With the death of Raygun, the media and politicians have launched into a dirge fest which is as nauseating as it is untrue, covering over the blemishes of the last twenty years to hide the sickness that has decimated America’s vision. But this is how myths are made in a land devoid of imagination and terminally tapped into the tube. Mythology is an art meant for communication, of making sense of the troubling and sometimes mystical events in life. Under capitalism, and especially via the media meatgrinder, sympathetic events become epics subjected to surreal attention and transformation into something larger than mere life, mere humanity. This is mythomania, and it is how the entertainment industry--Hollywood--intersects and becomes part of the military-industrial complex. Raygun understood this, from his time selling out his fellow workers to HUAC, to his fealty to war-giant and death weapon manufacturer General Electric. Mythomania is something that Howdy Doody Ronnie could grasp, work with from experience, and even help to create.

Without going into detail of Raygun’s miscalculations, military or economic, because they have been well-documented elsewhere by more methodical journalists and writers, the mythomania which he brought from Hollywood to DC represented a final end to participatory democracy, to the idea that anyone could be elected president. Raygun’s first con of the small actual voting base of 1980 sent the signal to the corporate war and poverty profiteers that the office of the President of the United States should only be filled by the less-than-substantive, the non-complex, the unintelligent lowest common denominator type of inbred yes-man that continuously churns out shallow melodrama’s in Hollywood. Yes, that’s right, fooling not only the American people but the supposed stalwarts of individuality and moral argument that so rails against Hollywood’s influence. Backed by media who thrive on simplistic contrivance, and more than willing to ‘play the part’, the corporate oligarchs had their man in Ronnie.

The legacy has continued of course, the implosion of the first bush presidency and the partial reconstruction of hope under Clinton (with it’s never-distant boosterism for increased corporate control of everything) has now given way to the further simplification of the bush psychopathology. Here we dispense with even the need for something as potentially complicated as mythology. Comic books, far less dependent on reflection, are enough. And so we have the comic book antics of bush and company that have led us into a world where America is confronted with unrecognizable and alien depths. But here is where the fabric distorts and breaks apart, the world has not changed so much as our leadership has become more entroptic, more slow, more dumb, and less able to use imaginative response to solve problems. By paying allegiance to the myths of American supremacy promoted by Raygun, and the one-dimensional reasoning of the bush psychopathology, we have as a nation become entwined with ignorance and fear.

We have traveled along Republicrat roads seeing, and sometimes believing, a myth of American goodness, where Hollywood the propagandist for American honesty and righteousness [Reagan as a cantankerous Moses/Sheriff handing down the law] has pushed us ever onward--don't look back, history is for eggheads--to the comic book-like confusion of Archie’s Gang, or Richie Rich, exemplified in the one-dimensionality inherent in the bush psychopathology. There is no depth here, no shadow, only a unswerving swath of primary colors and figures described as well-rounded or jagged and sharp (that is, us or them.) This movement from mythic superficiality to confused impotence is the Raygun-bush legacy. In this strange violent passage we have become far less able to perceive the wonder of different attitudes toward life and far less accepting of them. Raygun's callous and insipid one liners are playing endlessly on media loop right now, to lead us sentimentally forward once again, in a repeat, to the bush psychopathology…blank stares, vehement denials, and bromide religious panaceas. The ignorant’s are having a sitcom remembrance party, and the bush psychopathology truly becomes the media-knighted heir to Reagan’s mythomania.

Too bad it is not real. Or true. Perhaps America wished to be deceived, or rather the forces which live parasitically off us (death weapon makers, entertainment/trash corporations, and oil companies) are counting on us to be deceived. As soon as Americans start to realize, to remember again, that other worlds, other peoples, and other cultures exist beyond the comic book fantasies of the neo-cons and the mythomaniacal master-race b-movies of Hollywood, beyond our product branded borders and mono-language zones, then we, as Americans, can join with the world once again to start building for something with more substance than the Bonzo Savior or the confused Richie Rich bush psychopathology have promoted as the only way that America can be.

The main thing I remember about the Reagan administration was the increase in homelessness. A lot of mentally unstable people were shoved out into the streets.

I know vagrants seem to be a regular fixture in American cities, but, there used to be more public housing and mental hospitals, and vagrants were far less common. Today, they're everywhere. Today, it seems like every other poor person has been through a period of homelessness where their living situation was, at best, unstable.

That, for me, is the symbol of Reagan - poor people falling through the "safety net" (a term he liked).