Mendocino County Today: Monday 1/27/2025

DRY AND COLD weather with slow moderation of overnight temperatures is expected through mid week. Rain with high mountain snow is expected to return late this week and continue for the the weekend. Gusty offshore winds over higher terrain and ridges today will continue to diminish tonight through Tuesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cold 33F under clear skies this Monday morning on the coast. Cold morning temps & clear skies thru Thursday then what is now looking like a at least a 6 day rain event gets underway Friday. Looks like a total forecast amount of about 3" so far, we'll see.

ANOTHER GREAT SENIOR CENTER CRAB FEED

Thank you, Anderson Valley, for showing up for the AV Senior Center by coming to the Crab Feed last night! Thank you to all the local businesses and individuals that generously donated to the crab feed’s raffle, silent auction and live auction! Far too many of you to mention! You know who you are. Your support is crucial and appreciated beyond measure!

Thank you to Larry & Jeanne Mailliard, Dennis & Wynne Nord, Steve & Terri Rhoades, Kevin & Jo Spies Athey, Julie L Lowry-Winchester, Gwynn Smith, Lily Apfel, Jacob Hernandez, Jenna Walker, Philip Barker Thomas, Evette LaPaille, Jessica Walker, Estephany Arias, Chris Rossi & Lamiece Dawson, Jay Newcomer, Nick Rhoades and my hubby, Kevin Lee! So much hard work but so worth it. We did it again!

Special thanks to Arthur Folz and the class of 2025! It would’ve been impossible without you! I hope ya’ll enjoy your senior trip!

Renee Lee, AV Senior Center Executive Director

AV UNIFIED NEWS

Dear Anderson Valley Community,

I hope this update finds you well! Our schools are bustling with activity and students are learning, playing, and having fun.

Photos from FFA: FFA members who participated in the Leadership Conference in Rohnert Park, and two students with goat kids!

District Updates

Murals at AVES

Many have shared concerns about murals at Anderson Valley Elementary School. The murals were removed when the buildings were painted and the new panther logos were installed. Some love the new look, feeling it is clean and fresh, while others miss the murals, feeling that those contribute to the warmth and feel of the campus.

Our previous administrators saved the old murals for us; they are in storage. The murals are in various states of disrepair, due to effects of weather and age on materials that were not designed to withstand the elements. Some may be able to be restored while others will not.

In order to ensure everyone’s thoughts have been considered, we are asking for your input!

Please take this survey to share your thoughts about murals on the AVES campus.

Please consider attending our Mural Meeting at AVES, on February 6th at 4:00 p.m. in Room 19, to review the data collected, view a slide show about the murals, and provide final input for Mr. Ramalia as he and his team make final decisions regarding old, new, and future murals at AVES!

Immigration Support & Updates

Anderson Valley USD is committed to its students and families. Please see the attached Board Policy and Administrative Regulations, as they pertain to immigration support. We will have these translated into Spanish soon, and I will share them again at that time. Below are some key points from our Administrative Regulation; I apologize for awkward translation, due to my use of Google translate:

I encourage all students and families to update their emergency contact information throughout the school year and to provide alternative contacts, including an identified trusted adult guardian, in case a student’s parent/guardian is detained or is otherwise unavailable.

Information on the emergency card will only be used in response to specific emergency situations and not for any other purpose.

I encourage all students and families to learn their emergency phone numbers and be aware of the location of important documents inducing birth certificates, passports, social security cards, physicians’ contact information, medication lists, lists of allergies,and other such information that would allow the students and families to be prepared in the event a family member is detained or deported.

In the event that a student’s parent/guardian is detained or deported by federal immigration authorities, the superintendent or designee shall release the student to the person(s) designated on the student’s emergency contact information or to any individual who presents a caregiver’s authorization affidavit on behalf of the student…

Here are some resources for families who are concerned about immigration enforcement:

www.ca.gov/immigration/

www.nilc.org/resources/everyone-has-certain-basic-rights/

Adult School Classes Will Start The First Week Of February

Please see the adult school website for class information, including teachers, cost, and meeting days and times. If you wish to register, you can attend the open house registration event on Sunday, February 26th from 1- 3 p.m., visit the Adult School website at www.avadultschool.org, email adultschool@avpanthers.org, or call 895-2953. Thanks!

We love to see parents at our events, supporting their kids. If you would like to be more involved, please contact your school’s principal, Mr. Ramalia at AVES or Mr. McNerney at AV Jr/Sr High, or me, district superintendent, Kristin Larson Balliet.

We are deeply grateful for our AVUSD families.

With respect,

Kristin Larson Balliet, Superintendent

Anderson Valley Unified School District

klarson@avpanthers.org

ROBIN SUNBEAM: Registered Democrats, vote for me!

Robin Sunbeam is running to be a delegate to the California Democratic Party. Register to vote for her at https://ademelections.com/register/mail. We are in Region 2.

FORT BRAGG POLICE CHIEF NEIL CERVENKA TO SPEAK MONDAY AT NOON

I often hear members of the public ask me why Fort Bragg has far less homeless on the streets than in previous years. Not everyone watches the City Council meetings where Police Chief Cervenka has described CRU and its successes, and that's a big part of what's helping the homeless in this city.

CRU is the Care Response Unit outreach and support program formed here in 2022, and staffed by Social Services liaisons. It was the brainchild of Captain Thomas O'Neal, who obtained a grant from the Board of State Community Corrections. It's been highly successful in helping the homeless get the services they need to get off the street, and there are many success stories and other benefits related to CRU.

Chief Neil Cervenka will speak to the Soroptimist of Noyo Sunrise at the Senior Center Library at noon this Monday 1/27. The public is welcome to attend and learn all about it.

Tess AlbinSmith tkasmith@hotmail.com

(Fort Bragg City Council Member)

FORT BRAGG ROTARY CLUB: Today, Cynthia, Kate, and I had the wonderful opportunity to serve as guest speakers at the Fort Bragg Rotary Club on behalf of the Mendocino County Safe Space Project (MCSSP). We were warmly welcomed and grateful for the chance to share our recent activities and future plans. Thank you to the Fort Bragg Rotary Club for allowing us to express our passion for creating safe spaces for the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Your support means a lot to us!

THE WES SMOOT MEMORIAL WILL BE HELD SATURDAY, FEB. 1, 2025, 2pm, at the Apple Hall, Boonville Fairgrounds.

PICKLEBALL, ANYONE?

Interested in learning to play Pickleball? We have a beginning clinic scheduled for Saturday, March 22nd from 1:45-3:15 at the AV HS tennis courts with 2 excellent instructors from Santa Rosa, Lena and Jack. $50 and you just need to bring a paddle. You can (facebook) message me for more info (or text me at 707-489-0096).

— Jeanne Eliades

GATHER YOUR HEIRLOOMS & TREASURES

Witherell Evaluation Event (Fundraiser for the AV Historical Society) March 16, 2025. 10a-2p Anderson Valley Museum, 12340 Hwy 128, Boonville $5/Item for museum members & $8/Item for non-members (3 item/person maximum)

Former PBS “Antiques Roadshow” Appraiser Brian Witherell traveled with the popular PBS television show as an invited appraiser for 22 years and is the owner of Witherell Auction House based in Northern Nevada. Brian’s Anderson Valley roots run deep. His grandparents were prominent members of the Anderson Valley Historical Museum. His parents, Brad Witherell and Linda Tuttle graduated from AV High.

Just like “Antiques Roadshow” Brian Witherell will be onsite to provide evaluations, auction estimates and guidance for participants with family heirlooms, treasures and collections. He will be joined by Witherell General Manager and Graduate Gemologist, Adam Anapolsky. As generalist evaluators, the two will provide an informative, enjoyable experience in a wide range of categories including jewelry, coins, watches, fine art, comic books, sports memorabilia, advertising, historical memorabilia, collector cards, militaria, antique firearms, weapons, Native American, silver, sculpture, furniture and decorative arts.

‘BRING ME A ROCK’

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

If I were arrested, charged with crimes and faced years in prison the first thing I would do is get a sleeping bag and camp out every night in front of my lawyer’s office.

It would be Job One and Job Only, even if it meant getting a divorce, putting the kids in an orphanage and working night shifts at Kwikee Mart. I’d spend mornings, starting around 4 a.m., standing on the sidewalk so that when my lawyer showed up at the office I could say “Anything I can do to help?”

Then, “Do we need another meeting? May I get you some coffee? Take you to lunch? Wash your car?”

Why leave anything to chance when it means spending one month, let alone 25 years, getting acquainted with the residents of Soledad Prison?

I am retired, but for 34 years I worked as a criminal defense investigator, many with the Mendocino County Public Defender’s Office. It was fun and genuinely interesting work and as near a perfect career as I could reasonably have imagined.

The pay was sufficient, office mates were congenial, smart, cynical and skilled at lawyering, and there was occasional travel to exotic places, including too many days in Covelo. But there was also a traveling carnival in Florida, many visits to Oregon and a few to remote villages in LA, Canada and Tennessee.

Deputy Public Defenders were dedicated, hard working, and often inspired by noble ambitions to help the underdog, uphold the Constitution and fight the good fight. But the job included a mystery: the casual indifference on the part of many charged with crimes to do much to help their lawyers.

A fair number of defendants simply shrugged, assumed the lawyer would take care of everything and went back to whatever they were doing before they got arrested.

It seemed insane, bordering on suicidal. Some were dim-witted, as expected from people who spent hours and days inhaling methamphetamine fumes. After years of such indulgence some were no smarter than the chair you’re sitting in, and a lot less useful.

So we were perpetually perplexed at the nonchalance of many of those facing years in prison.

One of the Deputy Public Defenders and I dreamed up an all-purpose scenario demonstrating their disinterest. The hypothetical setup: Client comes into office.

Lawyer says “Well, Mr. Recidivisto, we have some good news with regard to your case. Last weekend I wrote six motions, each of which was granted by the court, and your investigator found a witness in Chicago that has photos of you at Wrigley Field in a game against the Reds on the date the crimes took place.”

Client: Stares, shrugs, frowns.

Lawyer: “So I talked with the DA and charges will be dismissed next Monday when we go to court.”

Client: Stands, turns, heads to door.

Lawyer: But there’s a catch. Between now and Thursday afternoon you have to bring me a rock, or else the deal is off and we go to trial As you know, your exposure in this case is 36 years. If you get convicted you’ll do so much time your parole officer has not yet been born.”

Client: Frowns.

Lawyer: “So all you have to do sometime in the next three days is bring me a rock and all your legal problems are over. A rock about oh, this big would be fine, or maybe a bit bigger or smaller. But I have to have the rock by 5 p.m. Thursday.”

