Role of a lifetime: Ronald Reagan and his revolution

...The family farms around Dixon-still, Kleinknecht says, home to those who guard Reagan's memory fiercely-would default on loans while large farms and agriculture corporations reaped the subsidies of "deficiency payments...

...In this rotting simulacrum of Hollywood artifice, the gangster king is the fifty-three-year-old has-been Bmovie star who would, sixteen years later, preside like a robber baron over a rotting simulacrum of America...

...that some people are worthy, and some are worthless...

...The small businesses that line downtown would, within a few years, be shuttered by their inability to compete with the chains whose megastores have moved into the outskirts of town...

...In his second term he said, "We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women by spending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of a bloated federal establishment...

...It was only a matter of time before the people who fell to that savagery were no longer the "welfare queens" of Reagan's imagination but the people who supported him most fervently, the ones who believed he was returning America to small-town values and simpler times...

...Cold, mean, and unrelievedly brutal, The Killers was made for NBC but was rejected as too violent and released to theaters instead...

...Is it any wonder that facts were, under Reagan, determined by image and not substance...

...That mess becomes Reagan's symbolic payment for his crimes, marked with the blood he spilled, figuratively and literally...

...It will fall to someone else to tackle Reagan's foreign policy, particularly the lie that he defeated communism-as if the people who took to the streets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were bit players...

...It's supremely satisfying, in the film's climax, to watch Lee Marvin as the hit man on Browning's trail, leaking blood all over Browning's neat upper-middle-class home...

...One work captured the disconnect...

...And no one has ever been able to fully account for why those people, in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary, continue to believe that Reagan was their champion...

...It was always the aim of the radical right to transfer as much wealth as possible into the hands of as few as possible...

...Ronnie is a nice man," said his costar Clu Gulager...

...After Reagan's cuts in state aid, the town's center for the mentally retarded would close (1,200 jobs lost...

...It feels necessary...

...Government is the problem...

...Reagan himself epitomized the disconnect from reality...

...and that, with the blessing of God, God's messengers will separate the one from the other...

...The Web site of the snake-oil salesman Sean Hannity hosts a poll asking "What kind of revolution appeals most to you...

...The American dream we are looking at, the essence of what Reagan sold ("It's morning in America again") is a dead way of life...

...This is not, as some right-wingers are claiming, a degeneration of the Reagan revolution...

...Who doesn't long to feel that about their country, especially given the dispiriting drabness of the alternatives, the campaigns run by Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale...

...Disgusted by the hagiographic regard for Reagan that has intensified since his death, Kleinknecht sets out to prove not just that Reagan destroyed the small-town America he is credited with enshrining, but that his reign was the beginning of a remaking of the country that reached its logical endpoint with the economic collapse that accompanied George W. Bush's eight years in office...

...The book is an unremitting-and sometimes wearying-catalog of Reagan's free market evangelism, bill by bill, appointment by appointment...

...that certain opinions are sanctified, and some are evil...

...But Reagan's election, and the continued persistence of the view of Reagan as a champion of bedrock American values, does herald a shift from which American culture has not recovered: the divorce of reality from the perception of that reality...

...In the 1989 video for Don Henley's The End of the Innocence, in the midst of images of Fourth of July barbecues and new fin-tailed cars, images that show America's view of itself as its most prosperous and happy, we see a brick wall in some forgotten business district, on which, smiling out from tattered campaign posters, is a picture of Reagan...

...In 1985, schools would be so poor that the sports programs, like the football team Reagan played on, would almost be eliminated...

...What it had never been, and what it became under Reagan, was a free-floating construct divorced not just from the land itself (which lost environmental protections) but of the people it comprised...

...Reagan had promised it...

...Ronald Reagan set out to make America into a place ruled by business, where those who fell by the wayside were merely succumbing to the inherent weakness that decreed they deserved to fail...

...And this is why Reagan is so utterly convincing in The Killers...

...The glitch in the radical right master plan was that its proponents needed to be elected by the very democratic means they so openly mocked and despised...

...And now, out of power, they are, like any extremist group in that position, turning to violent rhetoric if not yet action...

...Could he have been any clearer about his disdain for the office he was entering...

...Though a recent Department of Homeland Security report warns of the possibility of extremist right-wing violence...

...It's not just that he was declaring himself unfit to rule as that he was announcing his refusal to govern as a representative of the people who elected him...

...It's also too easy to dismiss Reagan's ability to make people feel they were a part of America, caught up in something bigger than themselves...

...America has always been an experiment, an ideal to be measured against...

...In a vision of America as a corporate spread sheet on which profits only went up, up, up the jettisoning of dead weight, the move away from inclusion to the most rigid exclusiveness could thus be sold as a fulfillment of America instead of as its most abject betrayal...

