...in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells a remarkable story about watching a presidential speech in a roomful of people with severe aphasia, a condition that impairs or destroys understanding of verbal content but leaves its victims preternaturally alert to the authenticity of facial expressions, mannerisms, and tone. Every solemn, ringingly earnest sentence out of Reagan's mouth had the patients rolling on the floor laughing.Never forget!
Monday, March 19, 2007
Reagan Bashing
I hate Ronald Reagan. I hated his movies. I hated his presidency. Now I hate anyone who says good things about that rat bastard. Google "Reagan Bashing" and you get a bunch of links from conservative sources bitching about the liberal media's attacks on the charlatan. But I did find an obituary in the Village Voice that gave me the main line Reagan hating fix I so desperataly craved.
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5 comments:
That's my very favorite Sacks anecdote. The other half of the story is that a woman on the same ward, who could not distinguish expressive tone of voice and had cataracts, relied on the exact expression of grammar and semantic meaning- neither was she impressed.
I'va always had a love/hate feeling about the guy. I always respected the way he ended the cold war. I've always hated his treatment of labor-firing the PATCO air traffic controllers. Unlike Bush, Reagan at least showed leadership. Unlike Clinton, he treated the office with respect and our enemies feared him, he didn't squander his presidency having to cover up for his affairs. I think history will treat him well unlike the presidents since then.
That's exactly the kind of Reagan pandering I can't stand. He didn't end the cold war. He was just there when the USSR finally went bankrupt. He wasn't a leader. He was an actor. And Clinton treated the office with as much respect as Thomas Jefferson, unlike Mr. Iran-Contra, Mr. Star Wars Defense System, Mr. Paranoid Delusional Reactionary. And the thought that history will treat Reagan well drives me nuts. Lieing, scheming, dehumanizing scum-bag. The American people got exactly what they deserved when they voted for that piece of shit.
In my opinion.
I never voted for the dude, but it WAS his huge defense spending that financially put the Ruskies in the place where they couldn't afford to match our spending. A very capitalist way to win a conflict!
And we're all still paying for an arms build-up against an enemy that all intelligence said was already going bankrupt. Capitalism at its finest.
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