THREE

I remember General Electric Theater. It, like Friday Night Boxing, was one of those things I was required to watch in order to gain the privilege of seeing stuff I wanted to see, like Victory At Sea or Omnibus. Ronald Reagan was a bore. I could never understand what anyone saw in him. It didn't matter, really: I gave him little thought -- wrote him off as what I would later term a harmless buffoon.
I was wrong about the "harmless" part.

TWO

It's about time, folks, to realize, face the fact, that the sorry state in which we find ourselves has a cause and a very definite origin. Call it the Reagan Revolution. You know: that long-ago Morning in America. Not so much Reagan the man, however; but Reagan the idea, Reagan the symbol, Reagan the tool carried in the pocket of every man who owned him.
That steep oil-slicked slope down which all of us are sliding started with Reagan, the narrow-minded reality-deprived figurehead of the neocon slime that was even then festering deep within his administration and has now brought us to the limit of what the rest of the world can stomach of our imperial hubris and greed. That limit has resulted in increased blow-back from those we have senselessly offended most.
If all those justified and deserving of revenge against us were to suddenly have their way with us . . .
But that conflagration represents the bottom of that slope. We aren't there yet; though we're picking up speed on the slide.
On the way, we can watch with horrified fascination as other features of the Reagan legacy fulfill themselves. We can watch the Pentagon swell until it explodes, watch the national debt do whatever . . .
We can thrill with the horror of spending everything we have on useless wars. Then, long before we've quite spent it all, we'll start to syphon our own blood -- our welfare, our planet, our children -- until we, too, are gone.

And look who got the ball rolling. Didn't exactly start it -- just gave it a millennium's worth of a kick in the ass. The gods must be rolling in the aisles.

That's All, Folks!

All of his movies sucked. Every one of them, whether I saw them or not, for seeing one is seeing all. His speeches, his philosophy, his politics, his intellect, his life -- were all of similar quality.

He was a B movie

One

I first heard of the New Hess Hay most likely in a comic strip. The New Hess is a place -- a place very close to home (or the Homeland, if you prefer the modern revival of Nazi jargon). The New Hess government is a creation of the New Hess Constitution, etc . . .

I don't recall which comic strip it was. Indeed, it could well have been in an episode of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
But it wasn't.

For one thing, it goes back a little further than Boris and Natasha. I've, in fact, narrowed it down to one of two Cold War comic strip sources: either Pogo or L'il Abner. In either case, it would be perfectly at home: a hick interpretation of how a Russian, European, or Asian might pronounce "USA." I strongly suspect Al Capp . . . from around the time that a fictional Asian power he created allowed its airlines to dlop slops (dump waste) over Dogpatch, USA. I think one of the pilots may have called us the New Hess.

The name has become a pretty snug fit over recent decades, has occurred to me many times as deserving of resurrection. What the hell -- it's more fitting now than it was when Stalin was reviewing all those endless military parades, and I was ducking and covering in the hallway, or in the cloakroom, or under my classroom desk.

I'm weird enough to just love the "Hess" part. Historic links and all, you know . . . all the more fitting. Savor the rich and heavy bass tones of pure fascism in New Hess Intelligence, New Hess Imperialism, New Hess racial policies . . .

Ever wonder how things got so royally fucked up? Or when? Both questions have the same answer.

Ronald Reagan.