“One Love, One Heart”: Reagan/Marley ‘08 (Red Emma)

WRITTEN BY RED EMMA (and posted by Chunk)

.....I got a laugh out of my Dissent editor when I proposed manufacturing a bumper sticker advertising this unlikely ticket, and he asked me to share with Dissenters because both of us are all about sharing the love. One love. Or, if you prefer, the luv.
.....Ronald Reagan and Bob Marley are both dead, which makes them ideal presidential candidates, even Kennedy-esque. Weirdly, their birthdays were the day after SuperDuper Tuesday, noted on the radio even as we were offered a preview of the big match-up: Audacity of Hope vs. the Hundred Years War. The liberal NPR “Morning Edition” chose to remind listeners of the Gipper’s big day (1911) while the radical weirdos at KPFK celebrated the Rastaman’s (1945). More, perhaps, of the funny dichotomy of our political moment, which requires us to choose sides.
.....Remember, once, when you were either a fan of the Beatles, those charming and adorable moptops, or a fan of the Stones, the street-fighting Satanists? That’s how voters make their choices, or are offered them, so that my own reductio ad absurdum political pair-up echoes I think quite modestly the symbolic excitement drummed up by the horse-race media and, more to the point, the corporate owners who are the singular beneficiaries of hustling “change,” “hope,” “pride,” “the future,” or whatever other useless psycho-spiritual commodity is for sale this season. Think $100 million in ad revenues.
.....But, to the big point (because Red does have one): Reagan, the former wax museum president, should be poster boy for the biggest transfer in history of public wealth into private hands, Star Wars, invading itty-bitty countries, firing trade unionists, murderizing thousands in Central America, destroying public education. But, no, he is perpetually avuncular, jolly, strong, wise and patriotic.
.....Bob the Rastafarian died of brain cancer, smoked a lot of dope, fathered about 20 children, went to Zimbabwe to celebrate Pan-Africanism, seemed to support a Socialist Jamaica, but mostly worshipped a dead Ethiopian monarch and wrote a whole lot of freedom songs. (As a former South County waterman, I spent a lot of time with white, ganja-smoking OC surfers who loved Bob Marley and his music, play it constantly but, interestingly, vote Republican and hate black people.)
.....So, yes, Reagan, the Great Communicator with nothing to say except taxes are bad, the jingoist iron fist in the iron glove, embraced by right-wing religionists who hate women. And Bob, the dreamy Black artist-musician humanitarian whose songs, intrinsically political, transcend politics and whose “One Love” will no doubt be played at the next Republican convention, if it hasn’t been already.
.....Bookends, it seems to me, and an ideal ticket, not even trying to reconcile the choice we are offered between McCain and Obama but, My Friends, embracing it! Why settle for either the current old man Viet Nam war criminal on his zombiesque anti-historical death march (clearly, he is just fucking mental, poor guy) or the all-things-to-all people cipher whose ambiguous hot air of hope “transcends” race, sex, politics, civil rights (in other words, history).
.....One is never, ever, not even once asked to account for dropping bombs on civilians from a big fat American plane. The other is never asked what he will do, exactly, with the garrison state, Star Wars, the corporations, James Dobson and Newt because that would mean he might be fighting a class war. So: “Let’s get together and feel alright!” No, my ticket, Fellow Americans, has something for everybody, and all of it symbolic and therefore sell-able, a real consensus.
.....To misquote Mother Mary Harris Jones: Vote for the dead, and pray like hell for the living. -RE

Andrew Tonkovich