Today, some web links recalling the monstrous politics behind the happy-face mask.

• Dan Modela discusses Dark Victory, his book investigating Reagan’s lifelong ties to MCA, former parent company of Universal Studios and the most notoriously Mob-connected company in Hollywood. (Universal’s now being acquired by GE, which once sponsored a TV show Reagan hosted and MCA produced.)
• Third World Traveler has links to several accounts of Reagan’s disastrous foreign policies, includng his luuuvvv for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. (Among Ronnie’s enamored: Saddam, Osama, and Pinochet.)
• Mark Hertsgaard, in a 1996 interview, mentions how Reagan was given virtually free rein by a submissive Washington press corps.
• David Swanson remembers the secret Iran-hostage deal that gained Reagan the White House in the first place.
• William Rivers Pitt insists that ” virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.”
• David Corn, in a 1998 Nation essay, recalls “66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan.”
• And Greg Palast emphatically recalls Reagan as “a conman” and “a coward.”
• But Madison, WI’s Capital Times asserts that progressives oughta learn from Reagan’s “willingness to fight for his faith.”

I’ve lately been studying a lot about “positive attitudes,” and the ways in which people who exude such attitudes can achieve their biggest dreams.

As many obits have noted, Reagan was a positive-thinking epitome. He had a winning smile, an easygoing voice, a knack for delivering simple jokes, and baby blue eyes. He diligently used his positive image to bring what I still believe were negative policies to the US and the world.

Sure, he never got around to some of his more contentious platforms (re-outlawing abortion, entirely dismantling the social safety net).

But he did get a lot of wrong things done.

He fired the air traffic controllers.

He slashed aid to the poorest, sending tens of thousands onto the streets.

He slashed college financial aid, reversing the postwar trend toward the democratizing of education.

He preached about smaller government, while he built up record budget deficits.

He started a massive buildup of nuclear weapons.

He arranged to keep the Iran hostages imprisoned to help his election drive; then let the whole Iran/Contra mess happen.

He enthusiastically supported every genocidal dictator who used anti-Communism as his excuse.

And, along with his evil twin Margaret Thatcher, he spread a gospel of blind faith in The Free Market. In practice, this meant massive corporate welfare, military-industrial contract corruption, the economic decimation of the middle class, the whole “greed is good” national nonsense, environmental catastrophes, jobless “recoveries,” and most of the wrong directions this country’s been headed in ever since.

I once wrote that the fictional character Reagan most closely resembled wasn’t Rambo but Simon the Likable, a villain from the last season of Get Smart! The Chief tells Max as they trail him, “He’s a terrorist, a gangster, a killer…” (the Chief catches a glimpse of Simon’s baby blue eyes and delicate smile) “…and a really nice guy.”

A British cable channel is claiming to offer the ultimate low-budget “reality” series. Watching Paint Dry would be “exactly what it says on the tin. Every day a different kind of paint will be put on to a wall and you get the chance to vote for your favourite. Confirmed contestants include matte, silk, gloss, satin, vinyl, eggshell textured and smooth masonry—all of whom are eagerly looking forward to their first brush with fame.” Something tells me this is a cheeky hoax, but it’s still fun to imagine.

Finally saw a complete episode of American Idol. Like most “reality” shows, it constructs a very specific, detailed fictional “reality.” This particular show’s fabulist conceit is that the banal rehashing of ’70s soul music is, and always has been, the main and only form of popular vocal music in the U.S.

A few years back, some baby-boomer intellectual wrote a book in which she whined about Those Kids Today, whose music didn’t got the same soul as that old time rock n’ roll. I don’t know if that author’s an Idol viewer, but the show’s conceit might fit her idea of a musical utopia, in a “be careful what you wish for” way.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, KOMO-TV anchordude Dan Lewis has started each 11 p.m. newscast on the station’s roof. This serves no journalistic purpose. I can only imagine three non-journalistic purposes for the ongoing stunt:

• To make the broadcast seem Important and Relevant, even though it’s usually a rehash of the most gruesome personal events already exploited at 5 and 6:30;
• To show off how Lewis’s carefully sculpted hair can remain perfectly in place, no matter what the weather;
• To let Lewis repeatedly drop the name “Fisher Plaza,” the station owners’ block-long, massively under-occupied office development.

