The craziest thing yet said about the sainted Ronald Reagan?

Nutty Edmund Morris is back, spewing nuttiness worthy of his favorite nut.

by Ken

I've kept my head down over the Reagan centenary weekend. I don't think there's any way of overstating the evil Reagan perpetrated as a public figure, or the monstrousness of his legacy -- even granted that the monstrosity was a close collaboration between America's Doodyhead and an American pubic that had made the decision to embrace imbecility and inner vileness. But then, why wouldn't people embrace a puppetbrain whose message to them was to embrace, even celebrate, their imbecility and inner vileness?

And for all that Reagan devoted such mental energies as he had to reducing reality to two dimensions, his "intellectual" heirs make him look like an intellectual giant -- a man who had (gasp!) actually visited reality!.

REAGAN'S DALLIANCE WITH REALITY

Among Alex Seitz-Wald's "10 Things Conservatives Don't Want You to Know About Reagan," mixed in among some gross imbecilities, are some unmistakable obeisances to reality like:

1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser -- "in seven of his eight years" as governor of California, and as president, according to his "dear friend" then-Sen. Alan Simpson (now best known as a supervising Deficit Diddler) "11 times in his administration -- I was there."
5. Reagan did little to fight a woman's right to choose. As governor he signed a bill that liberalized California's abortion laws, and as president -- despite tough talk during the campaign -- "he never seriously pursued curbing choice."
6. Reagan was a "bellicose peacenik." His bellicosity was apparently sincerely aimed at producing effective arms control.
7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants.

In the interest of fairness, I don't think we should ignore the other points:

2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit.
3. Unemployment soared after Reagan's 1981 tax cuts. (Crucial phrase: "Income inequality exploded.")
4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously.
8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran.
9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act.
10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

Reagan's, political heirs have managed to reduce the Gipper's two dimensions to one or less. And most importantly, they understood that ignorance and stupidity, cherishable as they, aren't sufficient to block out reality entirely, and added to their arsenal the crucial weapon of dishonesty: lies, lies, lies, in every size and shape, in every situation and at every opportunity.

But the Reagan "tribute" I really want to direct you to is pretend historian (and authorized Reagan biographer) Edmund Morris's in a Washington Post piece called "Five Myths About Ronald Reagan"

In case you've forgetten the bizarre book Morris spawned under the rubric of a "biography" of Reagan, Dutch, here's Kate Masur writing in the December 1999 issue of the American Historical Associations Perspectives:

In a recent interview, Edmund Morris said he knew all along that writing fictional characters into his biography of Ronald Reagan "was going to cause burst blood vessels in academe." On that point, at least, he struck an unvarnished truth. But it's more complicated than that. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan has elicited sharp and impassioned criticism from professional historians that also reveals fissures in the historical profession itself.

Professional historians began lambasting Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan even before its September 30 release. Most have insisted that the book, which is populated by made-up characters and bolstered by fabricated documents, should have been marketed as fiction, not biography. According to John Demos (Yale Univ.) -- who has written on history and narrative form -- one of the cardinal rules of unconventional history writing is to "be as clear as possible to your reader about what you're doing." Morris and his publisher, Random House, clearly flouted this rule.

Morris played fast and loose with footnotes. The notes in Dutch refer readers willy-nilly to real archival materials as well as nonexistent documents. For historians, footnotes represent scholarly rigor, hours dedicated to dusty documents, creative links among archives, thoroughness, and depth. False footnotes cheapen the real work of writing history. As Kathryn Kish Sklar (SUNY-Binghamton) pointed out, "Historians work hard to recover evidence about the past. . . . If the rules governing their craft permitted them to invent evidence, then all their labor would be in vain."

Nothing in Dutch reveals Morris's promiscuous mix of fact and fiction. People who read the book's dust jacket or glimpse coverage of it on television, radio, print media, or the Internet will know. But given that libraries often discard dust jackets, "How will readers in 10 years learn about the inventions of the author?" Joyce Appleby (UCLA) asked. "Let's call it biofiction or biofantasy or bioimaginings, but not biography, which has a venerable tradition."

Now I'm not sure that Morris's myth-debunking doesn't leave Reagan sounding worse off than before, but the paragraph that really leapt out at me occurs near the end of myth no. 2: "He was but a movie-set soldier in World War II":

In the spring of 1945, Capt. Reagan, as the FMPU's intelligence officer, spent weeks processing raw color footage from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The images so burned into his brain that later in life - quite understandably - he imagined he had been there at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald.

Say what? "Quite understandably"? Sorry, I don't see any way a sane human being can go from watching however-much footage to actually believing he was there. He should have been hauled off to an appropriate institution for locking up and throwing away the key right then and there. And maybe his buddy Edmund Morris could have been sent to join him.

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