What a great country. We've just had a fierce public debate over a docudrama no one has seen, culminating in a form of censorship. Not having seen the bio-pic about the Reagans was no bar to the punditry, which held forth ferociously.
Indeed, many of our fellow citizens, who also hadn't seen the docudrama, were egged on by the Republican National Committee and right-wing talk shows to write CBS, demanding the unseen film not be aired. It has now been banished to cable, presumably to the cultural deprivation of the citizenry.
Fortunately, this exercise in fatuity served to take our minds off grim news about mutual fund trading and even grimmer news from Iraq. Good thing we've all got our eyes on the prize here. Unable as I am to speak to the merits of this particular bio-pic, not a genre widely admired to begin with, I would like to point out that lese majeste (French for the old crime of dissing the king) is not yet against the law -- and anyone who wants to argue against bad taste on television is welcome to try.
It is an odd feature of our national life that Ronald Reagan, of all people, is now considered by some to be above criticism. I assume the historians will take care of most of these questions, though I did once draw the odd journalistic assignment of reviewing the book by Nancy Reagan's astrologer, Joan Quigley. It did not persuade me that life in the Reagan White House was the avatar of normalcy. (Some fairly weird stuff in there. Just the kind of dish they love to put in bio-pics.)
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http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15941
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