One of the luxuries that goes with finishing exams is time: in this case to do a little wandering down music’s memory lane. As a ‘True Child of the 80s‘ (I even finished Year 12 - the Upper Sixth - in 1988), many of my memories of the decade are fixed musically, none more so than the common perception that Ronald Reagan was a dunce, one of the worst Presidents to grace (not) the White House. One song that caught this particular zeitgeist well (and with some wit) is the Genesis track Land of Confusion, with its oddball ‘Spitting Image‘ film clip. Before I go on, I’ll ask you to take a look at it:
Whoopsadaisy - Ronnie accidentally starts WWIII, after trying to save the world in a superman suit while riding a triceratops and wearing a stetson. The clip is still funny, but we laugh with the hindsight provided by the fact that Ronnie was right, and that his defeat of the Soviet Union by non-military means has not only ensured his place in history but placed him in the first rank of US Presidents. That said, the rock stars who sang ‘We Are the World’ also come in for a pasting.
Apart from showing that rock groups can be wrong, this provides me with an interesting entree to alt-metal act Disturbed’s 2006 cover of Land of Confusion. Eschewing Bush-bashing, Todd McFarlane (of Spawn fame) produces a far darker vision of change. In a futuristic world destroyed by what is obviously the War on Terror, McFarlane manages to reference the original version (complete with mad mullahs and marching feet; the Genesis clip has at least one Ayatollah, along with Gaddafi) at the same time as recognizing the dark impetus behind revolutions. What replaces the totalitarian statism at the start of the clip is not very pretty, led by a figure of other-worldly evil:
McFarlane also manages to reference Gulliver’s Travels, his earlier work on Pearl Jam’s Do the Evolution and some classic anti-semitic tropes attached to ‘global finance’ (the exploding financier who showers money on the city is straight out of Der Stuermer). He’s nothing if not an equal-opportunity satirist, however, and the image of the child suicide-bomber (with attendant mad mullah) is one of the bleakest you’re likely to see.
There’s no Bush, though, in part because Bush may be vindicated by history, as Reagan was. I don’t say this as a Bush supporter - I’m not, as I think I’ve made clear over the years. I say it as someone who is alert to the vast power differential between the United States and her various enemies. People often underplay this, thinking that a rag-tag army of Islamists in Iraq or elsewhere could somehow knock over the last true superpower. Unlikely.
If the US loses in Iraq or Afghanistan, that loss will be the product of choice and democracy, as it was in Vietnam. Or otherworldly intervention, as in the Disturbed clip. Which is also unlikely.
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Interesting. I too am a child of the 80s (I started high school in 1988, just as you were finishing).
My husband wishes to say that naturally, he thought the Disturbed version was musically superior to the Genesis version (being a metal fan).
The clip was very disturbing - kind of like a mad manga. No one came out positively. I am glad that they didn’t descend into the cliche of Bush-bashing - although I’m certainly not a Bush supporter either, it’s a bit hackneyed.
If I wrote a sci-fi book, it would be about how revolutions often replace an authoritarian regime with something that is just as bad. Although George Orwell already did that most effectively in Animal Farm. But perhaps one could put a modern twist on it. Yes, in this regard, I am a pessimist.
Why oh why did you have to remind me that Genesis exists? I’d almost forgotten. Even all the god-awful shite they’ve dragged up from the 80s hasn’t included Phil bloody Collins.
I’m not sure that I can buy the version of history that has Ronald Reagan as some strategic genius who planned the downfall of the Soviet Union. Certainly Colin Powell who worked for him does endorse that view: Reagan was a visionary according to Powell.
But it seems to me that a visionary would be less prone to making boo boos like recalling scenes in movies as if they were life or cracking jokes about bombing Russia. Brilliant subterfuge? I’m not sure. It wasn’t all boo boos of course. He could be also be very articulate.
My take on history is that it’s 96% folly. So I guess I’m prejudiced. In order to sort out the competing versions of history it’s necessary for the Culture Warriors to move on and start lying about other things. Then we’d be able to examine the facts as they lay out.
The one fact that seems to stall the Reagan mythology is that the Americans were actually stunned when the Sovs fell down. The US intelligence apparatus was focussed on counting bombs and, I believe, the Westerner who actually predicted the fall was a British journalist.
An alternative explanation is simply that the Soviet Union after Stalin began the slow grinding decline that comes of a complete lack of incentive. Under Joe Steel there was one hell of an economic incentive to get things done: bullets. Afterward it was just one giant bureaucracy that expended most of its resources getting people to point in the same direction. No-one gave a shit. Le Carre described the Soviet Union as the place where every waiter is a tyrant.
Reagan came in just after the blows of Vietnam and Irangate. He wanted to restore national pride and every Leader’s favourite way of doing that is spending big on the military. Russia of course couldn’t keep up but considering they and the Yanks already had enough bombs to blow up Earth and Mars and Venus did it matter?
I view the Reagan mythology with skepticism because I know that Americans crave heroes and construct their history around the heroic. I know this ’cause I was schooled by ‘em. My alternative thesis is based on the premise that static oligarchies will decline. They almost always do.
It’s also pertinent that in situations where long standing and bitter enemies make peace both sides must be willing. I have my doubts that Reagan would’ve been as successful if Andropov had lived?
