Joshua Orkent responds to the entry below:

“That sad, chained penis was none other than ‘Dick Cheney!’Get it? The other puns represented in that ensemble were the leafy green
George ‘Bush’, a large black bowl of Condoleeza ‘Rice,’ and my personal
favorite, a long pink ‘colon’ Powell! Didn’t you wonder why those characters
were rolling a tank over the statue of liberty?

I must admit, it took me a little while to figure it out as well, but I
really liked that troupe, and was glad to see someone making reference to
the administration’s unusually noun-like names. Though having made a ‘Dick’
puppet, I wonder why they didn’t create a big skanky ‘Bush?’ Seems like
there would be more dramatic potential. Well, no one looks to the Solstice
Parade for logic.”

HEREWITH, THE SECOND and last part of our recent visit to the Fremont Solstice Parade and street fair. Today, some of the more overtly “political” statements made there.

Despite this “wall of shame” and other anti-right-wing displays, the Bush-Cheny ’04 campaign bravely staffed a booth at the street fair.

The megaphone guy is calling for John Kerry to show some backbone during the current campaign.

This Statue of Liberty balloon has just been re-inflated, to thunderous crowd applause, after having been deliberately run over by a cardboard replica of a U.S. Army tank.

I’m not sure what this sad, chained penis is meant to represent. The stripped and abused Iraqi prisoners? U.S. society’s repression of Eros? Seattle’s moratorium on new strip clubs? “Alternative” culture’s sexist stereotype of the phallus as the “root” of all evil?

In any other era, a line of belly dancers probably wouldn’t seem all that “political.” This year, it’s a statement. Yes, there are positive cultural contributions from the Arab world; female-empowering contributions, even.

Every year, the parade includes at least one entry based on a big local-news story. This time, it was the big move into the big, beautiful new Seattle library (which, I’ve now decided, is an airport terminal for voyages of the mind). The paucity of objects on the carts these folks are pushing might represent the library’s slashed operations budgets.

You might not think of the Oompa-Loompas from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as political, but I do.

Dahl was one of the wisest and most subversive authors of “children’s” literature. I’ve always thought Charlie was a prescient parable/parody of conservative economics. Willy Wonka, you might recall, is a ruthless capitalist who’s fired his unworthy local workforce, then reopened for business with a crew of happily servile, low-wage immigrants.

Indeed, in the 1964 first edition, the Oompa-Loompas were (in the words of Dahl biographer Jeremy Treglown) “a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’ Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, ‘and the bark of the bong–bong tree.'”

Dahl re-created them as white fantasy creatures for the 1971 Willy Wonka movie and subsequent reissues of the book.

The end of the parade didn’t mean the end of the statements. The art-car display included this minivan decorated by Calif. conceptual artist Emily Duffy. Recalling our recent discussion about the limits of “positive attitudes,” we can ponder what Duffy believes are the deleterious effects of fashion advertising.

Duffy believes the fashion biz thrives parasitically, by bullying women into hating themselves and their bodies. But the industry’s ads, magazines, and in-store displays are exclusively filled with overt “positivity.” In Fashionland, everyone’s happy, confident, full of pep and/or attitude.

But it’s a happy fantasy land populated only by those deemed by the industry’s gatekeepers to meet one ideal of perfection or another.

David Neiwert, a local author who specializes in investigating hate crimes and other examples of rabid nonsense, has issued a “Media Revolt Manifesto.”

Like many of us, Neiwert’s mad as hell at the GOP cheerleading and pundit-blather that passes for “news” in today’s US mainstream media. Thankfully, he wants us to get beyond just complaining and protesting about it.

He sees rescuing US journalism as a multi-faceted, multi-fronted task. At the center of this new media paradigm will be the so-called “new media”:

“Blogs… can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.Blogs will not and cannot do the job alone, of course. The whole purpose of the revolt is to foster an environment in which mainstream journalists, from the lowly ink-stained wretch to the well-coiffed network anchor, are both allowed and positively encouraged to provide truthful and meaningful journalism that provides vital information to the public and does it responsibly and thoroughly. So that will mean recognizing and positively celebrating when superior journalism does its job well; such reporters and truth-tellers should be lauded, promoted, and in the end well remunerated for their work. It will mean channeling the marketplace to reward organizations that do their job well, too.

Finally, the Media Revolt will tap the energy of the citizenry through traditional means as well: Letter-writing campaigns, voting with our pocketbooks, organizing politics and funds on the ground — without which, in fact, anything that occurs on the Web may prove meaningless. The idea is to turn from simply critiquing the media to taking concrete action.”

Of course, some of Neiwert’s goals are easier to accomplish than others.

He’d like to see more websites that don’t just rehash or comment upon stories from the traditional media. He’d even like to see “the creation of viable newswire services beyond the current Asssociated Press monopoly.” But he acknowledges the difficulty of funding original reporting, particularly on the web (Salon’s bleeding red ink, and Slate survives as a Bill Gates vanity project).

So he also calls for a mass groundswell of support for breaking up the media conglomerates, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and otherwise reshaping the media we’ve already got from “a press corps addicted to trivia and inanity” into something that actually serves the needs of an active democracy.

“I think the tools for serious change are finally within our reach,” Neiwert says. Can it happen? Only if we all, those of you who read news and those of us who write it, do our part to help make it happen.

The aforementioned David Neiwert claims we haven’t heard much from the “patriot” militia gangs lately because they’ve been absorbed into the Republican establishment.

…just keeps getting shriller and dumber. Now, a prowar outfit is trying to pressure movie theaters into not showing Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

A quick Net check shows this group is led by one Howard Kaloogian. He recently ran for a US Senate seat in California, on an anti-immigration, anti-environmental, anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-weapons platform. He also played some part in the gubernatorial recall campaign that put Schwarzenegger in the state house down there; other recall advocates allege he siphoned contributions from the recall drive to put into his own campaign.

Another principal in the drive is a Calif. campaign operative and former Reagan advisor named Sal Russo. Kaloogian and Russo previously co-ran the successful campaign to stop CBS from airing its Reagans miniseries.

As Frederick Sweet writes, the anti-Moore drive is no grassroots support-our-troops campaign but a smear tactic from high GOP sources. “The Bush Republicans are trying very hard to stop Americans from seeing Michael Moore’s movie. They are also trying to hide the fact that their campaign is attempting to smear Moore and pressure theater owners into not running his movie. Hopefully, the Republicans’ censorship and intimidation will fail and millions of Americans will soon learn how George Bush had a business relationship with the Bin Laden family. They will learn this just before the next presidential election.”

…no more dead-Gipper links, but Slumberland had one I couldn’t resist: A mock campaign site for “Bush/Zombie Reagan 2004!” “Difficult times call for great leaders — men of vision, strength and courage. Men like George W. Bush and the shambling, reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan.”

• 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.

(I’ll only have one more roundup of these links after this one; don’t worry):

• Marc Connor vividly recounts the disastrous results of Reagan’s pro-dictator policies in Latin America, and adds that “he firmly established a new tone and ethos in national politics. The mask of equanimity was ripped off American politics, and the winners in our society were finally given permission to publicly gloat. All of a sudden it was socially acceptable to denounce the poor, to blame the victims, to celebrate and even promote inequality. It was hip to be mean…. 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.”
• Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, in a Wash. Post article, dryly note that “In Central America, Reagan remains a polarizing figure.”
• Our ol’ pal Geov Parrish, as you might expect, has a personal, emotional perspective on the topic: “When Reagan was elected president, it was an inexplicable, savage turn for a country that I’d never realized was capable of such things. It’s not just that George W. Bush would have been impossible without Reagan. The presidency of Reagan himself was so bad, on so many levels, that as young adults a sizable number of us could only sputter in impotent rage…. It simply made no sense that an entire country could be run by sinister thugs, all because its spokesperson was a washed-up actor with the professional training to deliver the most ridiculous, venal lies with a calming ‘Great Communicator’ demeanor.”

• Joe Strupp, in Editor & Publisher, reminds us that Reagan’s not the first leader to have gotten undeservedly fawning media obits, and that Clinton actually had higher popularity-poll ratings than Reagan.
• Eric Pianin and Thomas B. Edsall note in the Wash. Post that the lavish praise given the man “obscures that much of Reagan’s record through eight years in office was highly controversial and intensified social and political divisions. Even now, nearly 16 years after he left office, some major interest groups and key voting blocs most adversely affected by Reagan policies remain bitter about his legacy.”
• The Village Voice‘s Tom Carson calls him “A noted fantasist… perhaps best remembered for the eight years he spent believing he ruled an entirely fictional United States. To the old trouper’s delight, this was a delusion shared by most of his compatriots, which is why his imaginary nation still subsumes ours to this day.”

…the most negative campaign ever?

