1946 SAG Keynote Address
On October 30, 1946, Ronald Reagan delivered the keynote address at a hugely attended meeting of members of the Screen Actors Guild. Still just considered a lightweight leading man unlikely to assume the mantle of stardom, the reception transformed his reputation and is now considered the symbolic origin point of his political career.
Lifeguard
In the very first lines of the book contained within the Preface, an anecdote informs the reader that long, long ago in the halcyon days of his rugged youth, Reagan had been employed as a lifeguard. The word “lifeguard” will go on to recur nearly fifty times throughout the narrative, situating it as a symbol for the way Reagan wanted to be regarded as President if not necessarily how he was regarded.
Football
Football employs imagery as metaphor more than any other sport. Even though in reality it actually bears little resemblance to any sort of battlefield strategy that could conceivably result in anything but a massacre, the concept stuck and has managed to worm its way into the American consciousness. Reagan took this misguided symbolism way too seriously and literally applied it as a philosophy of life in which everything is a battle, but every battle is a football game.
Welfare
Welfare is the symbol of everything that Reaganomics works against. It is really a theory which rides with the comfortable expectation that if the government quits subsidizing social programs, the public sector will ride in like the cavalry and save the day. Except that the public sector never actually has done this and certainly not when it comes down to giving people living in abject poverty any serious chance of climbing out of it with decent wages. Ultimately, welfare is viewed as taking money away from good people and handing it over to bad people and this runs directly counter to essence of Reagan’s economic strategy: good people would never accept a handout therefore those who do cannot be good people and therefore should not be helped in the first place. Simplistic madness, of course, but surprisingly effective propaganda.
Communism
Make no mistake about this. Going all the way back to when Reagan was a confidential informant for the FBI spying on his friends and co-workers in the movie business at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover, he viewed communism as equivalent with evil. Symbolically speaking, communism is genuinely the serpent in Reagan’s metaphorical Garden of Eden and he spent the greater part of his life trying to catch stomp it to death with his foot.