…not to be judgmental about judgmental people anymore. But sometimes I can’t help it. Such as when KOMO’s voice-O-relative-sanity Ken Schram gently lambastes the NIMBY hypocrites fighting he homeless “Tent City” camp in Bothell.

AND SO IT HAS COME TO THIS: Frasier ends tonight, after eleven seasons and 264 episodes, of which only one had been half filmed in Seattle. That’s never stopped the local media from considering the series to be “ours;” a portryal, to varying degrees of accuracy, of the local urban zeitgeist.

I must, at least partly, agree with the assessment.

While written and executed on the Paramount lot in LA (one of the early writers, Ken Levine, did spend a little time around here as a Mariners announcer), the show did express what the culture-analysts call a “sense of place.” It was a place that only barely existed in real life, alongside several other Seattles, except in the highly selective realities of the early Seattle Weekly and KUOW.

In 1993, Nirvana’s final album was about to come out. Microsoft Windows was still a kludgy interface add-on to MS-DOS. Seattle was still mostly Boeing Country. Our wealthy were fewer, and much less ostentatious. The upscale home of choice was a huge waterfront “cabin,” not a condo.

But over the next seven years, it came to be. All the “market price” restaurants. All the frou-frou supper clubs. All the high-rise townhomes. All the gourmet cheese shops. All the mauve men’s shirts. All the uptight attitudes.

Now, the Frasier universe goes into that great rerun in the sky. What will be the next great fictional Seattle?

Let’s not wait for Hollywood to invent it. Let’s make it ourselves.

…a “new” celebrity category—the non-singing, non-dancing, music video model. I guess the NYT finally got cable, some two decades too late.

…of US “private contractor workers” torturing Iraqi prisoners, the Guardian wonders why U.S. newspapers are so eager to not discuss it.

Globe and Mail TV writer John Doyle wrote about the Faux News Channel’s attempts to get onto Canadian cable systems. Doyle said his countrypeople should get the chance to see the channel so they could laugh at it.

Bill O’Reilly, on said channel, urged his viewers to send insulting emails to Doyle, as if Doyle would be impressed and won over by people calling him dumb names.

Doyle’s follow-up article sez: “The people who support Fox News must be the most uncivil and foul-mouthed creatures on the planet. This is an informed opinion. They’d give English soccer hooligans a run for their money.”

…gets to become a bigtime movie star. His ol’ pal Squiggy gets to become a Mariners assistant scout. (Scroll to bottom of page.)

…in the coolness department: the new Vancouver affiliate of Toronto broadcast trailblazer City TV. Imagine: A commercial VHF station in a region no more populous that ours that’s got local cooking shows, local ethnic-cultural shows, local filmmakers’-showcase shows, serious arts documentaries, old silent movies, sex documentaries, uncut soft-R movies after midnight, and a Speakers’ Corner where citizens can videotape themselves ranting about anything they want.

…chopping away at our (and broadcasters’) rights? Sign the Stop FCC petition.

…as previously posted here. Along the way, I’ll post some tidbits about its milieu, the world of television production.

The first thing word people forget about TV is how word-dependent TV really is. No scripted program works without a decent script. And that includes the news. Evidence: The official BBC Style Guide. In 92 brisk pages, it gently instructs how to write copy with the authoritative yet understandable BBC house style:

“It is our job to communicate clearly and effectively, to be understood without difficulty, and to offer viewers and listeners an intelligent use of language which they can enjoy. Good writing is not a luxury; it is an obligation. Our use, or perceived misuse, of English produces a greater response from our audiences than anything else.

“It is in nobody’s interest to confuse, annoy, dismay, alienate or exasperate them.”

TOM RUNNACLES offers up a fine li’l tribute to Alistair Cooke. Some email respondents to him then go and spoil the proceedings by noting that Cooke’s BBC Radio essays had become steadily more reactionary over the past two decades. (Cooke, like Sinatra, had apparently fallen in love with the Reagan crowd as saviors of a more genteel past.)

…there was another cross-studio team-up of animated favorites, the justly forgotten anti-drug screed Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue.