The Reagan vulgarama
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington From 1937 on, when he was a sports announcer in a movie called Love is on the Air, Ronald Reagan played many roles. He was a football player, a social worker, a college professor, a plantation foreman, a rancher and a secret service agent, but never a president. He was not a very good actor hut at last he has found a role he can play. On the television screen at least he makes a helluva good president. Never mind, that the contents was ordinary inaugural schmaltz-laced banality'. Its delivery was 'boffo', to borrow a show business idiom.
This first speech as President had everything that Jimmy Carter's efforts always lacked. Ronald Reagan can take a so-so script and with it make the goose pimples rise. Not since John Kennedy has the White House had such a speech giver. In truth, he is better at television-adapted oratory than Kennedy was, although Kennedy's writers could turn phrases that Reagan's ghosts cannot begin to invent. Nor did Kennedy have an official inauguration song of such arresting lyricism as Reagan's: Thumbs up America, We're still a mighty team. Thumbs up America, Let's wave the star-spangled dream. Thumbs up America. We've only just begun. Thumbs up America. We're still the real number one.
When they weren't singing that ditty, which was most of the time, the thousands who had crowded into Washington watched t!le Pyrotechnics, listened to the boom of tne cannons and swarmed drunk and sober, celebrating this political Mardi Gras, Such 211tPouring of victorious partisans has been ha Pouring at American presidential inauguratiweons since Andrew Jackson's time, , hn his uncouth western farmers munuated the town, got drunk, messed on the carpets and generally misbehaved; so long bash has to be judged against a °rig history of tasteless celebratory Yall°°ing. The highly unwashed Cowboys and Indians who marched in Teddy s °°sevelt's inaugural parade must have 1,e eeined as primitive to spectators of 1905 as the as team of Alaksan husky sled u ,uogs would have appeared today. (The i_oa_gs, hugural owever, never made it to the 1: Place parade. A thief broke into the h where they were being kept and stole the Poor al s, but such is cjuality of daily .11,te under Ronald Reagan.) Not yet stolen, the dear English people will no doubt be 'WY to learn, is the Codex Leicester. The Da Vinci manuscript bought in London last month by the American oil tycoon, Dr Armand Hammer, was exhibited every day during the pre-inaugural festival which included endless concerts, performances and recitals in honour of the new chief magistrate and his queenly consort, Nancy Fancy, the first clothes horse to live in the White House since Jackie moved out. In a matter of days we learned that she wears shoes by David Evins, carries bags by Judith Leiber, holsters by Gucci, revolvers by Van Cleef and Arpels, and dresses by Delaranta, Bill Blass and Adolfo (first, or is it last, name unknown). They are saying she has spent 25,000 dollars on rags for her bony back during these past few days. Let the word go out — it is now 'in' to flaunt your money. !Poor taste has been redefined to mean the taste of poor people who cannot afford more.
With Reagan, the rich are coming out of the closet. They want us to know they are rich. They want to be envied, to have the pleasure of exciting our jealousy. For the fun of riding us down in their motorcycle escorted limos, they'll put up with the angry looks. A fair exchange, and it is also possible that a lot of us associate that kind of behaviour with a new blossoming of American power in the world. We may draw martial strength from watching the television cameras play peekaboo at the decolletage of rich Republican women. Nevertheless, there is a subterranean minority making its way through the jams of chauffered Cadillacs, Which thinks that the Reagans are surrounded by an unusually high proportion of low-down, tatty, tacky millionaires. In recent days both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have done stories broadly implying that Frank Sinatra is, if not a gangster himself, the business associate of gangsters. The concentration on Sinatra arises out of the suspicion that the Reagan entourage of friends and hangers-on is loaded with shabby, shady. schloky, smarmy. shyster millionaires.
The televised gala directed by Sinatra suggests that Reagan may have the same blinkered loyalty towards his friends that Warren Harding and Harry Truman had. The event itself was the consummation of a match long in the making, the marriage of Washington and Hollywood. There in a basketball stadium before 18,000 people was Mr and Mrs President-elect, seated on gray plush. wingbacked chairs, not unlike thrones, while people alternatively played for them and saluted them. Omar Bradley, the last living American general to have won a battle, was rolled out in his wheelchair. Airforce General Jimmie Stewart, who once starred in a movie about a young idealist called Mr Smith Goes To Washing ton, threw his new Commander-in-Chief a tearful salute. Dean Martin, the nation's best known drunkard, did his number. The only thing the gala lacked was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in sequinned bikinis singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. ABC bought the rights to the gala for something like 600,0(X) dollars and then went out and sold commercial sponsorship for it at three times the price. The sponsors included Prudential Life Assurance, the Atlantic Richfield oil company, Ben Gay Arthritis Rub, General Motors and Amer ican Express. This last commercial shows a gentleman coming out a yery fine house indeed asking the viewing audience: 'Do you know me? I'm a duke'. The video then cuts to a credit card in the name of 'John, Duke of Bedford', His Grace's voice-over adjuring us: 'American Express Card. Don't leave home without it.'
Corporations that did not sponsor the gala held receptions — Pepsi Cola, Avon Cosmetics, the Ford Motor Company, and General Electric — donated the 5,000 red, white and blue light bulbs for the Sky Salute, an enormous electric American flag that was to be dragged across the night air by a helicopter. The Sky Salute was, unluckily, aborted when it was determined that the smoke from the 4,600 rockets in the firework display would blot out Old Glory. This corporate conspicuousness reminded those who still have a functioning memory that over the years Reagan has promoted almost every commercial interest in the country. A new industry has been born making reproductions of old magazine advertisements and posters showing the President plugging every kind of merchandise imaginable. Shirts, cigarettes, electric toasters — you name it and Ronald Reagan has tried to sell it at one time or another in his long career.
He may, however, be a modern Thomas Becket. He may have used these people to get to the top. But now that he is there, he is seized with a zeal that may go beyond what these business fellows want. There are moments when the man sounds like his own true believer, when he sounds quirky and uncompromising, the way some older people get. Like Cicero who ended his life indulging in a mad heroicism which had been utterly absent during a long life of surviving and getting ahead, Reagan may be smitten with a noble — albeit, very dangerous — courage. Cicero could not get it through his loquacious head that times had changed. Is Reagan also a victim of an older man's inability to accept that the world of his dotage is not the world of his youth or even of his middle age? There were no less that eight inaugural balls (plus a disco blowout for the kiddies). The orchestras playing at, these affairs were those of Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Harry James, Glenn Miller and Sammy Kaye, band leaders who are either retired or dead. Mr Reagan may foxtrot to a different drummer, but time is boogying on.
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