The attorney and I would speculate on what percentage of our customers might follow through. It was asking a lot. To understand the assignment and then have the initiative to not only find a rock, but then bring it to the attorney all on his own would thwart all but the most persistent of our clients.

Instead he would come to court an hour late wearing a torn t-shirt with a mildly offensive message, and when the judge inquired about the rock, would give a short speech about how he’s been real busy because his grandmother died again last week, and that his lawyer didn’t remember to bring him a rock.

Next Monday the jury trial would begin. He’d wear the same shirt.

BILL KIMBERLIN:

This is the Boonville Hotel in Anderson Valley. Jack London and his wife stayed here in 1906 when he was covering the San Francisco earthquake of that year for the New York papers. At that time the hotel was called the Berry Hotel. Jack's wife Charmian carried a notebook which is in the San Francisco Historical Society and I read her account of the trip. “We stopped at Mrs. Berry's place.” I've always wondered how they got here. Probably by stage coach but Norm Clow told me his kin saw them riding through the Valley on horseback. So I am guessing that you could rent a horse, like we do now a car, and drop it off at your destination. In any case Jack signed the register at Mrs. Berry's place in Boonville.

ED NOTE: Jeff Burroughs is descended from Mrs. Berry and can probably fill in the details, but I believe Jack and Charmian were headed south as one leg of a journey to assess earthquake damage on the Northcoast.

ED NOTES

AMONG THE MANY things local libs get completely wrong is their hostility to the armed services as an option, often the only option, for local youth. Yes, a kid might get killed, but the odds are heavily in favor that he won't be killed; but the odds that he'll drive drunk into a redwood or get shot in a pot patch are more likely than him or her buying eternity at the hands of a furriner. But what do you see for the typical Mendo County high school graduate? Nothing. Take a look at all the young people caught up in the justice system, and tell me the military services wouldn't have given them a chance at life.

ALTHOUGH I was magically tracked as college material in high school through zero effort on my part, I had no desire for more class time and no money anyway, but I had to do something to support myself and opted for the Marines, deluding myself that I was tough enough to manage it. Just barely, in the harrowing event.

IF IT WEREN'T for sports I would have dropped out of high school, and I don't regret going into the Marines. The “warrior” experience de-deluded me. Additionally and moreover, those of you who know something about the history of this country, will know that it was the wonderful world of sports and the military, those two institutions, that achieved what ethnic harmony we've since achieved in this country. Sports and the military threw us all in together and, for the most part, it was good for us, and very good for US.

I KINDA ENJOY spam, the daily deluge of electronic come-ons. In a darkening world, I see spam as an opportunity for tiny funsies, the amusement opportunities for a tiny, idle mind. I recently wrote back to a guy who calls himself Brother Steve, a self-alleged man of the cloth who sells everything from gospel music to accounting services. Brother Steve hits me at least once a day with special discount offers on an implausibly large range of services. I wrote back to Brother Steve to ask him if he was related to Br'er Rabbit. Brother Steve instantly responded.. “Br'er Rabbit's my cousin,” he said. Dorothy Lee Donahue describes herself as an “energetic alchemist” and a “Certified Reiki Master Instructor.” I asked Dot if she could make me some gold out of the old newspapers cluttering up my office. “Hmmm,” the energetic alchemist replied, “I'll see what I can do.”

THE ANNUAL hypocrisy defaming the memory of Martin Luther King has come and gone, an orgy of media self-congratulation on the reverence Americans now have, thanks to King, for non-violent political progress when in living fact King would be appalled at who and how his memory has been hijacked. I happened to be alive and more or less cognizant in 1968 when King was murdered, alive and more or less cognizant in what has since magically become synonymous with, of all delusions, “progressive” civic policy in that adult playground known as San Francisco.

I REMEMBER widespread jubilation among white people, men especially, at King's murder, and I remember most vividly that it was the national media that whipped up public opinion against King, the bravest kind of man there is because he wasn't naturally courageous according to his biographers, the kind of guy who got up every morning not knowing if he'd be alive at the end of the day. Prominent as he was, King, most places, had no police protection. His house with his wife and kids in it was fire bombed with impunity and J. Edgar Hoover, arguably America's greatest nutball ever, who spent his down time prancing around in a cocktail dress, bugged King's hotel rooms and passed the tapes of King's robust private life around to Washington big shots. When King started denouncing the Vietnam War and the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and saying “maybe there's something wrong with capitalism,” well, here was a man walking around with a neon bull's eye on his chest. And sure enough, King didn't live to be 40. A few people reading this will remember the lefty hall south of Market from where many Bay Area protests were launched beginning in the early 1960s. Something Alley. I've forgotten the address although I was a habitue. So, the night of King's murder I headed to Troublemaker Central to see what we were going to do about it, which turned out to be a big march, a very big march but not so large that it intimidated into silence a lot of race baiters shouting insults from the sidewalk. I wound up leafleting on Market Street near Powell in preparation for that event. A totally unhinged guy went at me verbally so intensely I had to warn him that I was not a non-violent person and bluster blah-blah mothafucka get away from me or I'll Gandhi your nose for you. That was the worst of it that day for me, and not any kind of a big deal over a lifetime of unpleasant political encounters. But I can still see that fool's red face screaming foul insults at me and MLK. And I can remember the tenor of the editorial comment in area papers that King, just prior to his assassination, had “gone too far” and ought to confine his efforts to civil rights, about which he'd also gone too far before he became too famous to go too far on that one. King was always going too far, and if he were around today he'd be going wayyyyyyy too far for the idiot cadres of the DNC with their wars on the poor, their giveaways to the banks, their phony healthcare reform, their eager support for mass murder in Gaza, their bland collaboration with everything gone terribly wrong in this doomed country. King’s real legacy has turned out to be an intensification of everything he gave up his life to prevent. King's birthday ought to be a national day of mourning for missed messages. (The best book on the man remains the little Penguin bio by Marshall Frady.)

Steve Derwinsky Library, Boonville, California

DID THE ELITES WANT MLK DEAD? IF SO, WHY?

by Alexander Cockburn (November, 2009)

I believe Oswald killed JFK and Sirhan killed Bobby. Lone gunmen both. With MLK, it could be a different matter. And with the infinitely more radical Malcom X it certainly was. The Kennedys were no threat to ruling power. They were part of the ruling power. Whatever his actual function — and King was given a hard time as an Uncle Tom by radicals in the later Sixties — the ruling power construed him as a threat.

He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 just after 6pm as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single rifle bullet hit him in the jaw, then severed his spinal cord. James Earl Ray, a white man, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 99 years. Ray was certainly the gunman.

But there are credible theories of a conspiracy, possibly involving US Army intelligence, whose role in the life and death of Martin Luther King was explored by Stephens Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1993.

The Army’s interest in the King family stretched back to 1917 when the War Department opened a file on King's maternal grandfather, first president of Atlanta's branch of the NAACP. King's father, Martin Sr., also entered Army intelligence files as a potential troublemaker, as did Martin Jr. in 1947 when he was 18. He was attending Dorothy Lilley's Intercollegiate School in Atlanta and the 111th Military Intelligence Group in Fort McPherson in Atlanta suspected Ms. Lilley of having Communist ties.

King's famous denunciation of America's war in Vietnam came exactly a year before his murder, before a crowd of 3,000 in the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He described Vietnam's destruction at the hands of “deadly Western arrogance,” insisting that “we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

US Army spies secretly recorded black radical Stokely Carmichael warning King, “The Man don't care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble.” Carmichael was right.

After the 1967 Detroit riots, 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the Army's Psychological Operations Group, dressed as civilians. It turned out King was by far the most popular leader. That same year, watching the great antiwar march on Washington in October 1967 from the roof of the Pentagon, Major General William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for Army intelligence, concluded that “the empire was coming apart at the seams.” He thought there were too few reliable troops to fight the war in Vietnam and hold the line at home.

The Army increased surveillance on King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying sniper sites in major American cities. The Ku Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama, as a subsidiary intelligence network. The Army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis. King was dogged by spy units through early '67. A Green Beret unit was operating in Memphis the day he was shot. The bullet that killed him came from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store. Army intelligence chiefs became increasingly hysterical over the threat of King to national stability.

After his Vietnam speech the major US newspapers savaged King. Fifteen years later the New York Times was still bitter when the notion of a national holiday honoring the civil rights leader was being pressed — with ultimate success — by labor unions and black groups. “Why not a Martin Luther King Day?” an NYT editorial asked primly. “Dr. King, a humble man, would have objected to giving that much importance to any individual. Nor should he be given singular tribute if that demeans other historical black figures.”

Give one of them a holiday and they'll all be wanting one.

Within hours of King's murder rioting broke out in 80 cities across the country. Dozens of people, mostly black, were killed. On April 6 the Oakland Police cornered the Black Panther leadership and when one of the young leaders, Bobby Hutton, emerged with his shirt off and his hands up, shot him dead. Futher police executions of Panthers followed, most notoriously the killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, as they slept, by the Chicago police, with FBI complicity, in December, 1969.

In contrast to Hutton, the Panthers and above all Malcolm X, slain in 1965, white liberal opinion, resentments at the disloyalty of the Riverside Church speech conveniently forgotten, has hailed King as a man who chose to work within the system and who furthermore failed to make any significant dent on business as usual.

In his last years King was haunted by a sense of failure. Amid a failed organizing campaign in Chicago he was booed at a mass meeting there and, as he lay sleepless that night he wrote later that he knew why: “I had urged them [his fellow blacks] to have faith in America and in white society. They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.” As radical journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote shortly after King's assassination, “That he failed to change the system that brutalizes his race is a profound relief to the white majority. As a reward they have now elevated his minor successes into major triumphs.”

Forty years on, America is still disfigured by racial injustice. Militant black leadership has all but disappeared. To black radicals Obama’s sedate homilies and respectful paeans to America's ladders of advancement available to the industrious are to the fierce demands for justice of Malcolm X and of King in his more radical moments, as Muzak is to Beethoven. Obama was caught, even as King was. The moment whites fear he is raising the political volume, he's savaged with every bludgeon of convenience, starting with the robust sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sin was to have reminded whites that there are black Americans who are really angry. “Damn America,” roared the Rev. Wright.

King was just as rough at Riverside Church in the speech that so terrified the white elites: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” Honesty of this sort from a black politician in America extorts due retribution.

An Aside on Eldridge Cleaver

Reading up on the death of Bobby Hutton, and MLK, I came across Henry Louis Gates Jr's interview with him for Frontline, from which I recently quoted some lines. I'd been inclined to think of Eldridge Cleaver as a somehat pathetic figure in his later years, after a failed bid in the 1980s to bring the codpiece back into sartorial repute. But, that aside, Cleaver was a smart fellow who understood that most Americans really believe in rebirth. So, amid problems with crack addiction, burglary charges and the rest of it, he sensibly rebirthed himself in the 90s as a Christian and a Republican. He remained as sharp as a tack and essentially a Marxist in political analysis right until the end, as his interview by Henry Louis Gates for Frontline shows. This must have been done shortly before his death at the age of 62, in 1998.