Anyway that wasn’t the worst that Spitting Image ever did to him. They had a running sketch: “The President’s Brain is Missing”. That was hilarious. The brain, of course, was very tiny. At one point it jumps into Brezhnev who starts railing at his minders to “get away from me you commie bastards”. The best bit was when a turtle attempted to mate with it.
Also:
A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of liberty.
Mark Twain
Not a prog-rock fan I take it, Adrien? I’m with LE’s partner, and much prefer the Disturbed version, in part because it has fatter guitar (as you’d expect) but also because the clip is an interesting exercise in equal opportunity evil.
WRT Reagan, I think the American people were shocked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Reagan and his top advisers weren’t at all. Powell’s recollections bear this out. The ‘liberal media’ had an investment in portraying him as a dunce who couldn’t plan strategically, but the likes of Powell knew better.
To my mind, the 80s media portrayal of Reagan as an idiot when he clearly wasn’t (Jason over at Catallaxy has put up quite a few youtubes of him cheerfully - and intelligently - chatting away on Chicago school economics etc) led directly to the creation of Fox News. A pervasive left bias in the MSM - a bias so institutionalized media practitioners were unaware of its existence - meant that (quite literally) only half the story was being told. Fox leapt in to fill the void, making buckets of cash in the process.
Even as a teenager (albeit a bright and critical teenager) I remember thinking ‘hang on, this can’t be right, the people knocking him must think there’s something good about the Soviet Union’. When there clearly wasn’t (anything good about the Soviet Union). Quite a few people I knew growing up were refugees from various communist regimes (from Ukraine to Vietnam) and they used to shrug their shoulders sadly at the Western Press and say things like ‘if only you knew’.
I’ve never forgotten that.
One of my dearest friends is a Soviet refugee - she gets very frustrated about uncritical portrayals of the Soviet system (even to this day).
I’m always wary of media portrayals of politicians ever since the instance of Neil Kinnock (ex-Labour leader in the UK). The press portrayed him terribly. After he was ousted, I saw him on the UK version of Good News Week and was amazed by the fact that he was an ordinary and intelligent human being.
Nonetheless, I don’t have much beef with the belated sainthood of Regan - just a human being with the same flaws as the rest of us. And, as Adrien has said, lucky that Andropov died.
They lept over the void. And came at it from the other side.
Have you seen the kind of stuff they do lately? It can’t be parodied anymore, it’s already so preposterous. There’s bias and then there’s bonkers.
True, Jacques I haven’t had a television for a year (thanks to collegiate rules) so it’s quite possible they’ve headed off the reservation and I haven’t seen any of it. In the beginning, though, they were funny and sharp - Peter Black wrote a good post on Fox and how they carved out their niche, IIRC.
[Found it - it was on OLO]
Hi there,
You appear to have swallowed the populist line on Reagan with gusto. I would have thought that the leader of the USSR, oh what’s his name, Gorba something or another, should be credited with bringing about change in the Soviet Union during the late 1980s. Have a read of this, it will fill in some details for you:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/perspective/stories/2008/2276201.htm
Well I didn’t watch American television during the 80s Skeptic. Generally Australian TV seemed to be stuffed to the brim with blokes named Gobbo or Jobbo or Boppo - something ‘o’ who talked about footy all the time and were proud they had beer bellies.
There was a lot of comedians making fun of Reagan but that’s as it should be. The best was a parady of Ron and Nancy arguing over who’s aged better. Nancy gets hinm a beauty which I won’t repeat.
However as a teenager in a complex world in which old men seem to make light of global thermonuclear war I was less than impressed by what seemed to be a cavelier attitude on the part of Mr Reagan. This in no way ever translated to support for the Soviet Union. My first argument viz The Soviet Union Sux (me first speaker for the affirmative) happened when I was 9 with my best friend Amin who spent his early years there. Amin’s an investment banker now.
But I have taken note of Jason’s posts and of General Powell’s testimony. I don’t dismiss the Reagan myth as entirely hooey.
However it is a myth. Defined strictly in utilitarian terms a myth is an idea that holds a bunch of people together. The veracity of myths empirically is not really important. Or at least it hasn’t been until recently.
To tell history as a the Story of the Great Man (or woman) is an American specialty. It is part of their Romanticism. It is a very romantic country politically speaking.
This doesn’t invallidate Reagan’s claim to strategic greatness. The alternative Great Man hypothesis concerns Gorbachev of course. I remember the Trots used to sell t-shirts with “Gorby Is It” printed on them (quite telling really).
A third way of examining it is to trace the story at a macro level looking at the procession of postures the US and the Sovs took, their individual foreign policy problems, economics etc.
That is the route I would prefer to take for the simple reason that I prefer that root. I don’t claim any absolutism on these matters and if I ever do: shoot me I deserve it. Doubtless all of these modes of inquiry would bear fruit. Doubtless there are other ways of looking still.
I haven’t really looked yet. I will sometime tho’. The key to quality would be to design the inquiry in a way that will subject all myths associated with the era to skepticism.
This will, in now way, erode the Reagan Myth however. He will remain legendary for the time being.
Not a prog-rock fan I take it, Adrien?
Uh no. I’m an ex Mod/Punk. If a song’s more than 3 minutes long it better have a bloody good reason.
Ha ha ha ha. I’m not a prog-rock fan either, generally speaking.