...Ronald Reagan had to wait until the very end of his acting career for his defining role, mob boss Browning in Don Siegel's 1964 The Killers, and he hated it...

...The Man Who Sold the World is about how America was overtaken by a radical philosophy whose aim was nothing less than the conversion of a democracy to a corporation and the dismantling of as many safeguards as possible along the way...

...and gives as choices "Military Coup," "Armed Rebellion," "War for Secession...

...But watching Reagan as Browning in his dull, tastefully appointed office near the end of the movie, posing as a respectable businessman, after we've seen him disguise himself as a police officer to rob an armored car, after we've seen him slap around his mistress (Angie Dickinson), is to see the veneer ripped off likable, smiling affable Ronald Reagan...

...The extent of that rot is the subject of William Kleinknecht's The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America (Nation Books, 2009...

...In 1987, denying he had exchanged arms for hostages, Reagan said, "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not...

...NOTEBOOK Role of a lifetime RONALD REAGAN AND HIS REVOLUTION CHARLES TAYLOR Not every actor who gets a role that defines him is lucky...

...Charles Taylor is a writer living in Brooklyn...

...And while the plot hops all over the country, the pasteboard sets and functional furniture give you the sense of never leaving the back lot...

...Kleinknecht opens his tale on Election Day 1980 in Dixon, Illinois, the hometown Reagan would trumpet as the embodiment of American values but would not bother to visit until his reelection campaign four years later...

...It is as if the Puritans have reached across three hundred years of American history to reclaim the society they once founded-accepting the worst vulgarization of their beliefs if it means that, once again, God and his servants will be able to look upon America and tell the elect from the reprobate, the redeemed from the damned...

...It was Reagan's aim to make government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" perish from the earth...

...In his first inaugural address, he said, "Government is not the solution to our problem...

...The sonofa-bitch was Scotch-guarded...

...The studio system was falling apart, and American movies had not yet moved into the renaissance that would begin three years later with Bonnie and Clyde and flower in the early seventies...

...The biggest employer in the area, Northwestern Steel and Wire Company, already beginning to lose trade to low-priced foreign competition when Reagan took office, would continue to stumble toward its eventual closing...

...Just a few weeks before Reagan took office, Greil Marcus wrote, The secret message behind the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4th was that some people belong in this country and some people don't...

...Twenty years later, with jobs vanishing even more rapidly from small towns and even suburbs, with the cost of commuting becoming prohibitive, we are looking at what may very well become the slums of our future...

...It's too easy to say that people are gullibleespecially after the lead-weight plummet of George W. Bush's reputation and after an election in which Americans rejected the lies of John McCain's campaign...

...When the sensible face of conservatism is represented by David Frum, who goes on Bill Maher's HBO talk show to complain that, before Reagan and deregulation, it was a serious crime for an American to own gold, you know that if this obsession with wealth at the time of looming economic catastrophe is all it has to offer, then even the allegedly reasonable side of the right wing has placed itself on a continuum with the nut jobs...

...What doomed the enterprise was democracy itself...

...It's that cruddiness, though, that makes the movie feel so prophetic...

...From this microcosm follow the details of Reagan's determined and largely successful moves to bring about deregulation, his willingness to cripple agencies by appointing chairs in league with the corporations they are supposed to oversee, the collapse of business ethics that resulted from that practice, and the government's refusal to enforce the law when companies violated it...

...The result is an unholy realization of Calvin Coolidge's remark, "The business of America is business...

...It is the logical step of an antidemocratic movement that can no longer usurp the mechanisms of democracy to achieve its goals...

...The movie isn't nice...

...Those who appear to be truly deranged, Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachman and tear-prone talk-show host Glenn Beck, take to the airwaves to warn that youths may be sent to reeducation facilities or that FEMA may be setting up concentration camps...

...But that view, and Marcus's quote, suggests, finally, what Kleinknecht cannot make himself grasp: that from the radical right point of view, Reagan and everything that flowed from him, including the current state of our economy, was a roaring success...

...Destroying the very laws and programs that had allowed working men and women job protection, health insurance, care for their elderly parents, and education for their kids became equal to honoring their trust...

...Kleinknecht's focus is squarely on domestic economic policy...

...During his presidency, the Left was content to make jokes about Bedtime for Bonzo, about "Win one for the Gipper" and "Where's the rest of me...

...The Killers was only acknowledged in a postcard made of a still from the film: good-natured Dutch Reagan holding a pistol...

...This president wasn't just Teflon...

...And given the Right's unwavering belief in economic Darwinism, the current state of our economy is simply the way things should work...

...This, he persuasively argues, and not social conservatism, is how Reagan remade the world...

...Visually, it's cheap, flat, and garish...

...In this context, he's a vampire, and the ordinary Americans in the blackandwhite images around him are, as the film theorist Paul Coates once wrote of actors in black-and-white movies, resigned to their own future ghostliness...