He had an enormous ego, though, and he had some general good looks, but there really wasn't a terribly large muscle in his head, so he learned to use his voice, a smattering of rhetorical skills, and some charisma to move himself up in the political branch of the world of entertainment, since he knew instinctively that he was not really good at acting, other than reading lines, sometimes so obviously that his producer bosses cringed.
Because his inherent skills taught him that looking someone in the eyes, pretending to give a shit, and honing dramatic cues for more than just reading those stupid lines made him a lot more powerful in the long run, he had no problem in learning to be a grifter--all politicians are grifters, some worse than others.
He found being a politician was actually something he felt good at. He had all the fame and adulation he wanted, so now he started to bank on his power, and see how far to the top he could go. And go to the top he did. And millions of Americans were brainwashed into believing that this actor, this travesty of a human being, this truly apathetic asshole had changed the landscape of the USA, and brought people like James Dobson, Karl Rove, and their ilk out of the woodwork, raping the country, and selling us all down the river for a long time to come.
Hoping you're not resting in peace, mofo.
(And this is the fucker they want to put on a dime?)
And this post follows the first, after someone said Reagan wasn't ALL bad:
People are always prone to take the easiest way out of any situation. They fail the test of humility, and become drawn to things which distance themselves from the general populace. They become greedy, apathetic, hard, cold. They no longer have the ability to empathize or care. They justify their new nature as a "sacrifice" of a sort. Money means more to them than people. They can't fail, because failure means going all the way back to the beginning, and the struggle and pain in their lives. They no longer have the choice to change their ways, because the person they are in the end is all that they know anymore. In faith-based vernacular, they have sold their soul to the devil. In reality, they have had the taste of power, and it is a heady feeling. They will do anything which keeps that sense of exhilaration, of commanding the actions of life or death.
In life, they have chosen the oldest path--that which requires the least amount of actual work. They are not unique at all--this path is one which most people do, but some are just able to grasp the brass rings they find along the way. Extraordinary people always follow the more difficult path, the road less traveled, as Robert Frost said. Most of us have found that path, tried it for a short while and diverted back to the path of least resistance. It's okay--we're not all capable of the hardness, the racing in the wind or swimming against the tide. Humans rarely are able to finish that path because it's more difficult to find all the conditions which favor it. It's against human nature in general to accept the inevitable losses which come with heroism and complete self-sacrifice. But in life, we can recognize some of those people as true leaders--Gandhi, Mandela, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, Jimmy Carter.
Human beings are not wired all the way to exercise the best of intentions all the time. Very few have the ability to ignore their own needs and put the needs of others ahead of them.
But Reagan was not a hero and never a man of the people. His own selfishness and desire for power were fueled by his ego and his overwhelming desire for power. The more power he had, the less of a human being he became.
Anyone who eulogizes Reagan needs to step back and look at the whole picture, of the horrible things he did while he was in office--things he did to satisfy his own ego, and for essentially "photo ops" for the history books.