Next time you want to explain Marx's theory of the reserve army of the unemployed to someone, you could do a lot worse than quote Cleaver:

Gates: Are you optimistic about the future? I mean given the fact that we have this large black underclass and a large black middle class, it looks like we have two nations and they're both black.

Cleaver: We have more nations than that because we have poor white people, we have poor Indians, we have poor — we have got to eliminate the economic basis of the underclass by providing them with jobs not handouts from the federal government. That is the failure of our economic system, that you have economists who say that you've got to keep the people on the brink of starvation in order to motivate them to work and hustle around. The failure of the capitalistic economic system is that they did not provide for full employment. They were satisfied with a certain percentile unemployed and then they were willing to keep a lot of people perpetually in reserve and that was to keep wages down and all that kind of pressure.

We have got to have a policy of full employment and by restoring the frontier and the unions of the western hemisphere it is a full employment program for the whole hemisphere. There's a lot of work to be done but we have to reorient ourselves from a system of scarcity and a belief system in scarcity and there is no problem that we have on our agenda that we cannot solve.

Gates: But Tupac was a gangster, wasn't he?

Cleaver: Huey was a gangster.

Gates: Oh, he was?

Cleaver: I'm not — I'm talking about a real gangster. Tupac, they were talking about gangster rap. Huey P. Newton was a gun toting gangster, but that's not all he was. I'm saying he went through that experience as a criminal, but the thing about Tupac was his spirit and his rebellion against oppression. This comes from the way that he was raised and the values that were transmitted to him. His father died in a gun fight with the New York police department and so Afena was a very strong stalwart of the Black Panther party and Tupac was raised like that. He is what we call a panther cub. And that was what he was about. And that is why it was such a blow, [Tupac's] liquidation, and many people think that it was the COINTELPRO that took him out because the story doesn't hold up because anybody who knows Las Vegas knows that after the Mike Tyson fight there, there is no way that anybody going to drive along upside of another car, shoot them and drive away because it's gridlocked for blocks around there, man. So that is not what happened. There is more to it than that.

Gates: Eldridge, now, thirty years later, the smoke has cleared, bodies are buried, people have moved on. Was it worth it? I mean was the Panther movement worth it? Was it a good thing?

Cleaver: It was a good thing and like all things, there was good and bad, but nothing like what this nitwit, Horowitz, is talking about because that is not where we were coming from. And I regret the way that the Party was repressed because it left a lot of unfinished business because we had planned to make a transition to the political arena and we would have been able to transmute that violence and that legacy into legitimate and peaceful channels. As it was they chopped off the head and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods out there now, they've got the rhetoric but without the political direction and they've got the guns. A man told me in Berkeley, said — ‘Eldridge, the two most dangerous demographics in the Bay Area right now are young black men with guns and middle-aged white women with Volvos.’

Gates: You're crazy.

Cleaver: They're taking out more people than anything else.

Gates: Will history judge you and your contemporaries from the 60s — Karenga, Rap, Stokely, Angela, the whole gang, Julian Bond — favorably, do you think?

Cleaver: I think they will. I think they will give us Fs where we deserve them and they'll give us As where we deserve them and they're going to give Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver an A plus.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, January 26, 2025

LUIS BARRAGAN, 25, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, probation revocation, resisting.

GREG BURNETT, 54, Kelseyville/Ukiah. Controlled substance while armed with loaded firearm, ammo possession by prohibited person, felon-addict with firearm, probation revocation.

MELISSA CROW, 37, Willits. Assault weapon, construction of firearm from parts, unspecified offense, probation revocation.

TED DEMITS, 67, Fort Bragg. Parole violation.

JORGE MARTINEZ, 29, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ROBERT MORENO, 44, Ukiah. Under influence, paraphernalia, registration tampering, probation revocation.

MARIA PEREIRA, 30, Ukiah. Attempted petty theft, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

HEATHER MULLINS, 40, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ANTHONY WILSON, 47, Ukiah. DUI.

A READER ASKS: How many undocumented residents are in the greater SF Bay Area?

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/01/25/immigration-deportation-trump-bay-area-california/

SLO LEARNERS

Editor:

The ancient Greeks portrayed tragedies as the result of arrogance, the delusion that one person or group could annihilate any obstacle. Our Industrial Revolution encouraged that fallacy. And who could blame us? The 19th-century inventors accomplished feats often considered impossible.

Yet the consequences of burning fossil fuels should have been a warning long ago. London, as early as the 14th century, started having “Pea Soupers”: smog inversions. In 1952, a five-day event called the Great Smog caused the deaths of 12,000 people, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nevertheless, it took Parliament four years to pass Britain’s Clean Air Act.

While America hasn’t had five centuries to decide on the fossil fuel problem, we still deny the consequences of burning it. Why? Money. The rich consider money more important than people. And the rich oil politics with campaign contributions. Money buys politicians who can prevent change.

Who cares if our harmful habit causes respiratory stress, heart troubles and cancer? The rich can afford medical care that the poor cannot.

Tom Fantulin

Fort Bragg

AS FISH POPULATIONS CRASH, TRUMP WATER GRAB THREATENS 4 MILLION BAY-DELTA RESIDENTS' HEALTH

by Dan Bacher

Stockton, CA – If you thought that Trump’s actions against fish, wildlife, the public trust and the people of California in the first four days of the Trump administration couldn’t get any worse, they just did.

On Friday, President Trump issued Executive Orders that will have “devastating consequences” for California’s water future, public health, and environmental protections, threatening a federal takeover of California’s right to manage its land and waters, according to a coalition of fishing, Tribal and environmental organizations.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/26/2299420/-As-fish-populations-crash-Trump-water-grab-threatens-4-million-Bay-Delta-residents-health

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME

by Randy Newman (1970)

Turpentine, dandelion wine
Turnin' the corner and I'm doin' fine
Shootin' at the birds on the telephone line
Pickin' 'em off with this gun of mine
I got a fire in my belly, fire in my head
Gonna hi-di-ha 'til I'm dead

Sister Sue, short and stout
She didn't grow up she grew out
Mama thinks she's pretty and she's being kind
Papa thinks she's lovely and he's half blind
Don't let her out much except at night
I don't care 'cause I'm all right

Oh the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
And the young folks lay on the floor
Oh the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
Keep them bad times away from my door

Brother Gene, he's big and mean,
But don't have much to say
He had a little woman that he'd whup each day
But now she's gone away
He got drunk last night, kickin' Mama down the stairs
I'm all right and I don't care

“l WAS A MINER and l was a cowboy but mostIy l was a hobo. l fought wherever l couId, in schooI haIIs, outside saIoons, any pIace they were putting up a purse. l once waIked thirty miIes across the desert to a town caIIed GoIdfieId in Nevada so l couId fight for twenty doIIars.

l got beat a Iot. l improved. But l remember the beatings l took. Once l got beat so bad they had to take me out of the ring in a wheeIbarrow. Later some said l was a kiIIer in the ring. They got that wrong. l kiIIed nobody. But I took out other guys quick. That much is true. l got more one round knockouts than anybody, sixty knockouts in the first round.

l beat a good Heavyweight in New OrIeans once in fourteen seconds. l knocked out Fred FuIton, six-foot-four, 250 pounds, in nineteen seconds. How come? Not because l was a kiIIer. Other way round. l was aIways afraid that l'd be the one who was kiIIed. Get 'em quick and you Iive to fight another day.”

— Jack Dempsey

A SUPER ALTERNATIVE

Editor,

As Super Bowl Sunday nears, it’s worth considering the staggering number of chickens sacrificed for a single day of indulgence — it’s estimated that 1.45 billion wings will be consumed. This annual tradition comes at a great cost to animals, the planet and our health.

Fortunately, there’s a kinder and equally satisfying alternative: plant-based wings. Made from ingredients like tofu, seitan, potatoes and cauliflower, these options pack all the flavor without harm to animals.

This year, why not make your Super Bowl spread one of compassion and sustainability? By swapping traditional chicken wings for plant-based alternatives, you’ll score a win for animals and the environment, all while enjoying a healthier take on a game-day favorite.

Sal Fuentes

San Francisco

ALZSCAMMERS

by Fred Gardner

Charles Piller, an Oakland-based investigative reporter for Science magazine, is soft-spoken in person and in print. In his new book, “Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s," dynamite accusations are professionally gift-wrapped. "In some cases, the data problems might have an innocent explanation," Piller wrote in a NY Times essay previewing the book. "Some researchers who put their names on papers may not have been aware of errors made by co-authors, but other cases most likely involve serious negligence, misconduct and outright fraud."

Piller's "most likely" is a polite way of saying "obviously."

"Take for example the revered neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah, whose groundbreaking research has shaped the development of treatments for memory loss and Parkinson’s disease, and who in 2016 was entrusted to lead the National Institute on Aging’s expanded effort to tackle Alzheimer’s. With roughly 800 papers to his name, many of them considered highly influential, Dr. Masliah seemed a natural choice to steer the project, with billions in new funding. He hailed the moment as the dawning of 'the golden era of Alzheimer’s disease research.'

"Last September in Science magazine, I described evidence that for decades Dr. Masliah’s research had included improperly manipulated photos of brain tissue and other technical images — a clear sign of fraud. Many of his studies contained apparently falsified western blots — scientific images that show the presence of proteins in a blood or tissue sample. Some of the same images seem to have been used repeatedly, falsely represented as original, in different papers throughout the years. (When I reached out to Dr. Masliah for the story, he declined to respond.)

The day Piller's piece appeared in Science, Masliah lost his position.

"I then asked a team of brain and scientific imaging experts to help me analyze suspicious studies by 46 leading lzheimer’s researchers... Collectively, the experts identified nearly 600 dubious papers from the group that have distorted the field — papers having been cited some 80,000 times in the scientific literature. Many of the most respected Alzheimer’s scholars — whose work steers the scientific discourse — repeatedly referred to those tainted studies to support their own ideas. This has compromised the field’s established base of knowledge."

Add Excerpts

The disease afflicts nearly seven million Americans, about one in every nine people over the age of 65, making it a leading cause of death among older adults. Up to 420,000 adults in the prime of life — including people as young as 30 — suffer from early-onset Alzheimer’s. The annual number of new cases of dementia is expected to double by 2050...

