sober review of Reagan’s
presidency doesn’t yield the seamlessly conservative record being
peddled today.” He never seriously followed through on promises to
outlaw abortion. He eventually raised taxes. He ignored any notion of a
balanced budget. His assault on entitlements never fully materialized,
and in 1983 he actually helped rescue Social Security. And on foreign
affairs, he eventually ignored the radical misjudgments of many of his
closest advisors, who were clueless to the meaning of Gorbachev, and
found a way to accommodate the Soviet reform leader. Reagan had been calling for the demolition of
the wall (as many had) since the day it was built. He just happened to
make that speech at a time when Eastern Europeans, inspired by what they
saw in Moscow, not Washington, finally felt freedom was in their reach. Most frightening is today’s conventional
wisdom that Reagan was “correct” in forcing the Soviets to spend
themselves out of existence in an escalating arms race. The Soviets were
quite bankrupt all on their own without Reagan’s assistance.
Heck, they didn’t even have toilet paper. Fifty
years from now, Reagan will be remembered not for lobbing a few missiles
at Qaddafi or for funding the contras, but rather for presiding over the
most radical transfer of wealth, upward, in the 20th century.
Which, in fifty years, will be looked down upon with the most
negative disapproval. Ray
Charles, on the other hand, will still be played and loved the way Louis
Armstrong or Frank Sinatra or The Beatles are today. I
know Reagan said “God Bless America” many times in his public
utterances, but if you really want to hear that phrase with true heart
and meaning, there’s no one says it/sang it like Ray Charles.
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