Next up in movie propaganda films: Reagan

[lpetrich]

The Sixties Era started in the early 1960's, and it lasted into the mid to late 1970's, and Samuel Huntington liked to call it Sixties & Seventies: S&S. Toward the end, it was evident that it was slowing down, with the Equal Rights Amendment almost but not quite getting ratified. But the Reaganites had no taste for that amendment, and no taste for some other late-1970's initiatives: renewable-energy development and conversion to the metric system of units.

In the late 1970's, students of historical trends could easily conclude that the US was heading into a conservative era. But what kind of an era? The best case would have been something like Good Feelings II: The Fifties. But it was instead Gilded Age II, and it has now lasted longer than the first Gilded Age.

I was very disappointed that neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama did much to end Gilded Age II, despite having made a lot of campaign promises that amounted to doing that. I'm also disappointed with the failure of the Wisconsin Revolt and the Occupy movement of 2011 -- the Occupiers didn't try to find new campsites for themselves. They ought to have known that city governments weren't going to tolerate them forever, and they would have needed gathering places to keep their movement going.

But I have reason to think that Gilded Age II may not continue indefinitely. The prominence of Bernie Sanders and the rise of "the Squad". BS himself is a veteran of civil-rights activism, complete with once getting arrested, and he has had a long career in politics.

 

[lpetrich]

I'll now turn to  Ronald Reagan himself. He was born in 1911 in a small town in NW Illinois, and in his high-school years, he had an interest in drama and football. He went to a small nearby college, and he was a mediocre student, being interested in sports, drama, and campus politics. He even became student-body president.

In 1932, he became a radio broadcaster who specialized in sports, and in 1937, he moved to Hollywood and became an actor. He played football player George Gipp, "the Gipper", in the biographical movie "Knute Rockne, All American" about that football coach of Notre Dame University. GG dies in that movie, and coach KR exhorted the survivors to "win just one for the Gipper" in honor of him.

In 1942, he did military service, and he continued his film career there, making some 400 training films.

After he was discharged in 1945, he continued his film career, and in 1951, he appeared in "Bedtime for Bonzo" as an animal-behavior researcher who tried to raise the titular chimpanzee like a human child.

I recall from somewhere that he mostly played pleasant, likable sort of characters, not nasty, villainous ones.

 

[laughing dog]

In the 1964 remake of The Killers, Reagan played a double crossing gangster.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And caused the Challenger disaster.

Evidence: {} -- I don't see the value of making such claims. There are plenty of bad things that the Reaganites did, but that does not seem to be one of them.

Something caused the launch people to swing from their usual prove-it-safe approach to a prove-it-unsafe. There's been a lot of speculation that it was from the White House, him wanting to refer to the teacher in space in a speech. However, AFIAK nothing has actually been proven in this regard. And there obviously was a wide coverup because NASA was trying to look everywhere for a cause rather than examine the obvious one: every engineer involved had said not to launch because they did not trust it was safe in the cold. Why in the world did they try to protect the people who said "go" in such an epically stupid way? And tried to hide the data from the ice team that had showed it was even colder than anyone realized at the time.

 

[lpetrich]

He married his first wife, Jane Wyman, in 1940, and the two had two children, Maureen and Christine, and adopted one child, Michael. Jane divorced him in 1949. He married Nancy Davis in 1952, and they had Patti and Ron. Patti prefers her mother's original last name to her father's, which is why she is Patti Davis.

He was elected President of the Screen Actors Guild union in 1947, and he cooperated with the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee about possible Communists in the SAG. Yes, he was involved in the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch hunts.

He started off a FDR Democrat, calling that President a "true hero" and supporting Harry Truman in 1946. But he drifted rightward, and he supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Richard Nixon in 1960, and Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Then in 1966, he ran for governor of California, presenting himself as a political outsider and charging that incumbent Pat Brown was responsible for the Watts riots of 1965 and was soft on crime, and he "hit the Brown administration about high taxes, uncontrolled spending, the radicals at the University of California, Berkeley, and the need for accountability in government". He won 57% - 42%

As governor, he balanced the budget by raising taxes, and he signed a strict gun-control law in response to the Black Panther members being armed in public.

Long before the culture wars on abortion,

Reagan also signed the 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act that allowed abortions in the cases of rape and incest when a doctor determined the birth would impair the physical or mental health of the mother. He later expressed regret over signing it, saying that he was unaware of the mental health provision. He believed that doctors were interpreting the provision loosely and more abortions were resulting

His response to some student protests were to sent in cops and National Guard troops. "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement".

He was re-elected in 1970, but he declined to run in 1974, and Pat's son Jerry become governor.

Reagan's governorship, as professor Gary K. Clabaugh writes, saw public schools deteriorate due to his opposition to additional basic education funding.[131] As for higher education, journalist William Trombley believed that the budget cuts Reagan enacted damaged Berkeley's student-faculty ratio and research.[132] Additionally, the homicide rate doubled and armed robbery rates rose by even more during Reagan's eight years, even with the many laws Reagan signed to try toughening criminal sentencing and reforming the criminal justice system.[133] Reagan strongly supported capital punishment, but his efforts to enforce it were thwarted by People v. Anderson in 1972.[134] According to his son, Michael, Reagan said that he regretted signing the Family Law Act that granted no-fault divorces.[135]

 

[lpetrich]

Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells | Salon.com - "Dramatic, awful changes occurred on my generation's watch -- and it amounts to a fiendishly successful conspiracy"

... the Great Communicator had cut his teeth on campus protests during the 1960s, using long-haired Berkeley students as perfect foils. Reagan assailed the Free Speech and antiwar movements, promising the taxpayers that if elected, he’d get college kids off picket lines and back in class. With comments like, “They are spoiled and don't deserve the education they are getting” and that the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,” he won in a landslide. Fourteen years later, Reagan was elected president, running against a host of mythical foes from “welfare queens” to an omnipotent “Evil Empire,” but he and his administration never shed their antipathy toward “elitist” campuses and the young people who dared question the system.

Opinion: Here's how Reagan created the homelessness crisis - The San Diego Union-Tribune

As a psychologist who began practicing nearly 40 years ago, I’ve seen a significant shift in the care of the mentally ill since the mid-1980s — and it hasn’t been for the better. After the deinstitutionalization movement began in California in the 1960s, many state mental health hospitals closed, forcing many folks who needed a lot of care onto the streets. Without those facilities, many mentally ill people ended up in jails and prisons which are not set up to provide safe, compassionate care for brain illnesses. But in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and emptied the psychiatric hospitals into so-called “community” clinics, the problem got worse.

 

[lpetrich]

Ronald Reagan first ran for President in 1976, challenging fellow Republican Gerald Ford, who was running for re-election. RR argued that GF was not conservative enough, and he described a supposed "Chicago welfare queen" who got a big income from welfare fraud, and he claimed that GF gave away American territory when he transferred the Panama Canal to Panama.

He won in 1980 and again in 1984, and he was succeeded by his Vice President, George Bush I, in 1988. He spent the last years of his life suffering from Alzheimer's disease.


RR had a famous line,  There you go again which is how he responded to Jimmy Carter's criticizing him for his record on Medicare.

Regardless, Reagan's charismatic delivery of his iconic retort defined the narrative of the exchange in the post-debate news cycles. Reagan's portrayal of his past positions during the debate, and characterization of Carter's criticisms as hyperbolic, were widely reiterated uncritically by the majority of news media at the time; as was Reagan's casting of Carter himself as mean-spirited.

 

[BH]

I remember the election of 1980. Yeah, Reagan did good in the electoral college but he just barely got 50% of the popular vote. And it was a 3 man race. And if Reagan was so great why did he lose to Ford in 1976? I mean seriously? Gerald Ford managed to beat the great Reagan. To add insult to injury Carter went on and beat Ford in November. Jimmy Carter was the man who beat the man who beat Reagan.

 

[JohnG]

Middle America is a big target audience for a lot of the entertainment industry - music and film.