Blood for Sale? Reagan’s Pagan Cult
Blood for Sale? Reagans Pagan Cult
May 26, 2012 2:40 PM EDT
Lee Siegel
A vial of the Gippers blood nearly sold for $30,000. Lee Siegel on what the ferocious idolatry of the former president says about todays right-wing insurgents.
Its official. With the online bidding for a vial of Ronald Reagans 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. Its hardly surprising that the macabre item will now be on public display. Reagan is the rights Christ, and his sacralization speaks volumes about the character of todays 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 Kennedys culturally glamorous crowd. And where Kennedy had ended as an American martyr, in true, Christological fashion, Reagan finished his lifeso it seemedwith 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 todays swing voters, either former Reagan Democrats or their descendants, look right past Mitt Romneys 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 todays voters search for Reagans comforting aura in every politician they encounter. Its no coincidence that in the very early days of Obamas 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. Isnt it?
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/26/blood-for-sale-ronald-reagan-s-pagan-cult.html
no_hypocrisy
(45,786 posts)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.