The Nature of Ronald Reagan

[Jan Klimkowski]

Brower loathed Watt, but viewed him as a comical figure, a corrupt moralist sprung from the pages of a Thackeray novel. He reserved his real animosity for the appalling Reagan, the supreme Confidence Artist of American politics.

Unlike many progressives, Brower never wrote off Reagan as an incompetent and incoherent stooge. He knew better. Brower, the arch-druid, and Reagan, the union-busting snitch, had sparred with each other across the decadesfirst in California over parks and wild rivers, pesticide spraying, nuclear power, and the governor's brutal attacks on the peaceable citizens of Brower's hometown of Berkeley; and later around the globe over wilderness, endangered species, the illegal war on Nicaragua, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

During the pitched battles to save some of the world's largest trees, Brower and his cohorts goaded Reagan into making his infamous declaration: "Once you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all." That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan's philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For the Gipper, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for photo-ops, just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV series that served as a catwalk for the rollout of Reagan as a politician.
Brower viewed Reagan as a mean-spirited and calculating figure, entirely cognizant of and culpable for his crimes. He refused to allow the old man access to the twin escape hatches of plausible deniability and senile dementia.

Born a year apart, the two men were part of the same generation and both spent most of their lives in California. Yet, the tenor of their lives couldn't have been more different. In World War II, Brower served as an instructor for the famous 10th Mountain Division and returned home a pacifist. He didn't talk much about his war experience, preferring to brag about the number of Sierran peaks he'd bagged (seventy first ascents) or the wild rivers he'd floated.

Reagan spent World War II in Hollywood making racist propaganda films to inflame the fever for a war that tens of thousands of others would die fighting in. Years later he boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death camps, even as he was forced to defend his demented decision to bestow presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley refuses to receive his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph for Reagan on those chilly grounds.

Important insights from an activist who spent decades fighting Governor and President Reagan.

Ronnie the Raygun was a great front man for American imperialism but I suspect he understood most of the lines he delivered with such faux folksy panache....

Watt's approach to the plunder of the planet seethed with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as "The Colorado Crazies." Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts. These thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.

The privatization of the public estate is a live agenda now for Britain's odious Tory government, which is scheming and planning the sell off of our forests despite having no electoral mandate to do so.