• Leonard Pitts asserts that the news media “have embarrassed themselves this week. They have rewritten history and slapped on a happy face.”
• William Greider, expectedly, calls Reagan “a fabulist” who “launched the great era of false triumphalism that continues to this day among American leadership.”
• In These Times quotes historian Wakter Karp describing Reagan as “Like Death not knowing itself”: “Yet what brutal truncation, what cutting back of the plant, produces that splendid bosom! What lopping away of knowledge, of curiosity, of truthfulness, to produce that public aura of candor and confidence. What lopping away of realism, foresight, even the very capacity to govern. Reagan is ignorant, deliberately, willfully ignorant, scarcely knows who works for him, rarely asks a penetrating question.”
• Randolph T. Holhut remembers the Reagan era as “an exercise in horror and frustration, but it turned out to just a warm-up to a presidency that is even worse.”
• Gary Dretzka insists that the also recently-deceased Ray Charles “probably did as much for lifting the veil of tyranny on imprisoned nations as Reagan….”
• And theater critic Frank Rich likens Bush to Reagan’s “Stunt Double”—”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.”

In the end, the corporate media’s Reagan hagiography, in which the smiling countenance was lauded and the cruel policies ignored, could be interpreted as little more than the corporate media’s (and even the “alternative” media’s) business as usual, in regard to dead famous people. The media tend to act as if someone’s media image was someone’s whole being. They don’t care what you did, just “who” you superficially were. Hence, Ken Kesey was principally described in most obits as a “sixties icon,” not as a novelist.

I began this thread a week ago by mentioning that I’d been reading a lot in self-help books about the importance of maintaining a positive attitude. I’ll end the thread by mentioning another concept in some of these books—the duality between “doing” (masculine/yang/western) and “being” (feminine/yin/eastern).

Some of the books’ authors claim modern society has overemphasized the “doing” aspect of human lives, and ignored the “being” aspect.

I’d say certain parts of modern society overemphasize a shallow slice of the “being” aspect, and always have. The current White House occupant didn’t get there due to anything he did (other than schmooze big campaign contributors), but because of what he “was”—his daddy’s boy. Over the centuries, too many incompetent people have attained too much power due to such trivial criteria.

In Reagan’s case, he worked and clawed his way up from Illinois radio and into the easy life. This self-made status made him a good figurehead spokesman for the silver-spoon set, a more effective one than either of the George Bushes. He attained the power to do good things for many people, but instead helped create the sleaze machine that’s still trashing this country and this planet.

We are all “doings” as well as “beings.” And both count.