An old friend writes:

I don't usually enter the political fray on this list, but this morning my patience has run out. I cannot read the paper, listen to the radio or link to my internet provider without being barraged with information about THE funeral.

My own theory about Ronbo Ray-Gun was that he actually died long ago.

In his bid to become Dictator of the World, Attorney General Alexander Haig arranged for the President to be assassinated through the services of a patsy, John Hinckley, in 1981. However, by attempting to declare Martial Law before the body was even cold he overstepped his mark and riled the VP, Twat Senior, who realized he would necessarily be next on the hit list. Assisted by the fact that the death had not yet been announced, and helped by his ex-cronies at the CIA (some of whom had seen Kurosawa's film KAGEMUSHA), Twat Senior pulled together a plot to neutralize Haig by putting out the news that the President had survived the attack.

Ray-Gun's body was very expertly taxidermized. An assemblage was made of lines from his old films and put into a recording box in his throat that could be activated by pulling a string. (When I was a kid, I had a doll, Chatty Cathy, who could be made to "talk" in this way. She would say inane baby things like "Please Mommy, brush my hair" and I got up to many dark sadistic acts upon her, but that's another story). So at press conferences, they would wheel out the Head of State on a cleverly disguised system of strings and pulleys, and a handler would stand behind him and action the string in his neck to make him talk. You notice that, like Chatty Cathy, he very often repeated himself and that his answers generally had no relation to the questions posed by the journalists. But sometimes, there would be a kind of surreal, oracular consistency to them, just as sentences randomly generated by a computer can be deeply poetic and apposite. Based on this phenomenon, Ronbo achieved the reputation of a great speaker, despite being a corpse.

In the aftermath of his Presidency, the Alzheimers was a convenient cover story for his continuing vegetative state. But then the Repugnicans found themselves in increasingly deep doodoo owing to their lying over Iraq, monstrosities at Abu Grahib, spiralling prices of oil and so forth. So they decided it was time to focus media attention on something bright and festive and count on the very short memeory of the American public to forget all their failings by November.

They timed the "termination" to coincide with the 60th D-Day commemorations in France to capitalize on photo opportunities of Twat Junior being tolerated by Jacques Chirac. And they will milk it to the last drop, putting every propaganda resource into the mix to manipulate us into imagining that this reactionary, jingoistic, wildly spending spongehead was a great President and that his passing is a national tragedy.

Alas, nostalgia is a powerful force. Twenty years ago is always a Golden Age.

EFR
Ile de France