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babylonsister

(170,964 posts)
Mon May 28, 2012, 07:50 AM May 2012

Blood for Sale? Reagan’s Pagan Cult

Blood for Sale? Reagan’s Pagan Cult
May 26, 2012 2:40 PM EDT
Lee Siegel
A vial of the Gipper’s blood nearly sold for $30,000. Lee Siegel on what the ferocious idolatry of the former president says about today’s right-wing insurgents.


It’s official. With the online bidding for a vial of Ronald Reagan’s dried blood reaching $30,000 before the auction was called off, the Republican Party is now the party of paganism.

The blood, reportedly taken from Reagan at the hospital he was rushed to after the attempt to assassinate him in 1981, was instead donated to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation in California after it and the Reagan family threatened to sue the auction house. It’s hardly surprising that the macabre item will now be on public display. Reagan is the right’s Christ, and his sacralization speaks volumes about the character of today’s right-wing insurgents.

Like Christ throwing the moneylenders out of the temple, Reagan signed into law a tax cut that forever changed American life. It created a stratum of moneyed elite that, finally, in relieved conservative eyes, could compete with the liberal cultural elite that had always oppressed conservative hearts. For conservatives, Reagan replaced the liberal Christ, John F. Kennedy, whose own historic tax cut they thought favored Kennedy’s culturally glamorous crowd. And where Kennedy had ended as an American martyr, in true, Christological fashion, Reagan finished his life—so it seemed—with a cheerful smile. He was a nontragic, happy-ending, American Christ: half-messiah, half Santa Claus. In the contemporary mind, he is all resurrection, and no crucifixion.

Can anyone doubt that today’s swing voters, either former Reagan Democrats or their descendants, look right past Mitt Romney’s spineless fluidity and economic heartlessness and see, on his handsome, shiny, happy face, the Gipper himself? How else to explain the astounding fact that this cynical cipher is now more or less neck and neck with Obama in the polls? A true Christian, alienated by the status quo, will search for Christ in every face he or she meets. So do many of today’s voters search for Reagan’s comforting aura in every politician they encounter. It’s no coincidence that in the very early days of Obama’s presidency, the one figure he was compared to more than any other was Reagan. Now he is the meek, soclialist Christian; the anti-Reagan.

Reagan may well have acquired Christlike status in many Americans’ eyes, but he inspires not the loving spirit of the New Testament, but the pagan ferocity out of which the Christian myth grew. The idea of the crucified and resurrected Christ has its origin in the annual pagan rituals of sacrificial destruction followed by the creation of new life: winter followed by spring. It is the liberals’ worst fear that Romney will steam into the White House fueled by sheer desire for destruction of Obama and everything he represents. After destruction, creation is bound to occur. Isn’t it?


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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/26/blood-for-sale-ronald-reagan-s-pagan-cult.html

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Blood for Sale? Reagan’s Pagan Cult (Original Post) babylonsister May 2012 OP
That's interesting because I see Reagan's blood more reminiscent of a religious icon no_hypocrisy May 2012 #1

no_hypocrisy

(45,786 posts)
1. That's interesting because I see Reagan's blood more reminiscent of a religious icon
Mon May 28, 2012, 07:57 AM
May 2012

in the tradition of The Church's obsession during the Dark Ages with such icons. Stuff like the Shroud of Turin, the Holy Grail, splinters of The Cross, etc. The Right made Reagan their Jesus and to me, that explains why someone would pay for his dried blood.

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