My Tribute to Ronald Reagan
BY MARK VALLEN
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would have turned 100 on Sunday, February 6, 2011, and many U.S. citizens are celebrating this centenary from coast to coast with frenzied idolization, praise, and adulation for the “Great Communicator.”
As my beloved country undergoes another bout of historical amnesia that is every bit as debilitating as the Alzheimer’s disease our acclaimed 40th President was known to have suffered from, a comforting blanket of forgetfulness descends upon the land. As Reagan himself affirmed in 1988, “facts are stupid things,” but oh what the passage of time and a little bit of corporate propaganda can do to wipe away silly truths.
Lending a helping hand to relieve us of historic recall, is none other than that newly celebrated orator, President Obama. A day before his 2011 State of the Union address, Mr. Obama published an op-ed piece in USA Today that praised “the sense of confidence and optimism President Reagan never failed to communicate to the American people (….)
He understood that it is always ‘Morning in America.’ That was his gift, and we remain forever grateful.” Who can resist our Nobel Laureate President’s inducement to fall into deep, unwakeable slumber? Certainly not America’s feeble liberal class, now falling all over itself in order to sound “Reaganesque.”
It is difficult to avoid being caught up in the hero-worship surrounding Ronald Reagan, and I feel compelled to deepen the national exaltation of the “The Gipper” with my own burnt offerings. But I must warn you dear reader, my version of the Reagan chronicles might seem decidedly heretical. My alternate take on his saga is here conveyed through the graphics I created during his time in office. Mind you, the images I have selected for this article are but a smattering of the anti-Reagan artworks I created during his ignoble reign, yet they help provide a more complete picture of the period, for the so-called “Teflon President” faced broad, implacable, and widespread opposition to his backward-looking and retrograde policies.
My intentionally crude Xerox photomontage, Nuclear Cowboy (see above), was used as the central image for a flyer that announced a mass protest against President Reagan at a $1,000 dollar a plate fundraising dinner for the G.O.P. at the L.A. Century Plaza Hotel, August 22, 1985.
The text outside of the image running up the left-side of the flyer reads, “There will be a soup-line for those who cannot attend the G.O.P. dinner.”
The protest was organized and sponsored by a variety of organizations, from the Alliance For Survival and the Coalition For A Free South Africa, to Jews United For Peace and Justice and the Committee In Solidarity With The People of El Salvador (CISPES). Reagan addressed the fundraiser, and the demonstration was attended by approximately 10,000 protestors, making it one of the major rallies against the policies of Reagan to be held in Los Angeles during the 1980s.
Just two months prior to the protest, Reagan escalated his illegal and unilateral war against Nicaragua by declaring a crippling economic embargo against the Central American nation, accusing its leftist Sandinista government of backing “armed insurrection, terrorism, and subversion in neighboring countries.” Reagan declared his embargo after the U.S. Congress had rejected his request for tens of millions of dollars for the “Contra” guerrillas the White House had organized, financed, armed, and directed in military attacks against Nicaragua.
Soldier Of Fortune was my parody photomontage flyer lambasting the militaristic policies of the Reagan administration. I altered a cover of the rightwing magazine, Soldier of Fortune (an extreme rightist publication in the U.S. that openly recruited American mercenaries in the early 80s to fight in South Africa, Afghanistan, and Central America), inserting a photomontage of Reagan as the supreme mercenary commando, along with some tantalizingly jingoistic headlines. The tagline of “Shock Battalion” appearing at the bottom of the photomontage was the name of an arts collective I founded in the 1980s that primarily unleashed anonymous creative acts. The flyer was published as a color Xerox print.
Bedtime for Bonzo.
At the time students throughout California were engaged in an aggressive campaign to force the UC system to “divest,” i.e., to withdraw the huge financial investments made in the apartheid regime of South Africa.
The UC Regents supported apartheid by investing 30% of the UC system’s portfolio in corporations and financial institutions that conducted $1.7 billion worth of business transactions with South Africa.
Through unrelenting militant struggle the students eventually forced the UC system to divest their holdings in South Africa, helping to pave the way for the total collapse of the rotten apartheid regime.
My flyer announced an “Evening of Cultural Resistance” in celebration of the student occupation of the UCLA administration building, a takeover that demanded divestment, the release of Nelson Mandela, and an end to all U.S. military and financial support to the racist South African regime. The event took place in “Mandela City,” a tent encampment students had illegally set-up adjacent to the administration building. During that evening’s staging in front of a hundred striking students, I performed a multi-projection antiwar slide show, and singer-songwriter Carole King dropped in unannounced to lend her support and sing a few songs. The performer listed as “Hollywatts,” would in the future go on to use his real name, Roger Guenveur Smith, appearing in several productions by Director Spike Lee.
We Abhor Apartheid was another street flyer I created in 1985 as a satirical barb aimed at Reagan’s policy of propping up the South African racists.
I self-published five thousand copies of this flyer, all of which were distributed throughout Los Angeles.
By depicting Reagan in the company of other well known “opponents” of racism, the mocking image made fun of Reagan’s hypocritical avowal “that apartheid is very repugnant to us.”
In a 1985 radio interview with WSB Radio of Atlanta, Georgia, Reagan said the regime in South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country, the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated, that has all been eliminated.” That was of course a bald-faced lie. In the same interview the “Great Communicator” went on to sound off about South Africa, “I have to say that for us to believe the Soviet Union is not, in its usual style, stirring up the pot and waiting in the wings for whatever advantage they can take, we’d be very innocent, naive, if we didn’t believe that they’re there.”
Poster announcing a mass antiwar demonstration in downtown Los Angeles.
Stop The War in Central America was originally a large pencil drawing I created in 1986 to express my opposition to Reagan’s policy of military intervention in Central America. The focal point in the artwork are three skeletal figures inspired by the Dia de los Muertos drawings of the great Mexican artist, José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), only my skeletons represent the Escuadrones de la Muerte (Squadrons of Death) unleashed by Reagan in the nations of El Salvador and Nicaragua. They are clothed in U.S. supplied military uniforms that have dollar signs as their camouflage pattern. Clutching U.S. supplied M-16 automatic rifles in their decomposing hands, they move threateningly towards the viewer. In the wake of the deathly trio one can see the graveyards of countless victims, the skyline blackened with acrid smoke and bomb-blasts. I published this unsettling image as a flyer and a poster.
My silkscreen image, No Aid For Contra Terror, was also created in April of 1986. Around 200 of the 18.5 x 22.5 inch posters were printed and distributed across Los Angeles.
The works shown in this essay were of an activist nature, made for the street, mostly displaying a rough and ready, unrefined angry aesthetic born of urgency. These works of mine were part of an avalanche of protest art created by dissident artists during the bleak days of “Reaganism.” We are today revisited by that miserabilist political philosophy, and contemporary artists must meet its rising challenge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art for Change, in his own words, “is not about the art scene in my city, nor does it specifically focus on my own works. My writings on art exhibits, theory, philosophy, history, news, other artists, and a myriad of topics related to aesthetics, spotlight the role art and culture plays in shaping society. What differentiates my web log from other sites dealing with art is not just the emphasis I place upon social engagement and activism, but the fact that I am a painter who writes about and advocates a new social realism for the 21st century. This could not be otherwise, since I am an artist deeply influenced by the likes of Goya, the German Expressionists, the Mexican Muralists, and the American social realist school of the 1930s and 1940s.” Mark’s main site, which displays more of his art, is located at http://www.markvallen.com/ .