In the United States, more than 11 million family members and other unpaid caregivers (such as friends and neighbors) care for fathers and mothers, spouses and grandparents who have fallen prey to dementia. For many this means financial impoverishment. These caregivers in the United States provided the equivalent of nearly $350 billion in care to dementia patients in 2023 — nearly matching the amount paid for dementia care by all other sources, including Medicare.

Despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it.

For decades, Alzheimer’s research has been shaped by the dominance of a single theory, the amyloid hypothesis. It holds that amyloid proteins prompt a cascade of biochemical changes in the brain that cause dementia... Many of the most hardened skeptics of the hypothesis believe that amyloids have some association with the disease. But since the early 2000s, doctors, patients and their loved ones have endured decades of therapeutic failures stemming from it, despite billions of dollars spent in grants and investments. Its contradictions — such as the presence of massive amyloid deposits found in the brains of deceased people who had no symptoms of Alzheimer’s — have long exasperated critics and prompted doubts among many supporters.

Still, the hypothesis retains enormous influence. Nearly every drug approved for Alzheimer’s dementia symptoms is based on it, despite producing meager results. The anti-amyloid antibody drugs approved in the United States cost tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year, yet they slow cognitive decline so minutely that many doctors call the benefits imperceptible. The drugs are also not benign, posing risks of death or serious brain injury, and they can shrink the brain faster than Alzheimer’s itself.

The entrenchment of the amyloid hypothesis has fostered a kind of groupthink where grants, corporate riches, career advancement and professional reputations often depend on a central idea largely accepted by institutional authorities on faith. It’s unsurprising, then, that most of the fraudulent or questionable papers uncovered during my reporting have involved aspects of the amyloid hypothesis. It’s easier to publish dubious science that aligns with conventional wisdom...

Questionable and potentially fraudulent studies by Dr. Masliah and that of many others, have helped lay the foundation for hundreds of patents related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s treatments and techniques, now being pursued by leading pharmaceutical companies.

For example, Hoau-Yan Wang, whose work contributed to the development of simufilam — an Alzheimer’s drug tested on thousands of patients — has faced credible allegations of image doctoring and manipulated test results. Dr. Wang was indicted by the Department of Justice in June 2024 on charges that he defrauded the National Institutes of Health of $16 million in grants. He has pleaded not guilty. The biopharmaceutical company backing the drug, Cassava Sciences, settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on charges that the company and key executives had misled investors on research around the drug. The executives did not admit wrongdoing... (They made millions in salary and stock trades despite simufilam crashing and burning.)

Recently, alternatives to the amyloid hypothesis have begun to find support. Promising approaches include exploring the role of viruses in cognitive decline, treating brain infections and reducing brain inflammation — potentially with GLP-1 drugs that have transformed weight loss. There’s also growing evidence that healthy lifestyle choices, as well as controlling blood pressure and cholesterol, can slow the disease’s progression."

... The broader incentive structures in science — where pressure to publish, secure funding and achieve breakthroughs is immense — can lead even well-meaning scientists to make shocking choices.

A slippery slope sometimes begins when a researcher alters highly enlarged pictures of brain slices to enhance them aesthetically — seemingly “harmless” doctoring to clarify biology’s inherent messiness and ambiguity. Beautiful images increase a paper’s curb appeal for publishers. (That temptation has been especially enticing amid a publish-or-perish imperative for scientists that’s so extreme it has spawned an industry of pay-to-play paper mills. Shady companies churn out phony scholarly papers, then sell author slots to desperate or ethically challenged academics.)

Scientists may then find themselves changing an image to strengthen its frail support for an experimental premise. They might rationalize their behavior as simply polishing a potentially important outcome. Scholarly journals have overlooked or been fooled by such deceits over and over. Scientists who are devoted to their assumptions regardless of the evidence — or outright cynics — may then take that deceit a step further. They fundamentally change images to fit their hypotheses: unambiguous misconduct.

Decades of complacency by funders, journals and academic institutions that manage the research enterprise means that relatively few cases of such fraud have been caught. For example, few peer reviewers who certify a paper’s scientific quality have the skill to check for image tampering. Despite years of scandals, many journal editors don’t verify images either. And few perpetrators face meaningful consequences.

So with professional rewards potentially great, many scientists, including those of high standing, seem to roll the dice. They surely know that misconduct investigations are nearly always conducted by an accused researcher’s home university, which fears the loss of face and funding that might follow a prompt, robust and open process. Such investigations — often lasting many months or years — usually start and finish behind a bureaucratic veil, hidden from public view.

A Key Source

Great reporting usually involves great sources. On the Association for Healthcare Journalists' website, Piller wrote in 2022:

"A tip connected me last December with a whistleblower — neuroscientist and physician Matthew Schrag — who had doubts about the research behind Simufilam — an investigational drug from Cassava Sciences. He found more than 170 seemingly doctored images and other possible data manipulations in studies related to the drug or other papers by Cassava-affiliated scientists.

"Schrag had also started to explore the work of University of Minnesota researchers Sylvain Lesné and Karen Ashe, who in 2006 discovered Aβ*56 (“amyloid beta star 56”) — a toxic, soluble protein. Ashe described it as the first causal link between a particular substance and Alzheimer’s symptoms. Their breakthrough supported the amyloid hypothesis — the dominant idea that certain amyloid proteins form the sticky deposits and other toxic molecules that kill nerve cells and lead to devastating cognitive impairment. The Lesné-Ashe findings boosted faith in that hypothesis when it faced increasing skepticism and needed experimental validation.

"Their seminal 2006 paper in Nature on Aβ*56 has been cited in the scientific literature about 2,300 times — the fourth most for any of the thousands of basic-research papers about Alzheimer’s since it was published.

"I contacted Schrag just as he began to grasp that his findings could have far-reaching influence. If he was right, years of research and billions of dollars in research and development funding had been influenced by work with unreliable or false conclusions. Schrag found that Lesné appeared to have doctored key images in the Nature study and nine other papers supporting Aβ*56."

Piller, a professional science writer at the top of his game, thanks his primary source: "By calling out powerful agencies, journals, and scientists, Schrag might jeopardize grants and publications essential to his success. But he says he felt an urgent need to go public about work that might mislead the field and slow the race to save lives. 'You can cheat to get a paper. You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant. You can’t cheat to cure a disease,' he says. 'Biology doesn’t care.'"

TRUMP’S INAUGURATION WAS A GLIMPSE OF WHAT IS TO COME

Trump began his inauguration day encircled by a bevy of oligarchs, but ended it giving favor to his mob

by Sidney Blumenthal

The most sacred ceremony conducted at the Trump inauguration undoubtedly for Donald Trump personally, with its mystical meaning elevating him to his greatest height as an emperor, was the prayer for Fred Trump. Father Frank Mann, a retired priest from Brooklyn, offered a blessing to the ruthless real estate operator who made his fortune in the borough and bankrolled his son’s pilgrimage over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan to blow a half-billion dollars through six bankruptcies and the financial collapse of the Taj Mahal Hotel and Trump Castle casino in Jersey City, and a blessing for Fred’s wife, too, without whom “this day would never be the miracle that has just begun”.…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/26/trumps-inauguration-was-a-glimpse-of-what-is-to-come

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Trump wants to complete the ethnic cleansing in Gaza:

“I’d like Egypt to take people. I’d like Jordan to take people. We just clean out that whole thing.”

This was said on Air Force One by President Trump to reporters according to chief national correspondent Steve Herman of Voice of America.

You read that right — the US presidency is now arguing for crimes against humanity.

LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT

Super Bowl LIX Projections: Chiefs Meet Eagles in Rematch

Gaza and Lebanon Truces Are Fragile, but All Sides May Keep Them Going

Colombia Agrees to Accept Deportation Flights After Trump Threatens Tariffs

At Auschwitz, a Solemn Ceremony at a Time of Rising Nationalism

Southern California Rainstorms Raise Risks of Mudslides

STOCKS SINK AS INVESTORS WORRY ABOUT CHINA’S A.I. ADVANCES

Premarket trading implied steep declines for U.S. markets, with the pain concentrated at companies at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom.

by Jason Karaian

Stock markets fell sharply on Monday, dragged down by fears that advances in artificial intelligence by Chinese upstarts could threaten the moneymaking power of American technology giants.

The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek has made waves by matching the capabilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies rely on. That has made investors rethink the large returns they are expecting on the heady valuations of chipmakers like Nvidia, whose equipment powers the most advanced A.I. systems, as well as the enormous investments that companies like Google, Meta and OpenAI are making to build their A.I. businesses.

Premarket trading implied steep declines for U.S. markets when they open, with futures for the S&P 500 slumping more than 2 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropping about 4 percent. Tech stocks also dragged down markets in Europe and Japan.

(nytimes.com)

WHY THE IDF (TO BORROW ONE OF ITS FAVORITE TERMS) NEEDS TO BE ‘NEUTRALIZED’ PERMANENTLY:

Israeli Army Raids Home of Freed Hamas Member Amid Tensions Over Hostage Deal

Soldiers disrupted a Jerusalem gathering to mark the early release of an imprisoned Palestinian, arresting his brother and roughing up his father. A Times reporter conducting interviews was also assaulted.

by Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 26, 2025, 7:49 p.m. ET

The Israeli military raided the Jerusalem home of a Hamas member released as part of an exchange for Israelis being held hostage in Gaza, detaining one person and roughing up others on Saturday evening, including a New York Times reporter conducting interviews at the scene.

A squad of soldiers forced its way into the house on the outskirts of Jerusalem and disrupted an event marking the early release of Ashraf Zughayer, a Hamas member imprisoned in 2002 for driving terrorists to the locations of their attacks. Among them was a suicide bomber who killed six civilians by blowing up a bus. According to court documents, Mr. Zughayer confessed to the charges.

Mr. Zughayer, 46, was released on Saturday afternoon along with 199 other prisoners.

Overseen by a colonel, the soldiers entered the Zughayer family’s building with their rifles raised and assaulted several people, including Mr. Zughayer’s father and a Times reporter conducting interviews. The soldiers detained Mr. Zughayer’s brother and expelled journalists, then left about an hour later.

For years, Israeli security services have discouraged and often broken up family events celebrating the release of Palestinian militants, saying that the gatherings provoke unrest, lionize terrorists and inspire support for violence. Critics say the interventions increase Palestinian antipathy for Israel, prolonging a cycle of violence.

Israel has been particularly assertive in suppressing celebrations for detainees released under the terms of the cease-fire in Gaza. Israeli officials are concerned that they may help bolster the popularity of Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed up to 1,200 people. Dozens of the Palestinians released on Saturday were sent into exile in Egypt instead of being allowed to return home, in part for that reason.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had raided the Zughayer family’s house because it “received intelligence and videos of gunfire and incitement to terrorism in the area.” The statement said that the soldiers had been acting to “neutralize the threat of fire” and that they had raised their weapons at “armed individuals.” An Israeli military official said the brother had been detained for displaying a Hamas flag.

