The Ronnies

There are all these awards: the Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, Emmys, Obies, the Clios, as we now know from Mad Men, etc. Ronald Reagan blazed a path of creativity that has many followers and has resulted in many adherents to the new Republican doctrine of unreality. Ronnie, in fact, blew clean through the distinction between reality and invention. He is said to have been unable to keep his memories of the movies separate from what really happened and his memory was reportedly outstanding in some ways, nearly photographic. 

Anyway it was probably very visual and, I would guess, correspondingly low on the reality-check scale, an amazing trove or repository of incoherent matter, scattershot images and streams of images selectively nurtured for their value on a personal vanity index. Ronnie's vanity project became the nation's, a parallel world of feel-good stuff, a virtuality, probably needed to soothe Republican souls in carrying the weight of Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden of being simultaneously wealthy and worthless.

The Ronald Reagan Awards, or Ronnies, should honor those who have excelled in this creative work, the making-up of a realm of happy-talk, free from the need to conform to any measure of verification or intelligibility. There would be an award for creating the most crippling debt, one for military malfeasance, one for depriving children of food, one for depriving people of healthcare and so on. All of these assume reverse spin, which is the point, and are guised as the opposite of what they are. Freedom is limitation.

Security is risk. Fiscal responsibility is reckless abandon and debt. Individuality is conformity. Respect is presumption. Ownership is enslavement. The statuette is a representation of a chimp named Chump, an iconic and ironic reminder of how easy it is to get people to believe anything and to mimic it, so the nonsense is repeated and believed and on it goes until there is a calamity, like a financial collapse. It is then that the best creative work is done, when it is most hard to deny the reality of Republican incompetence.