THE FORMULA FOR TEFLON

Well well, Ronald Reagan has died and they are lining up in Simi Valley as I write this, eight hours deep to see a closed casket. It could be anyone in there; for all we know it could be EMPTY! How do we know if he really died?

Hey, I heard that collective gasp! You all must be thinking, "Whoa! What's Rusty trying to say? Why does he sound like he's worried about being deceived on this solemn occasion?" Well, maybe a lot of you don't remember the Reagan years. His administration lied about so many things, all I can say is that I even have a hard time taking his death at face value. Sure he was 93, but I almost think that Reagan's funeral has been staged to take our minds off Iraq!

That wheezing inrush of air says you must be thinking, "Could it be that Rusty doesn't like our beloved Saint Ronnie?" In a word, YES! And let me assure you Ronald Reagan was no saint, no matter how many hours of fawning remembrances you've heard on the air. That so many Americans revere his Presidency as the Good Ole Days is evidence of one of the greatest snow jobs in the last century. Sure his geniality was legendary but his ACTIONS were what bothered me. He kept talking about cutting Big Government but instead he increased Defense spending immensely and generated Big Deficits. I'm especially annoyed that the media went along with giving him credit for causing the fall of Communism, which he didn't really do, that was Gorbachev. Read Gorby's Mandate For Peace sometime: it's clear nobody over at Fox News did. The media also missed the fact that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer while he was in office, and dramatically so. But what pissed me off most was the general absence of a little story called the Iran-Contra Affair in all their patriotic glitz. Reagan got a free ride for that when he should have been impeached!

Damn, that cough was worthy of its own tobacco subsidy! "But that wasn't his fault! Ronnie didn't know what his underlings were doing!" moan the conservative true-believers. Yeah right! Follow me here. If you were Commander-In-Chief and a bunch of your people sold whole planeloads of our Army's missiles to an enemy of America AND used the proceeds to finance a little war of their own that Congress had expressly forbidden, and all this without your approval or participation, wouldn't you be just a little, umm, INDIGNANT? Well that's exactly what happened. Reagan subordinates sold missiles to Iran, which conservatives will be first to agree was an enemy of America. The "little" war they financed was against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Now if I were President and someone pulled a stunt like that I would have had them swinging upside down by their balls! Oops, no, that makes me sound too much like an Abu Ghraib prison guard! Maybe I'd just jail them about fifty years. At the South Pole. But no, Ronnie didn't do anything like that. In fact he called the most prominent among this band of rogues, Colonel Oliver North, a hero! Face it, Ronnie loved what Ollie North, Richard Secord, Bill Casey, Bush the Elder and all the others were doing.

Oh my, you're breathing funny again. Is it that I mentioned Bush, the same man who said he learned more from Ronnie than anyone else? Yes, and get real about him. As Vice President and a former CIA chief George The First had plenty of time on his hands back then; you don't think he just attended funerals do you? Do yourself a favor and type those four names into Google. Right after them type "weapons of mass destruction" and hit the I Feel Lucky button.

Anyway it's clear Saint Ron was a willing partner in the Iran-Contra Affair, if not a day-to-day participant. The only part he didn't get away with was having to answer a few questions from the press; Lord knows he made sure his people never had to pay for their crimes. Most were pardoned before they even got within barking distance of jail. They didn't even have to pay for the damn missiles they sold! You know, the ones that your tax dollars bought! With all the deficits Ronnie ran up you'd think they could at least pay us back.

