The Reagan Bounce is a last-ditch dance with a dead man.
Recently we've seen the Reagan Bounce performed to near-perfection by the ethically bankrupt, morally corrupt, dangerously incompetent Bush administration, which has picked up a few temporary points in public-opinion polls by dazzling an already stunned electorate with the illusion of fancy footwork.
How you do the Reagan Bounce depends on your degree of desperation.
If your name is George Walker Bush – aka the Sultan of Sham – you're already a very desperate man – which is to say, you've hijacked an election, fomented a fraudulent war, plundered a robust economy, stolen the lives of hundreds of brave troops sacrificed in your futile battles, and posed in faux-macho costumes distorting your meager credentials while showcasing your dubious pedigree.
In short, you're way out of step with reality.
To do the Reagan Bounce, first you carry the corpse of the USA's current favorite dead president – that great American, Ronald Reagan, polishing his myth, and yours – around with you, before the body's even cold. Then, verticalizing his corpse – which suddenly and magically bears a remarkable gravitas it did not quite possess in life – you eke out a paradoxical two-step, a distracting tap dance followed by a slick slide of a soft-shoe segueing into a Texas shuffle, if possible twinkling your toes so it doesn't appear the corpse, deep in throes of rigor mortis, is actually carrying you.
You're stealing his reputation and appropriating it as your own.
While the death of a president is, properly, a historic event, this icky Orwellian orgy of exploitive BushMonster spinmastery we're witnessing – hammering home nonexistent personal and political parallels between Bushwah-the-Wannabe Gipper and Reagan himself – is nothing short of disgusting.
Political vampirism. Grave-robbing. Necrophilia.
Way before his father's funeral, broadcaster Ron Reagan got grossed out by the Bushies' opportunistic appropriation of the "accomplishments" and charmed aura of someone who could no longer speak for himself. "The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, " he was widely quoted in the online journal Salon last year, "particularly because of the position he's in now. Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the '80's. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's – these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people."
Clearly, this is only the beginning of Bush's pathetic efforts to remake himself as Reagan: The horror!
It's as if Ingmar Bergman's classic movie "Persona" gets redone by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite film director, and we see two people intertwine, blurring, merging and becoming virtually identical, eventually indistinguishable so you forget who and what they each once were. The Cult of Personality run amok.
And then they'll put you in jail for the "thought-crime" of daring to dislike the movie.
"Maybe the White House or the Pentagon got Nancy Reagan to, not necessarily pull Ronnie's breathing tube out so he'd finally die, but hold the news of his actual death several days or weeks until the most politically opportune time, so Bush could reap the biggest benefit," speculates "Alicia" an astute Philadelphia merchant.
To say nothing of all that pent-up Father's Day sentimentality.
As poet Carl Sandburg wrote with such amazing prescience back in 1922 in his "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind" from "Smoke and Steel:"
"The past is a bucket of ashes ... Yesterday, is gone ... What of it? Let the dead be dead."
He went on:
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
and the only listeners left now
are the rats and the lizards.
The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.
And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.