Earlier that day, footage circulating on social media showed Mr. Zughayer wearing a Hamas scarf and being paraded in a car through his neighborhood, surrounded by a group of other men carrying Hamas flags — an action that is barred in Israel.

By the time reporters for The New York Times arrived in the neighborhood several hours later, the situation was calm. They saw Mr. Zughayer briefly wearing a slim Hamas scarf before a child ran off with it, roughly an hour before the raid. A second child who wore a cape bearing a Hamas logo left the house around the same time.

The roughly two dozen other attendees, including several small children, wore unmarked clothes and there were no flags on display. No one was armed, and Mr. Zughayer’s brother did not display a Hamas flag, the reporters said.

The home is owned by Mr. Zughayer’s father, Munir Zughayer, who is a well-known community organizer. Munir Zughayer liaises between residents of the impoverished neighborhood and the Jerusalem municipal leadership, as well as between the families of Palestinians in prison and the Israeli prison authorities. He said that he was not a member of Hamas.

After bursting into the family’s compound around 5:30 p.m., the soldiers moved through the yard, where the gathering was held, without stopping to assess the situation or the people inside, the reporters said.

One soldier immediately used the muzzle of his loaded rifle to strike Aaron Boxerman, a Times reporter who happened to be standing close to the yard entrance. Before Mr. Boxerman had a chance to identify himself, the soldier hit him in the rib cage, leaving a large bruise.

A second Times reporter, Natan Odenheimer, then identified himself as a journalist, video recorded by The Times shows. The same soldier told Mr. Odenheimer that he didn’t care, using an expletive to underscore his point. The soldier then pointed his loaded rifle at Mr. Odenheimer again, the video shows.

The soldiers also aimed their rifles at other attendees. The video shows the attendees quickly complying with the soldiers’ commands and appearing to pose no threat. The soldiers yelled profanities at Mr. Zughayer’s relatives; and shoved his father in the chest.

The military said in a statement that it regretted “any harm caused to journalists during operational activity,” and that it did not aim to target “uninvolved civilians, or journalists as such.” It said it was investigating the incident.

A spokesperson for The Times said it had lodged a protest with the Israeli military over the assault on Mr. Boxerman.

(NY Times)

HONEY, I FORGOT TO DUCK

by Jackson Lears

A few days after Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I was hurrying through Newark airport when I spied his smiling countenance on the cover of the Economist, accompanied by a caption in big block letters: THE MAN WHO BEAT COMMUNISM. This preposterous tribute succinctly summarized the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold Warrior. His rhetorical assaults on the “evil empire,” coupled with a relentless military build-up, had pushed the Soviet Union into an unwinnable arms race, destabilized its economy and accelerated its collapse. The pivotal moment in this narrative was Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, issued in Berlin in June 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” One could hardly imagine a tale more flattering to Americans’ nationalist narcissism, or more fitting to the unipolar moment when Madeleine Albright anointed the United States as “the indispensable nation.” Among politicians and pundits, the story that Reagan led the US to victory in the Cold War has flourished for nearly forty years.

This may come as a surprise to anyone who knows Max Boot’s ideological inclinations.

Boot’s recent ‘Reagan: His Life and Legend’ (Liveright, 836 pp., October 2024, ISBN: 978 0 87140 944 7) decisively discredits that narrative with abundant evidence and convincing argument.

For several decades Boot has been a laureate of American empire, openly echoing Kipling as he urges his countrymen to take up the white man’s burden by fighting “the savage wars of peace.” He complained continually about Americans’ reluctance to embrace their imperial responsibilities and shed blood abroad. Like other stenographers for the national security state, he was appalled by Trump’s election in 2016, and gripped by the (unwarranted) fear that the new president might begin a retreat from empire in his effort to put “America first.” With a book-length flurry of self-ennoblement, ‘The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right’ (2018), Boot gave up on the Republican Party and discovered white male privilege – as well as the fact that he was a beneficiary of it. He was preparing for his new political identity as a liberal neoconservative, a “centrist” capable of denouncing racism and misogyny while still advocating unceasingly for imperial adventures. Before long he had found an appropriate niche on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.

Writing Reagan’s biography must have been an ideological challenge as Boot recoiled from what he called “the right” towards what was becoming the center. Boot could no longer serve up undiluted adulation, as he might have done in his salad days as a young Russian émigré and devotee of the ‘National Review.’ As an established biographer from within the Washington consensus, he had to distance himself from Reagan’s views on race, campus radicals, and even the Soviet Union. He also had to explore the managerial morass that was Reagan’s White House. Once he began poking through the archives, he uncovered widespread symptoms of mismanagement: incompetent cronies appointed to high office, festering feuds left unattended, snap judgments, formulaic thinking, and long periods when Reagan himself was simply too tired, distracted or old to be mentally available. Subject to granular examination by a scrupulous biographer (and Boot is one, to be sure), the life of Reagan – even and perhaps especially while he was president – could hardly be called inspiring. But the legend of Reagan could. As Boot makes clear, from his subtitle onwards, he is at least as engrossed by Reagan’s legend as he is by his life.

The legend of Reagan was partly a consequence of his preternatural charm. “It was a joy to watch him in action,” one White House staffer told Nancy Reagan, “and there was almost no one who did not succumb to his magic.” The magic could also be exercised at a distance. When Reagan’s funeral procession passed through Washington, his son Ron recalled seeing an onlooker holding a sign: “Now there was a president.” Except for Reagan’s idol, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it is impossible to imagine this kind of spontaneous tribute to any other American president in the last century.

Reagan’s capacity to inhabit and generate legend also stemmed from his own impulse to substitute pleasing fictions for inconvenient facts – to the point that fiction replaced factuality altogether. Boot finds an interpretative frame for this process in ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ a film from 1962 about a successful politician who has built his career on the false claim that he once killed a dangerous outlaw. When the editor of a local newspaper learns the truth, he decides not to print it. “This is the West, sir,” he explains. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Hollywood had “precisely the same ‘fiction over fact’ ethos,” Boot writes, “and it would be a hallmark of Reagan’s life as well.”

Reagan identified so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealized football player George Gipp in ‘Knute Rockne, All American’ (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to “go out there and win one for the Gipper.” A Regular Guy, a mediocre football player, could supplant the star and become a legend in his own head. As Reagan told the Hollywood writer Gladys Hall in 1942, he did not “believe you have to be a standout from your fellow men in order to make your mark in the world. Average will do it.” A plain speaker from the heartland who would avoid being corrupted by Hollywood, and later by Sacramento and Washington: this was the core of the Reagan legend.

Throughout his career, Reagan spent much of his mental life in the America constructed by Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, where you could always tell the good guys from the bad guys, the snobs from the regular fellas, where decent, attractive people turned out to be resourceful and resilient as well. This was his most compelling reality, and even while it prevented him from engaging with empirical evidence, it also strengthened whatever claim he had on greatness – if we accept Boot’s argument. He spends hundreds of pages detailing the blunders and missteps of Reagan’s administration, yet he keeps returning to Reagan’s one enduring accomplishment: he “made America feel good about itself again,” as the Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney put it. But what exactly was it about Reagan that made Americans feel good?

According to the conventional wisdom then and now, it was all about overcoming the dreaded “Vietnam Syndrome” (dreaded, at least, by the foreign policy establishment): the reluctance to use force abroad after the devastating loss in Vietnam. Reagan laundered what military interventionists call “American ideals and values” in the wringer-washer on the back porch (where it usually was in Frank Capra’s films) and they came out cleansed of any taint of humiliation. We could hold our heads high again. We could reconsecrate the marriage of virtue and power. (The first-person plural was easily conflated with “the nation” and “the country.”) By early 1985, after a rough start, the Reagan medicine was already working: “The country had regained its confidence and swagger,” Boot writes, “thanks in part to the policies and pageantry orchestrated by the genial former actor who had made the job of being president look deceptively easy.” Boot’s choice of “swagger” gives the game away; the regeneration on offer was military. This was a return to a familiar exceptionalist idiom – “We’re number one” – but there were new developments as well. Rarely, if ever, had supposedly serious journalists referred to American allies and antagonists as good guys and bad guys. Now they chattered away in that idiom like eight-year-old boys.

Reagan’s revival of the American spirit cleared the decks for further armed interventions abroad. For the likes of Boot, this was a true spiritual renewal. No need, in his view, to reflect on its catastrophic long-term effect: the resurrection of a bipartisan, exceptionalist mission within the US political class to “promote democracy” across the globe. It is only a short step from Reagan to Biden, the decrepit old codger yearning to be a war president as he conjures up menacing adversaries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea. But it is a significant step. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of unipolar US hegemony, arguments for military intervention have become even more diffuse, more detached from conditions on the ground, than they were during the Cold War. Any sort of popular unrest in a foreign country can be manufactured or manipulated by the US intelligence agencies and eventually used to justify intervention in the name of “democracy.” The results are nearly always calamitous.

None of this concerns Boot. He is a thorough biographer, but his capacity for serious thought is undone by his attachment to a neoconservative creed. Trying to justify praise for Reagan, adrift in a murky sea of abstraction and sentimentality, he casts about for appropriate conceptual forms and seizes on the old reliable: reification. Abstractions become human entities with needs.

When Reagan began his presidency, his biographer assumes, the nation (the country, the American people) all needed the same thing: to stand tall again, to feel proud to be citizens of the greatest country in the world – sentiments that in US political culture could only be achieved through imperial adventure and military dominance, or the simulation of it. Reagan, in effect, created the cultural conditions that enabled neoconservative militarism to become respectable and ultimately almost universal among the Washington elite. They also enabled Boot to become a successful Washington pundit, singing the praises of war and its tonic effects on the body politic.

Despite his imprisonment in Washington convention, Boot is fully able to evaluate the claims that Reagan “beat communism” and “won” the Cold War. He recognizes the fundamental tension in Reagan (and in his administration) between pragmatism and moralism. Reagan’s “entire life,” Boot writes, was “a series of deals”: with the Democratic leaders Jesse Unruh in Sacramento and Tip O’Neill in Washington, with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva and Helsinki. “He was a true conservative,” his White House chief of staff Jim Baker said, “but boy was he pragmatic when it came to governing.” Yet for Reagan, “pragmatism was always sheathed in the armor of moral certitude,” Boot says. “His superpower was the ability to reorder the world in his mind as he wished it to be – not necessarily as it was.” While the fiction-over-fact mode helped make him a legendary figure, it didn’t always make for good policy.