The conservatives say, "Well BFD!" because they believe the actions of Ronnie's men kept Nicaragua from joining the Evil Empire of Communism. To them I say, "Hell yes!" because I agree it was just that, a really Big Fucking Deal and we fucked them up good! Them civilians, I mean. Around 15,000 people died in Nicaragua in the war that Reagan winked at. Let me repeat that. Fifteen thousand innocent people! That's like 5 Osama Bin-Ladens! BFD indeed! They were killed by the Contras, a bunch of ruthless mercenaries that Reagan The Grandfatherly likened to our own Founding Fathers here in America. NOT! Moreover thousands more were killed by regimes he supported in countries like Guatemala, Honduras and especially El Salvador. SEVENTY THOUSAND died there, that's about 25 Bin-Ladens! And El Salvador is tiny, with only a few million people in the first place, it must have been like the Holocaust! "But that wasn't America's doing, that was other people!" Technically yes, but Bill Casey's CIA trained a high percentage of the thugs who did it during the Reagan years. It was in a lovely little institution called The School Of The Americas, where in the name of stopping Communism, the CIA taught good old fashioned American values like sabotage, torture and disappearing your political opposition.

By the way you'll be happy to know that the School of the Americas no longer exists. It's been replaced by the Western Hemisphere Institute For Security Cooperation. The Institute operates in the same offices as the old School of the Americas. Ho-hum.

So what ever happened to the good old-fashioned values that Reagan always talked about on TV? I'm basically a Boy Scout at heart and I would have loved to believe his rhetoric, you know, that we did all those things in defense of freedom. I want America to stand for righteousness, justice and democracy! However somewhere in the early part of the Cold War, the power-mongers decided that we should not play by the rules, because the bad guys weren't. To fight Joe Stalin's brand of Communism they created the CIA in 1947. There was good reason to be worried about Uncle Joe back then, but the tactics made it hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The upshot was that regardless of what our leaders would say in speeches, they let the spooks play dirty pool whenever they wanted to. As long as the black bag tactics didn't become the subject of Mr. and Mrs. America's dinner conversation, of course! Reagan's flacks were largely successful at this -- selling the ideal and covering up their subterfuge with platitudes like "It's Morning in America".

Actually I'm willing to entertain the notion that Reagan didn't know about the nasty side of his administration. He was always a big picture guy, promoting that Capraesque view of America. He certainly was serious about keeping Communism down too, but it's obvious he didn't really care how it was done as long as it didn't penetrate the cinematic veneer. Lord knows he never dirtied himself with details like flying drugs up from Central America after flying guns down there, just like the School of The Americas taught them. And then... say, you need a cough drop or something for that? You didn't think missile sales were the only means of support for their illegal army, did you?

Detailed knowledge or not, Reagan was responsible and what makes me angry is that these allegations never seemed to stick to him. For me the man will always be the Teflon President, the guy who got away with it, not some hero worthy of a place on Mount Rushmore.

I've been wondering for years about why his scandal-proof coating worked so well, and now, after all the revelations of prisoner abuse in Iraq, I think I finally know. It's because his secret dealings never involved sex.

Whew! That gasp damn near sucked all the air out of the room! I'd better open a few windows.

It's clear nothing gets coverage like sex. Think about it! What did Clinton get in trouble for? Blow jobs. The press doggedly followed every scrap of story that had to do with Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones during the Clinton years and the Republicans pushed his pathetic denials all the way to an impeachment. And if you think that sex coverage only applies to Democrats, just think about Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for Governor last year. Does anyone remember his warmed over Pete Wilson politics? No, it was his er, ham-handed approach to females. Want more evidence? Quick, what was the biggest initiative that Resident Bush put forward in the last State Of The Union? Right, an amendment against gay marriage. And what's the biggest single issue binding all the fundamentalists to the Republican Party? Abortion, which isn't about the worst method of birth control, it's really about control of recreational sex. But that's a different column.

Americans obviously pay attention to sexual affairs enough to affect their votes; I'm just wondering if the quasi-sexual aspect of Dubya's prison abuse scandal is enough to be remembered in November. Sadly, few voters seem to get upset about the outright slaughter of innocents by our forces. Not in 1988 when Reagan's navy killed 290 on an Iranian airliner or in 1989 when George the First killed a couple thousand civilians in Panama, or uncounted thousands in the Gulf War, or all the thousands more that George the Second killed in Afghanistan and in his new invasion of Iraq last year. And the toll continues to rise every day as the military tries to put down the latest crop of fanatics over there. Earlier this spring they were doing it with Specter gunships firing into the middle of populated areas.

