The Great Communicator Daniel P. Beckmann 06.08.04-New York, NY

It took Ronald Reagan to help me to again realize just part of why it is that I am compelled to media. No it wasn’t that I was standing post when the story came down that he croaked…we heard it was going to happen and I truly wanted it to happen on my shift, but the guy officially passed away 8 hours after I left.

It wasn’t really this story in particular because the truth is that these types of stories are some of the easiest to befall a newsroom-essentially you sit back, relax and push play-the works already all been done for you…its not like we didn’t know what was going to happen or anything, the script was written well in advance, full of his optimism or his role as the Great Communicator and who can forget his love for Nancy?…no, that wondermeant is purely reserve exclusively for the armchair fellas with their beards they like to stroke with the quandaries of "how exactly predictable this news event went"…in fact, "lets make this news event more predictable next time!" they shall resolve!

No, Reagan croaking brought me back into the flock because at superficial count there are obviously two Reagans, the one we knew and the one that he really was. What we are dealing with this week is the death of the person that we knew through the clips that we are watching. We are reviewing ourselves and our impressions of that time. IN case there’s a test the following three, count ‘em three(3) things were unanimously agreed upon en mass on Reagan at a convention unknown:

1) Reagan was an optimist
2) Regan was The Great Communicator
3) And his love for Nancy and Nancy’s love for him

This whole damn week, that’s all they wrote, at least that they all could agree upon. These three, so obvious impressions of the man, so obvious that they were in fact written before he left office, only to surface again today as if the record player started playing again in the very same spot?

Differing Conceptions of the Gipper
I was born in 1980 and I’m damn proud of it. I caution, however, that I was born in May of that year so Carter was still firmly president-Reagan had yet to say there he goes again at that point… In my 4-year-old mind, when I came to first conceptualize ‘a president’, I understood the following:

He ain’t heaven..he’s Ron’s BRO!..

Ronald McDonald was his brother…

His Cousin

Donald Duck, his cousin…

Son of a duck

and Sam DONALDson was of course the son of a duck-they were the Anolds!

Together they were the "onalds"

(Ah-nold Schwartzenneger being next in line of course…).

A course there was his love for Nancy Reagan-a woman who my mom said ate ketchup straight and even though my parents probably voted for Reagan and would do it again, my mom had a good sense of Nancy, she didn’t want me drinking ketchup and I believed me mum.. Of course, McDonald’s ® was my favorite restaurant at the time…For others, he was an equal opportunity optimist, providing for the encouraging situation to inspire for instance…

Coke in these guys…

And Crack in these…

And this guy to believe New Coke® was a good idea.

Also Depending upon whom you talk to he either selectively or simply forgot about all this:

Now the actual guy-
We have all have been given ownership of the public idea of Reagan-it is indeed that which we are burying this week, for Reagan the man, we honestly never knew thee. We do know some of the people who apparently did though.

Will this BITCH ever shut up!?! Someone must have said…

While his public persona was the optimist, there was that one bitch that the whiteys wished wouldn’t try to ruin their plans. No, it wasn’t Nancy and her astrologers, it was Patty Davis(Named Davis, but still Reagans daughter. She wouldn’t stop claiming the guy was distance, vacant, not much optimism coming towards his own daugther. She purportedly actually knew the guy, but the whiteys and everyone else just wished she would shut up and go away…we were enjoying a revolution here you see!

So sweep that shit under the rug for another day–This is our fucking week! For without Reagan, how could we endure the career of Huey Lewis and the News, the song Don’t Worry be happy, and the Hair of all those bands? Reagan permitted this all to happen…no he directly inspired it!-the two were virtually married to each other in time!. To the public Reagan was the Great Communicator, he believed in saying nice things in a friendly sorta way, others before him I guess just said it. He served those well who desired someone to wash over what’s really going down and paint a rosy picture for them and you know what?–sure, gibralter may tumble, the mountains may crumble, but it felt much better going down(and keeping them down) didn’t it? I mean who could hit an old man for waiting for the applause to die down, and restarting several times to capture the right delivery of this English demand: "Tear down this wall" to his close compadre in grime Mr. Gorbachev (I mean the man was already reeling from that day he became bald-eh)?

What so abruptly brought me back into the media crowd is how important the idea can be…it overshadows the man. Whilst I am in the process of studying, a process that is slated to take a least 3.5 years more, if not my entire life, I don’t believe the newsies are the soul culprit in the creation of the idea that supercedes, but they certainly have a unique role in the process of assimilating it. As you can see, The Idea is very important, on Friday all the post offices will be closed, The Idea was a cold war, a war that took a Great Communicator to take credit for ending.

And then there was of course his love for Nancy

Reflection of ideas

Bennett

A fellow named Bennett, a student of history, promised that he was going to write something wonderful on this but its been almost two years now and he hasn’t. Nonetheless, I would like to introduce this idea to our forum on the hopes that others will follow for it’s a good one.

Time periods mirror each other. My analysis of the past 50 years is as follows. The straight-edged bile produced in the 1940s and 1950s was directly mirrored in the straight-edged truthing effect in the 1960s and 1970s. The positive tone yet pleasantly denying tone of the 1980s was reflected in the pleasantly realer cantameter of the suicidal grungees in the 1990s.

What the future shall hold if the mirror theory proves accurate is that the bile spewing out from every corner right now, of denial, hatred and anger, will in fact be mirrored in an equal and opposite reaction of truth, hatred and anger in the years to follow that will be just as harsh and unproductive yet necessary.

The 1980s was a good time to be a child. It is no abundantly clear that growing up as a child in that still analog age, everybody around me was at least as stupidly happy as I was regardless of their age. Could their have been a better time to have been spend the first 10 years as a human? The children of today don’t have that ol’ man in the white house shaking hands in Michael Jackson, stealing "Born in the USA" as his own without having listened to the words.

IN society, they are surrounded with still equally as stupid people, but there are no big hairdos, no positive rug under which to sweep for a little kid the notion that the Soviet was supposed to be blowing us up.

But in the end of course, there was his love of Nancy.