In the Reagan administration, clarity of thought was a rare commodity. The president’s political ideals were a muddle of Reader’s Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a “Red lake.” This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But even as he blundered about Central America determined to uncover and stamp out Soviet influence, Reagan adapted to changing circumstances in the Soviet Union – particularly the emergence of Gorbachev as the general secretary of the Communist Party. This was at a moment when transatlantic fears of nuclear war were on the rise and Reagan himself was stoking them with his denunciations of the Soviet Union and his plan (inherited from Carter) to install mid-range cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe.

As Boot shows, the idea that Reagan “beat communism” depended on the assumption that his arms build-up drove Gorbachev to reform the Soviet system in order to avoid bankruptcy and compete more effectively with the US in an arms race.

On the contrary, Gorbachev’s transformation of the USSR was not a product of any crisis induced by Reagan, but “a product of his own humane instincts.” The clearest evidence of this was Gorbachev’s encouragement of democratic dissidence among Eastern Europeans as well as Russians in his speech to the UN on December 7, 1988. Boot rightly credits Gorbachev with ending the Cold War and dismisses Reagan’s demand that he “tear down this wall” as a publicity stunt which provoked Kremlin hardliners rather than paving a path to peace.

Yet there was one humane instinct that Reagan did share with Gorbachev: a horror of nuclear war combined with a hope for a world without nuclear weapons. This truly did push Reagan to help end the Cold War, by joining Gorbachev in confronting the threat to the world posed by US-Soviet rivalry. Here, too, Reagan’s cinematic imagination was key. In November 1983, ABC aired the made-for-TV movie ‘The Day After,’ which powerfully evoked the impact of a nuclear strike on Kansas City, Missouri, and nearby Lawrence, Kansas. Reagan watched it twice, and it left him “greatly depressed.” We have “to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war,” he wrote in his diary. A movie representation of nuclear catastrophe was far more compelling to Reagan than an intelligence report could ever be.

While Boot mostly ignores ‘The Day After,’ he does show that a common nuclear pacifist outlook united the Soviet and American leaders and kept them returning to the conference table, despite disagreements. The major tension involved Reagan’s insistence that the US be allowed to pursue development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense system better known (derisively) as Star Wars. When talking about it, “his eyes would light up with that sparkle normally reserved only for riding horses and chopping wood,” a White House aide reported. Reagan clung to the belief that SDI could create an impermeable shield which would protect Americans from nuclear attack – a view no serious scientist shared. The Russians had experimented with missile defense systems and judged them too vulnerable to electronic scrambling. Gorbachev and his colleagues in the Kremlin weren’t afraid that SDI would work, but that American faith in missile defense technology would embolden US leaders to embrace a first-strike strategy, secure in their delusion that they would be protected from retaliation. SDI, in short, recklessly destabilized the balance of terror.

Reagan’s attachment to a fantastic, impenetrable nuclear shield was of a piece with his claim that the commercial airstrip under construction on the tiny island of Grenada was intended to service the Red Army. Both stories reflected his preference for satisfyingly simple, even cartoonish representations of reality rather than the annoying complexities introduced by conflicting evidence. Despite his horror of nuclear war, Reagan’s stubborn commitment to a techno-fantasy blocked the best opportunity to end the nuclear arms race we have ever had. The two leading nuclear powers agreed on every detail required for complete disarmament, except one.

Watching Reagan deploy fictions so unselfconsciously that they became truths to himself as well as to his audience, we begin to glimpse the epistemological significance of his intellectual vacuity. Ronald Reagan the actor, casting himself in a series of starring roles, becomes a leitmotif in this chronicle, as Boot repeatedly highlights the theatrical professional’s capacity to infuse artifice with authenticity, and ignorance with authority.

Dozens of Reagan’s public assertions, dating back to his Hollywood days if not earlier, could be characterized as literally false; but usually he seemed so convinced by what he was saying that it is hard to call him a liar (and Boot barely does). Reagan’s belief in his own utterances was often a direct result of his ignorance of or indifference to the complexity of the situation he was describing. Boot documents his detachment from detail and its damaging consequences – his tacit approval, for example, of the trading of arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and money, which was then secretly and illegally transferred to the Contra rebels in Central America. As governor of California and as president, Reagan shamelessly played on the cultural and racial prejudices of his supporters, falsely accusing student protesters of violence and “welfare queens” of fraud. Boot records innumerable such falsehoods and deplores Reagan’s exploitation of his supporters’ bigotry for electoral gain. He also explores major policy failures: the Iran-Contra Affair; the loss of 241 Marines to a suicide bombing in Beirut after the president had “sent the Marines on a perilous, ill-defined peacekeeping mission with scant hope of success”; the promise of balanced budgets while running up record deficits (mostly on military spending); the refusal to confront apartheid in South Africa or AIDS in his own backyard. Yet all these failures have melted into the mist of collective memory, while in Boot’s view “Reagan’s achievements – helping to end the Cold War and reviving the nation’s spirits along with the economy – loom larger than ever.” Setting aside the ambiguous claims about the Cold War and the economy, the heart of the matter remains “reviving the nation’s spirits.”

Since one clear expression of those revived spirits was the “swagger” that comes with military victory, the Economist’s editorial impulse becomes more apparent: they were printing the legend. Reagan may not have been actually “The Man Who Beat Communism,” but the idea was consistent with his legend, and with what “the nation” (or its political class) needed: not a leader who transcended conflict and pointed a path to peace, as Reagan did (however incompletely) with Gorbachev, but a winner who routed the bad guys. Reagan’s capacity to freshen the stale language of moral triumph was rooted in his hardscrabble Midwestern boyhood, and his successful escape from it to a world where people sat spellbound in the dark, watching an America that didn’t really exist.

Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois in 1911 in the middle of a blizzard. He called himself “Dutch” from early on: “I never thought ‘Ronald’ was rugged enough for a young red-blooded American boy.” His father, Jack, was a retail salesman in various lines, a hopeless drunk who bounced from one job to another, dragging his family with him from town to town; his mother, Nelle, took in sewing and prayed for her husband’s sobriety with a prairie Protestant church called the Disciples of Christ. In 1911, Boot writes, young Ronald’s way of life was already “fast disappearing.” Yet even as a boy, Boot writes, “ever the quintessential American, he always looked to the future with hope and optimism rather than dwelling on the past.’

Boot does not suspect that there might have been something self-consciously willed about that optimism – a way Dutch could protect himself against the anxiety that he and his brother must have felt as they huddled in bed listening to their parents’ screaming matches when Jack came home after a three-day bender. “My brother and I would hear some pretty fiery arguments through the walls of our house,” Reagan recalled in his autobiography. His anodyne language, which says nothing about what the boys felt, reveals Reagan’s powerful impulse to keep personal conflict at bay. Reagan’s son Ron remembered that his father would put his head down and fiddle with his mashed potatoes when he or his sister, Patti, clashed with their mother at the dinner table. Reagan himself, as governor and president, would remain serene amid the rancorous rivalries of his subordinates; smoothing things over with bland assurances was a way to keep darker feelings at bay and put intimacy out of reach. Family and friends who tried to connect with his inner life found that, in effect, there was no there there.

Reagan’s willful optimism resonated with America’s vernacular religion – positive thinking – but also with his mother’s religious outlook. Like other Disciples of Christ, she combined a conservative personal morality with Social Gospel concern for the less fortunate and faith in a benign life to come. True to this tradition, Reagan as a young man believed in heaven but not hell. “Nelle never saw anything evil in another human being, and Ronnie is the same way,” Nancy wrote. Reagan’s tirades against the “evil empire” were directed at the Soviet system and not at Russian leaders – a sharp contrast to the Putin fetish that animates contemporary Russophobia.

In 1920, when Dutch was nearly ten, the Reagan family moved to Dixon, where he came of age, and which became his ideal of a “good clean town.” At eleven, he formally joined the Disciples of Christ and “emerged from childhood with a moralistic outlook on the world, tending to view political disputes as battles between good and evil,” Boot says. He made a smooth transition to Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ institution ninety miles south of Dixon, with Social Gospel roots. “Dutch would go from success to success, untroubled by the taint of failure,” Boot writes. He was “a cocky SOB, a loud talker,” a classmate said. And when he talked, people listened. At the beginning of his senior year, he was one of several student speakers urging a strike against budget cuts. “For the first time in my life, I felt my words reach out and grab an audience, and it was exhilarating,” Reagan remembered. “When I’d say something, they’d roar after every sentence, sometimes every word, and after a while it was as if the audience and I were one.”

Graduating from Eureka in 1932 as the Depression deepened, Reagan landed on his feet in Davenport, Iowa, as a radio sportscaster. He moved to Des Moines, reporting on baseball games. Eventually he proposed covering the Chicago Cubs in spring training on Santa Catalina Island off the South California coast, an enticing alternative to late winter in Iowa. He was given the assignment, and got his break when he heard a girl from Des Moines singing with a big band at the Biltmore in LA. They met for drinks and she agreed to put him in touch with her agent – after insisting he take off his glasses for the meeting.

That was only the beginning of his transformation. Tall, handsome and personable, he quickly secured an offer from Warner Brothers to join its stable of actors as a contract player. He was renamed Ronald, refitted with a new haircut and new suits with thinner shoulder pads. (The thick ones made his head look too small.) Before long he was playing major roles in sentimental melodramas like ‘Knute Rockne, All American’ and noirish crime dramas like ‘Kings Row’ – and attracting the attention of the actress Jane Wyman, whom he married in January 1940. When the war came, Warner Brothers kept Reagan out of uniform for as long as possible and arranged preferential treatment for him even after his deferments ran out. His noncombatant status provided new opportunities for turning fiction into fact.

One supposedly factual story Reagan never tired of telling in later years involved a B-17 bomber limping back towards base after delivering its payload over Europe. The crew all managed to bail out successfully, except for the pilot and the ball-turret gunner, who was trapped at his post and crying out piteously. “Never mind son, we’ll ride it down together,” said the pilot, who was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Reagan’s voice would break as he recounted this incident, and by the time he reached the medal of honor moment he could barely hold back the tears. But if the pilot and the gunner both died, who was left to tell the tale? In fact, Boot suggests, the story was another product of Reagan’s cinematic imagination, probably lifted from the film ‘Wing and a Prayer’ (1944): “Seeing the war on black and white film” – rather than in person – “reinforced his Manichean, black and white view of the world.”

The coming of the Cold War had much the same effect. During the Second World War, Reagan had drifted away from a Rooseveltian tolerance for America’s Soviet ally to a rigid anti-communist stance. When the upstart Conference of Studio Unions joined the postwar strike wave in 1945-46, Reagan was appointed to a committee of the Screen Actors Guild to investigate. He concluded that the strike was part of “the communist putsch for control of motion pictures.” J. Edgar Hoover had been ramping up his pursuit of communist subversives, increasingly with the collaboration of the House Un-American Activities Committee; Reagan took the FBI’s warnings at face value and began seeing Reds everywhere. He remained equally credulous even as late as the 1980s.