What, no gasp? Maybe you don't know what an AC-130 Specter gunship can do. It's a flying gun platform, a Hercules cargo plane actually, but instead of carrying supplies it carries an array of guns that fire out of its side. And these aren't your average machine guns. The weapons include a 25mm GAU-12 Gatling gun firing 1,800 rounds per minute, a 40mm L60 Bofors cannon capable of 120 rounds per minute and a 105mm M-102 Howitzer cannon firing 6 to 10 rounds per minute. Gee, I guess the plane is still carrying a lot of cargo. It's all the ammunition required to feed the guns! Our military had this thing firing into the heart of Fallujah for days! In spite of its advanced fire control systems you have to believe that it hit hundreds of non-combatants, and even if most managed to scramble to safety, their homes and their neighbors homes for blocks around were reduced to rubble. THIS IS HOW WE WIN FRIENDS?

Oops, I've been talking only about atrocities in recent Republican administrations, what about Clinton's army in the incident made famous in Black Hawk Down? He caused at least a thousand civilian deaths in Somalia and his penchant for lobbing cruise missiles around Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq certainly racked up a few more innocents over the years. In the last hundred years the civilian death prize goes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose air force killed hundreds of thousands when we fire bombed Germany and Japan. Strange, I still admire him, but now that I think of it, is it mainly out of inertia? If I only admire Roosevelt's better qualities and tune out his body count, then why do I dislike Reagan so much? It's because Reagan was doing it when Congress had expressly forbidden it. I could say that World War II was a different time too, but in the final analysis neither one had to let slip the dogs of war on civilians like that.

The point is that American Presidents always fill up some graves, sometimes with the support of the American people, but often without any public knowledge or approval. However, in a democracy we are supposed to be aware of the actions of our government so that we can cast an informed vote. But we don't get informed. Life and death issues like these don't get ratings in our brave new electronic age; instead the media fills the airwaves with lowest denominator pabulum, and you know what that means.

Are we really so stupid that we can't get interested in a political issue if it doesn't have the smell of forbidden sex about it? Maybe the formula for Reagan's Teflon was that he never had even a whisper of sexual impropriety about him. Hell, maybe he was just too old to have that kind of problem! Regardless, without a sex scandal and with plenty of flag waving, Shining-City-On-A-Hill rhetoric, poof! America always believed Reagan was a moral person. So is history going to be left with only his White-Hat-and-Pearl-Six-Guns image? Sorry, not if I can help it. You can't wash away that much blood with a bunch of televised eulogies and a photogenic state funeral.

Actually right now the more important thing to remember is that a lot of the same Machiavellian people who worked for Reagan and Bush the First are working again for Bush The Second. In fact Dubya probably thinks he's a bloody Xerox of Ronnie. He is, except that the copier's almost out of toner. And I'm about out of rhetoric.

And I just remembered I have to get back into the Closet because there are a couple other notions I was entertaining in there. They're jumping up and down, demanding beer, chips and mud wrestling on Pay-Per-View. I think it's Dick Cheney versus Michael Moore tonight, some serious mud indeed! Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

© 2004 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: Look, what Mr. Pipes says about His Holiness on his own time is his own business, kind of, but we, the editors, who all attended college in the Reagan 80s, are going to see to it that he never writes for this magazine again! Until next month. Okay, we're as upset as you are, but Mr. Pipes' column is very popular, and the Editor In Chief is a left wing pinko bastard first class. They'll both find themselves in an eight foot cell when the President's second term starts, boy, I'll tell you that. Oh oh, I'm being summoned to the chief's office. Power to the Party, hail Ron, pass it on.