• Christopher Hitchens, making a sudden return to “contrarian” status after his prowar rallying last year, writes at Slate that “Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn’t like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see.”
• Kevin Brennan reminds us that Reagan didn’t defeat the USSR; it failed on its own accord, and in spite of the neocons’ faulty “intelligence” that exaggerated the Russkies’ economic/military strength for political reasons.
• UK historian Archie Brown teaches that the Soviet dissilusion was one of the most peaceful transitions of power ever seen in a major country, and was caused almost entirely by the central government’s calcification under power-politics gamery.
• MIchael Bronski claims Reagan was just as insensitive about AIDS as the James Brolin TV movie claimed he’d been.
• Bill Mon claims, “He was, for all his cornball folksiness, the ultimate class warrior, or class front man, anyway.”
• Juan Cole asserts that “Reagan’s policies thus bequeathed to us the major problems we now have in the world, including a militant Islamist International whose skills were honed in Afghanistan with Reagan’s blessing and monetary support; and a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which the Reagan administration in some cases actually encouraged behind the scenes for short-term policy reasons. His aggressive foreign policy orientation has been revived and expanded, making the US into a neocolonial power in the Middle East. Reagan’s gutting of the unions and attempt to remove social supports for the poor and the middle class has contributed to the creation of an America where most people barely get by while government programs that could help create wealth are destroyed.”
• And Phil Gasper calls Reagan a “venal and vicious man, who was happy to slash workers’ wages, see families thrown onto the street, support sadistic death squads and bomb other countries, if this was in the interests of the American ruling class.”

Today, some web links recalling the monstrous politics behind the happy-face mask.

• Dan Modela discusses Dark Victory, his book investigating Reagan’s lifelong ties to MCA, former parent company of Universal Studios and the most notoriously Mob-connected company in Hollywood. (Universal’s now being acquired by GE, which once sponsored a TV show Reagan hosted and MCA produced.)
• Third World Traveler has links to several accounts of Reagan’s disastrous foreign policies, includng his luuuvvv for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. (Among Ronnie’s enamored: Saddam, Osama, and Pinochet.)
• Mark Hertsgaard, in a 1996 interview, mentions how Reagan was given virtually free rein by a submissive Washington press corps.
• David Swanson remembers the secret Iran-hostage deal that gained Reagan the White House in the first place.
• William Rivers Pitt insists that ” virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.”
• David Corn, in a 1998 Nation essay, recalls “66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan.”
• And Greg Palast emphatically recalls Reagan as “a conman” and “a coward.”
• But Madison, WI’s Capital Times asserts that progressives oughta learn from Reagan’s “willingness to fight for his faith.”

I’ve lately been studying a lot about “positive attitudes,” and the ways in which people who exude such attitudes can achieve their biggest dreams.

As many obits have noted, Reagan was a positive-thinking epitome. He had a winning smile, an easygoing voice, a knack for delivering simple jokes, and baby blue eyes. He diligently used his positive image to bring what I still believe were negative policies to the US and the world.

Sure, he never got around to some of his more contentious platforms (re-outlawing abortion, entirely dismantling the social safety net).

But he did get a lot of wrong things done.

He fired the air traffic controllers.

He slashed aid to the poorest, sending tens of thousands onto the streets.

He slashed college financial aid, reversing the postwar trend toward the democratizing of education.

He preached about smaller government, while he built up record budget deficits.

He started a massive buildup of nuclear weapons.

He arranged to keep the Iran hostages imprisoned to help his election drive; then let the whole Iran/Contra mess happen.

He enthusiastically supported every genocidal dictator who used anti-Communism as his excuse.

And, along with his evil twin Margaret Thatcher, he spread a gospel of blind faith in The Free Market. In practice, this meant massive corporate welfare, military-industrial contract corruption, the economic decimation of the middle class, the whole “greed is good” national nonsense, environmental catastrophes, jobless “recoveries,” and most of the wrong directions this country’s been headed in ever since.

I once wrote that the fictional character Reagan most closely resembled wasn’t Rambo but Simon the Likable, a villain from the last season of Get Smart! The Chief tells Max as they trail him, “He’s a terrorist, a gangster, a killer…” (the Chief catches a glimpse of Simon’s baby blue eyes and delicate smile) “…and a really nice guy.”

…but still worth a click: Robert Kuttner’s cogent rant about “America as a One-Party State.”

…”A world held at bay by the Bushes and the Rumsfelds means the absolute negation of what we have been accustomed till now to describe as civilization.”