Reagan’s heartfelt warnings against communist infiltration of the film industry propelled him to the presidency of the SAG. From that platform, he enlisted in the witch hunt – naming names, wrecking careers, ruining lives. He claimed to have accused no individuals in public, but he certainly did so in private. For years, he minimized the importance of the blacklist or denied its existence, even as he assisted in implementing it. Under his leadership, the guild implicitly legitimated the dragnet of persecution by refusing to protest against it. He never expressed any regret; instead, he presented himself as the “one-man battalion” that had stopped the communist takeover of Hollywood.

Meanwhile, Jane Wyman was growing impatient with Reagan’s political obsessions and long-winded soliloquies, which provoked her to call out: “Hey ‘diarrhea of the mouth,’ shut up!” When she filed for divorce, Reagan was baffled: he believed in the fairytale accounts of their marriage spun by the Hollywood press. “There were a lot of gaps in his emotional intelligence,” his son Ron remarked wryly.

Reagan’s post-divorce life was priapic and lonely, a proliferation of anonymous, meaningless sexual encounters. But thanks to the anti-communist hysteria gripping Hollywood, he met Nancy Davis. She was a Chicago socialite and graduate of Smith College who had come to Hollywood in search of stardom but also – more important – a husband. Falsely accused of communist sympathies, she sought exoneration from SAG and took a shine to its president. He was attractive and charming and had a substantial presence in Hollywood. According to Boot, Nancy’s mother had taught her the importance of achieving family stability “by slavishly catering to and ceaselessly promoting her husband.” She practiced this on their first date, when she showed far more interest in Reagan’s monologues than Wyman ever had. By the time he was president she had the performance down cold. Whenever he gave a speech, the journalist Lou Cannon observed, “Nancy composes her features into a kind of transfixed adoration more appropriate to a witness of the Virgin Birth.”

In the couple’s early years together, Nancy had few opportunities to display such rapt attention. As the studio system collapsed and the free market came to the movies, Reagan’s career began to plummet. Soon he had descended to doing schtick for Las Vegas entertainers, and ultimately playing second fiddle to a gang of performing chimpanzees. He rescued himself by leaving film for the rising new medium, television. As the host of ‘General Electric Theater’ his job wasn’t just to welcome the TV audience but also to travel around the US promoting General Electric products and interests. Here he found his métier. “It was pretty hard to heckle Ron, because he is so obviously such a damned nice guy,” one of his colleagues said. He also seemed well informed, even though he carried his knowledge lightly. “All of Reagan’s reading of Reader’s Digest and other publications seemed to have paid off,” Boot observes. “The run of the mill actor turned out to be a superlative public speaker.’

Reagan’s new job required much travel and long absences from home, where family relations were tense. According to their daughter Patti, Nancy began hitting her on a “weekly, sometimes daily basis”; was constantly hiring and firing maids, gardeners and nannies; and was jittery and apprehensive despite frequently downing sedatives. Patti and Ron Jr. were restless and miserable: where was Papa? Out becoming a public figure or, when he was home, “a genial but aloof figure who was often emotionally absent even when he was physically present,” as Boot puts it. “We were happy,” the paterfamilias recalled. “Just look at the home movies.”

As General Electric’s spokesman, Reagan was well positioned to absorb and help spread the coalescing worldview of the Republican right. His mentor on labor issues, the virulently anti-union GE president Ralph Cordiner, was close at hand. On other matters, Reagan could augment the familiar wisdom of the Reader’s Digest with the harder-edged ideology of the National Review, founded by the wunderkind William F. Buckley in 1955. The new right-wing consensus involved a shift from isolationism to militant interventionism, whose advocates were “even willing to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union to liberate the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe,” Boot notes, without acknowledging that contemporary supporters of “total victory” in Ukraine (himself included) are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Reagan assumed that JFK was a closet Marxist, in keeping with the hard-right rhetoric of the day. Eventually, in order to negotiate with Gorbachev, he would have to put aside this kind of reflexive paranoia. But for several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity he craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like “overripe fruit.” The phrase was an invented quote from Lenin. Well into his presidency, Reagan was addicted to using quotations from prominent communists and socialists, nearly all of which he had made up. Reagan’s “disturbingly cavalier attitude toward factual accuracy,” Boot claims, “helped to inure the Republican Party to ‘fake news’.” But he doesn’t mention that the press and the Democrats became inured to fake news too, particularly when it was manufactured by the national security state.

When Reagan’s ratings fell, GE dropped him. But he had already become a rising star on the Republican right, and solidified his position in 1964 by stumping vigorously in California for Barry Goldwater’s doomed presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson. Several times a day, Reagan gave the same speech he had been making for years. The substance was reactionary boilerplate: casting off the shackles of government regulation, rolling back the Soviet Union, freeing the enslaved populations of Eastern Europe.

Goldwater was saying the same things, but he came across as a humorless ideologue and terrified the electorate, joking clumsily about lobbing a nuke into the men’s room of the Kremlin. Reagan, with his lemon-twist smile and effortless sincerity, domesticated the right-wing agenda and made it seem as comforting and inspiring as ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’ His audience was mainly affluent Republicans who could laugh at the line that 17 million Americans went to bed hungry every night because “they were all on a diet.” Eventually his donors in California persuaded the Republican National Committee to buy airtime for the speech that became known as “A Time for Choosing.” The choice was between traditional American self-reliance and remote control by “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol.” The speech was a sensation. Even moderates began to take reactionary ideas seriously. A telegenic demagogue was born.

Reagan knew he had a hit show on his hands and lost no time in preparing a run for governor of California. Nancy began assembling a new social network of rich friends – the Bloomingdales, the Annenbergs and their chums – who became the core of Reagan’s circle of informal advisers in Sacramento and later in Washington. Meanwhile he focused decent folks’ rage at bedraggled anti-war protesters and restless, dangerous Black people. Racially charged language – “Our city streets are jungle paths after dark” – became a staple of Reagan’s political rhetoric, anticipating his remarks about “welfare queens” years later. It was all very simple – the good guys versus the bad guys, the welfare recipients, dangerous criminals and subversive beatniks versus put-upon middle-class whites – and it was a winning formula. Reagan easily defeated the colorless liberal California Governor Pat Brown, whom he accused of coddling the Black Panthers and the Berkeley protesters.

Yet once he became governor Reagan revealed his pragmatic side, partly by surrounding himself with moderate advisers and keeping the Birchers at bay. He opened access to abortion (on “mental health” grounds), allowed conjugal visits for prison inmates, and even compiled a solid record of environmental preservation. But when it came to exploiting the backlash against Black and student protesters, he rarely held back. He described Martin Luther King’s assassination as “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws to obey.” When asked what it would take to restore order on campus, Reagan announced: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” His popularity soared.

After two terms as California governor, and with Nixon leaving the White House in disgrace, Reagan was ready to run for the presidency. He fell short of the nomination in 1976, but another chance came along quickly. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter was an invitingly vulnerable opponent. The country was awash in protracted stagflation, oil shortages and media-made humiliation at the hands of the Iranian militants who took 66 Americans hostage in Tehran. In the eyes of the Washington establishment, the peanut farmer president seemed ill equipped to confront these challenges. In the autumn of 1979, Carter delivered a thoughtful speech that proved his downfall. His theme was that the country needed to accept limits on consumption amid environmental crisis and dwindling natural resources. He “seemed to be blaming the American people for the country’s problems,” Boot writes, “and he sounded pessimistic.”

This was Reagan’s opening, his opportunity to restore “confidence and swagger” to a country – or a political class – still suffering from the effects of Vietnam Syndrome. His “theory of the Cold War” was “We win, they lose,” as he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser. Allen liked the idea but knew it would be heresy to a foreign policy establishment that believed in peaceful co-existence. Yet times had changed: what was a reactionary fringe position in 1964 – “Why not victory over communism rather than mere containment of it? We can lick those bastards!” – was now being asserted by a likely president. This militarist interventionism, in an updated version, would become the dominant worldview of the bipartisan Washington establishment. Reagan’s domestication of Goldwater’s ravings meant a transition to a kind of postmodern militarism – addicted to savage wars of peace, minimally staffed, light on its feet, leveraged to hell and back. Regardless of how few Americans now wear the uniform, the most important “national spirit” for many remains the martial one.

Reagan’s emotional appeal had a much wider basis, however, than the promise of martial regeneration. Among other sentiments, it was built on white people’s racism, which Reagan cynically manipulated. “I believe in states’ rights,” he declared in Mississippi during the 1980 campaign – an obvious dog whistle that journalists chose to overlook. The tall, conventionally handsome man with the well-padded shoulders exuded an irresistible aura and trounced the slope-shouldered pessimistic incumbent. Boot summarizes the conventional wisdom: “With the country mired in malaise, his indictment of Jimmy Carter’s stewardship resonated – as did his promises to “make America great again” by cutting taxes, boosting defense spending, and “standing up to the Soviets.” The dream of making America great again did not originate with Trump, or with Reagan. It is rooted in the Protestant rhetorical currents that have shaped American public culture from the beginning. The righteous community, as it strains to remain righteous, constantly fears that it is falling short, that it is failing to maintain the heroic standards set by its predecessors. Since it is a subjective feeling often manufactured by government and media elites, it is difficult to say how genuine and widespread the feeling of greatness is or was. But there is no question that Reagan met a popular need to feel it.

Reagan embraced the ceremonial side of his job, which gave him the opportunity to indulge in presidential psy-ops. When he visited the Pentagon to award the Medal of Honor to a Green Beret hero, he read the citation personally, which presidents never did. General Colin Powell was impressed. “The military services had been restored to a place of honor,” he recalled. Reagan was orchestrating national symbols to play the role of national therapist. But what really secured his legendary status, Boot believes, was the failed attempt on his life by John Hinckley in March 1981. Reagan came closer to dying than anyone in the general public realized at the time, but his grace under pressure transformed him “from a politician into a legend.” It isn’t exactly clear what constituted Reagan’s grace, beyond his reported remark to Nancy: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” But, in any case, he experienced a spike in approval ratings and became what the pollster Stuart Spencer called “a martyred surviving hero.”

