Ronald Reagan - Hair Rock

there's nobody quite like hunter when he gets wound up...

Reagan was made for the era: in the time of hair rock, when talent was completely and utterly indistinguishable from fashion, Ronald Reagan was the hair president. His coif was one of destiny: his hair glistened in ways that his soul never quite could. He was a handsome actor of middling quality at a time in American life when being a handsome actor of middling quality was the very best thing you could possibly be, in any profession, in any situation, in any corner of the national zeitgeist. And excesses of both rock and presidency were evolutions from what previously were dark days indeed -- while the fashions and rock of the eighties rapidly were evolving into clothes and hair so expansive that they required elaborate scaffolding, steelwork and cocaine to support them, the seventies had previously been so monstrous that the fashion-humiliated country was not only prepared but vaguely grateful for the gratuitously shallow (but nevertheless high-drama) change.

Ditto on the presidency, in which after two fairly lackluster transitional presidents Reagan and Reagan's glistening coif took over the conservative mantle from the disgraced, now-let-us-never-speak-of-him-again Nixon. Reagan succeeded in bringing the hard-right conservatives back into power, allowing them freer rein than Nixon himself ever did, and Reagan even managed to eclipse Nixon in the very, very important conservative presidential duty of doing something completely frigging illegal, extra-constitutional, and blasphemous against the very concept of America, giving seed to a new crop of conservative felons and near-felons to be worshiped as martyrs by the far right.

Nixon provided the movement with G. Gordon Liddy; Reagan gave us Oliver North. You can find them both, along with others, on Fox News and other conservative outlets to this day, neatly packaged reformed crooks, which in conservatism passes for nobility. And Reagan himself, of course, maintained plausible deniability, which from the multiple Bush eras we have now learned is the entire difference between conservative presidential hero and conservative presidential chump.

i positively SOAR with his verbiage... it's long, it's articulate, it's FUN to read... go enjoy...

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