Reagan did have something to offer the ideologues. He refused to negotiate with striking air traffic controllers and ultimately crushed their union. This legitimated the government’s right to hire replacement workers (i.e., scabs) and gave Reagan himself “a huge infusion of presidential credibility,” according to the Washington journalist Meg Greenfield. Pragmatism and right-wing ideology, in this instance, came together. Foreign policy was more complicated. The Soviets hoped that Reagan would depart from the human rights moralism of Carter and become a dealmaker in the Nixon mode – and eventually he would. But meanwhile he embarked on a military build-up disproportionate to any Soviet threat and resorted often to apocalyptic rhetoric, telling West Point cadets that they were “holding back an evil force that would extinguish the light we’ve been tending for six thousand years.” Yet in the first months of his administration he sent a handwritten note to Brezhnev saying he hoped they could begin talks towards a “lasting peace.” His secretary of state, Alexander Haig, insisted that his department be allowed to append a formal letter denouncing a Soviet arms build-up. Only the confrontational part of the message was clear in Moscow. The Cold War rift widened.

While Reagan advocated an approach towards the Soviets combining pressure and persuasion, for much of 1983 the pressure intensified: American B-52s flew over the North Pole; NATO played nuclear war games near the East German border. Even so, he grew convinced that the US could not keep pressuring the Soviets without risking a third world war – a risk brought home to him by ‘The Day After.’ With the express purpose of beginning to negotiate nuclear disarmament, he replaced Richard Pipes on the National Security Council with Jack Matlock, a career diplomat with a deep knowledge of Russian history and culture. Matlock wrote most of the speech Reagan gave on 16 January 1984, a dramatic announcement that the US and USSR shared an urgent interest in reducing nuclear stockpiles and ultimately aiming for their abolition. Reagan himself wrote the sentimental conclusion, an imaginary dialogue between a Russian and an American couple, Ivan and Anya and Jim and Sally: just ordinary folks who discover they actually have much in common. Mr. Smith had come to Washington.

As Reagan set out on his re-election campaign in 1984, the task seemed almost too easy. He had already made good on the promises of his first campaign, cutting taxes and domestic spending, increasing the military budget. The impact of those policies was already becoming apparent in the growth of racial and class inequality. By the end of the decade, the incarcerated population would double (thanks largely to a draconian “war on drugs” disproportionately targeted at Black people), and while the incomes of the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans rose by 75 per cent, for the bottom 90 per cent the increase was just 7 per cent. The middle class was shrinking as income was redistributed upwards. But none of that mattered in 1984. As one of Reagan’s campaign managers, Lee Atwater, reminded his colleagues, “we should remember that President Reagan was elected to make America great again.” The longing to recover lost greatness was as powerful in 1984 as it would be in 2024, and Reagan knew how to appeal to it – especially when up against yet another colorless liberal in Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale.

The only complication arose during the first debate, when Reagan, as his national campaign director reported, “came across as old, tired, and a bit befuddled. He groped for words, lost his train of thought, and mangled his closing soliloquy.” At one point, Reagan even admitted: “I’m all confused now.” “He was lost,” Mondale recalled. “It was actually a little frightening.” The journalists on hand were astoundingly unfazed by Reagan’s performance, which the president himself pronounced “awful.” But there was no talk of inadequate medication or cognitive decline in those days, and Reagan made a big comeback in the second debate. When asked about “the age issue,” he joked: “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The press, as always, was enthralled. Reagan walked the election.

His subsequent administration was characterized by his progressive mental decline and detachment from policy details, which became evident in his efforts to distance himself from any approval or even knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. What saved his second term from anticlimax was his successful collaboration with Gorbachev. Despite Reagan’s attachment to SDI, the two men began work on a series of bilateral treaties that slowed the development of new weapons for more than twenty years. They also issued a final joint communiqué after their meeting in Geneva: “Nuclear war cannot be won, and must never be fought.’

Reagan’s overall legacy is more problematic. Along with his pal Margaret Thatcher, he played a central role in implementing a corrosive neoliberal agenda that privatized much of the public sector and dismantled the welfare state. We have yet to recover from the damage done, as societies on both sides of the Atlantic grow more unequal and governments less responsive to people’s actual needs. In foreign affairs, apart from his co-operation with Gorbachev, Reagan’s impact has been subtler than in domestic policy but ultimately just as disastrous. Contemporary American policymakers’ obsession with “democracy promotion” first surfaced in the Reagan years, with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy “to promote freedom around the world” (Boot’s words) by working with both political parties, labor unions and the US Chamber of Commerce to underwrite democracy movements abroad. What Boot does not mention, but what everyone knew at the time, was that the NED was intended to do overtly what the CIA had previously done covertly: to undermine foreign governments that the agency had determined were threats to American interests. The appearance of openness gave a spurious legitimacy to election interference and other psy-ops that had previously been kept out of sight. Even before the end of the Cold War, Reagan administration officials were supplementing obsessive anti-communism with what Boot calls a more “nuanced” view of foreign policy. George Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams advocated “democracy promotion” to challenge non-communist as well as communist dictatorships. The New York Times applauded. This widening emphasis marked the start of a shift from Nixon and Kissinger’s realpolitik to what became George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” – a mission to oppose whatever the US government identified as tyranny, wherever it appeared.

‘Reagan: His Life and Legend’ reveals much about the former president, but also about its author’s transformation from palaeoconservative to liberal neoconservative. Consider this pronouncement, from a recent Boot op-ed: “The world’s leading illiberal powers recognize their congruence of interests and are drawing closer together to tear down the rules-based international order. The world’s democracies need to be at least as staunch in staring down the threat from the ‘alignment of evil’.” Boot borrows this phrase from an Israeli intellectual, a supposedly more precise augmentation of Bush’s “axis of evil.” “Alignment” is a bureaucratic, Democratic word, straight from the Brookings Institution and the political science department. But the Manichean focus on evil remains, as the dying empire searches the globe for adversaries to confront. The messianic mission survives.

(London Review of Books)

15 Comments

Bob Abeles January 27, 2025

In his Natual History (circa 73 C.E.) Pliny the Elder wrote, “We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life.” Awareness of our destruction of the environment and its consequences date to antiquity.

- Chuck Dunbar January 27, 2025
  
  Yes, for sure. And now, with AI so boldly ascendant, we dare to taint even the most beautiful parts of humanity– human creativity– in poetry, song and music, story-telling, art, on and on.
  
  - Bob Abeles January 27, 2025
    
    Likewise, the taint that AI leaves behind is the seed of its own self-destruction. As AI generated material is added to the internet, it pollutes the wellspring from which it comes. Generation on generation, LLMs (large language models) degrade as they “learn” from other LLM generated data.
    
    It’s kind of like making a cassette tape copy of a cassette tape. Every generation is of poorer quality than those that precede it.
    
    - Chuck Dunbar January 27, 2025
      
      Another loss via AI–Even the beautiful, perfect portrayals of women we now see– delivered to us by AI–they are too perfect to be real, too good to be true. It goes without saying that our flaws and imperfections are part of what make us human. We risk being further and further dehumanized in so many ways by the coming spread of AI influences throughout our culture. Some of them probably not dreamed of as yet. What is real, what is not?–it will all be up for grabs. And, of course, there’s lots of money to be made, the sky’s the limit! It’s the New America!
      
Chuck Dunbar January 27, 2025

Thank you, Chuck Wilcher, for yesterday’s two beautiful fox photos.

Kimberlin January 27, 2025

Editor, I edited the London visit article so as to not run on and on like so many here do. The New York press hired London to cover the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. He then covered Santa Rosa as it was very bad as well. Next he went to the Mendocino Coast. Coming back on horse back he and his wife stopped to chat with Clow relatives as they were riding through the Valley. London was a well known racist and I made a documentary on Jack Johnson where London had egged on The Great White Hope Jim Jeffries to save the title for the White Race. He lost his cause and Johnson walked away with over $100,000 dollars in gold. The fight was followed by race riots and the movie of the Jefferson loss was banned by Congress. Johnson was later arrested on Trumped up charges and spent a short time in jail. Johnson died after a car accident because the White ambulance wouldn’t take him, he had to wait for a Black ambulance.

Eric Sunswheat January 27, 2025

RE: development of treatments for memory loss

—>. February 10, 2023
“Extracts from these so-called ‘lion’s mane’ mushrooms have been used in traditional medicine in Asian countries for centuries, but we wanted to scientifically determine their potential effect on brain cells,” Professor Meunier said.
“Pre-clinical testing found the lion’s mane mushroom had a significant impact on the growth of brain cells and improving memory.
“Laboratory tests measured the neurotrophic effects of compounds isolated from Hericium erinaceus on cultured brain cells, and surprisingly we found that the active compounds promote neuron projections, extending and connecting to other neurons.
“Using super-resolution microscopy, we found the mushroom extract and its active components largely increase the size of growth cones, which are particularly important for brain cells to sense their environment and establish new connections with other neurons in the brain.”
https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2023/02/mushrooms-magnify-memory-boosting-nerve-growth-0

Kirk Vodopals January 27, 2025

All this discussion of artificial intelligence and the broligarch-Trump lovefest makes me think about a relevant book I just read: “Player Piano” by Kurt Vonnegut. Very apt at this moment

- Whyte Owen January 27, 2025
  
  Vonnegut was a true prophet. That novel, his first, published in 1953, projects the cultural disruption provided by vacuum tubes. A third of Schenectady was a vacuum tube based computer.
  
  n.b. Likewise his prediction in Hocus Pocus of the privatization of prisons.
  
Craig Stehr January 27, 2025

Bringing in the Dark Mother to purify the global chaotic confused mess. It’s simple. Invoke the dark mother of your choice, depending on the tradition which you appreciate, chant the mantra, visualize She and her colleagues destroying the demonic, and then celebrate! Either that, or continue rotting in the quagmire of samsara. You have a choice. Kali Ma’s Mantra: Om Aim Hrim Klim Chamundaye Vicche
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
27.I.’25

Harvey Reading January 27, 2025

HONEY, I FORGOT TO DUCK

Lotta words, too many as far as I’m concerned, especially considering the dull-wit subject of them.

Kimberlin January 27, 2025

Dan Bacher, With all the hate here for Biden and Harris I find it surprising that almost no one here could see this coming and vote accordingly. Now, the haters can roast in their own juice.

- Marshall Newman January 27, 2025
  
  Agreed. Sadly, the innocent will be punished more than the guilty.
  
  - Harvey Reading January 28, 2025
    
    Supporters of Zionist-inflicted genocide are not among the “innocent”. They include Biden and Harris, not to mention the current brainless-mutant president.
    
Jurgen Stoll January 27, 2025

I’m in total agreement with Tom Fantulin’s letter about the consequences of burning fossil fuel and the reasons we don’t stop. Beyond the respiratory stress, heart troubles and cancer caused by burning fossil fuels is the ever increasing load of carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere which is the primary cause of GLOBAL WARMING. I emphasize that because climate change sounds like it’s a natural occurrence that we don’t have a role in. We most definitely have a role in global warming…….. Unless like 47, you think it’s a hoax. Drill baby drill……

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