| About | |
| Contact Us | |
| Articles | |
| Topic Index | |
| Reports | |
| Quotes | |
| On the Web | |
| Links | |
| TW Tracker | |
| Support | |
Times Watch for
November 19, 2003
AIDS "Angels" vs. "Rancid" Reaganites
Sunday's Arts & Leisure column by editor Frank Rich "Angels, Reagan and AIDS In America" is a poisonous, 2,200-word excoriation of the Reagan administration's attitude toward AIDS. Rich, a long-time champion of gay issues, paints the forthcoming HBO movie adaptation of the play "Angels in America" as a triumph of the forces of tolerance over Reaganite intolerance: "Tonight is the night when Americans might have tuned into Part 1 of 'The Reagans' on CBS. But the joke is on the whiners who forced the mini-series off the air. Just three weeks from tonight, HBO will present the first three-hour installment of Mike Nichols's film version of Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America,' starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. (Part 2 is a week later.) This epic is, among other things, a searing indictment of how the Reagan administration's long silence stoked the plague of AIDS in the 1980's."
Here's Rich's description of the play (whose subtitle "a gay fantasia" is the most trustworthy thing about it): "'Angels' is only minutes old when Mr. Pacino appears as a real-life crony of the Reagans -- Roy Cohn, in his post-McCarthy-era incarnation as a still-powerful Republican fixer, closely tied to the Ed Meese justice department. A photo on his office wall shows him arm in arm with both the president and his vice president. Cohn is also a closeted gay man dying of AIDS. When he takes a sexual partner to the White House, he gloats, 'President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand.' Eventually Cohn will threaten to reveal 'adorable Ollie North and his secret contra slush fund' unless the White House secures him a private stash of AZT, then the most promising AIDS drug and still unavailable to all but a few. Cohn gets his pills while thousands of other dying Americans are placed on hold."
In one sentence, Rich states the obvious: "Mr. Kushner is not making a historical documentary, or practicing journalism, any more than those behind 'The Reagans' were." Then it's back to Reagan-era Republican-hating: "Whatever his script's fictions, it accurately conveys the rancid hypocrisy among powerful closeted gay Republicans in Washington as AIDS spiraled. And though 'Angels' takes note of the falling of the Berlin Wall, it doesn't feel that it owes a president any sanctuary from free speech. 'If he didn't have people like me to demonize,' says one angry non-Republican gay character, Reagan would have ended up the 'upper-right-hand square on 'The Hollywood Squares.' The Reagans are 'not really a family,' goes another riff. 'There aren't any connections there, no love.'"
Rich then suggests a line about AIDS cut from the miniseries on the Reagans did in fact express the former president's true feelings toward gays: "If there was one consistent theme to 90 percent of the outrage over a mini-series that no one outside CBS (including me) has seen, it was focused on a single line about AIDS attributed to Ronald Reagan: 'They that live in sin shall die in sin.' The screenwriter of 'The Reagans' admitted to The New York Times that she had no source for the line and it was cut. Yet even after it was cut, those on the attack kept harping on it more than any other element in the unseen film. Why? It was the syndrome of protesting too much, methinks. There's no evidence to suggest that Reagan was a bigot, but even so, he did say things similar to that jettisoned sentence. Edmund Morris, who wrote 'Dutch,' the Reagan biography both solicited and authorized by the former president's inner circle, quoted him as saying, 'Maybe the Lord brought down this plague' because 'illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.'"
But as columnist John Leo notes, Morris' biography of Reagan isn't exactly wholly trustworthy; Leo calls it "as shaky as any docudrama, with made-up dialogue, and the author himself inserted into the book as a fictional character who knew the young Reagan."
After bashing Reagan for not doing anything about AIDS, Rich writes: "The zeal with which the likes of Gary Bauer and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, among others, have suddenly taken to championing the Reagan record on AIDS may have less to do with Ronald Reagan than with trying to bury their own records back then. Not that they've changed much since."
A few sentences later, Reagan is seen as partly to blame for his own Alzheimer's: "When Gary Bauer and his peers expressed horror that CBS would broadcast 'The Reagans' while Ronald Reagan is dying of Alzheimer's, they seemed oblivious to the reality that they had helped scuttle some of the scientific research that might have helped their idol. When they complained that it is unfair to revisit the Reagan story when Reagan can no longer speak in his own defense, they ignored the tens of thousands of casualties from that time who also have no voice."
Rich seems to fancy himself speaking truth to power when he concludes: "Neither CBS nor those who intimidated it can suppress the story of just what happened in America in the 1980's, a time when too many died in secret and too many of those who might have helped looked away."
The author of the play Rich so fiercely champions, Tony Kushner, is not just a gay activist but an avowed Marxist who celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto and expressed the hope of redeeming "Marx from the mess Stalinism made of Marx."
Here's more on Kushner's bluntly politicized plays and his extremist view of Ronald Reagan, as summarized in Sparknotes (a sort of online Cliffs Notes): "Tony Kushner stands out for the vehemence with which he voices his politics and the directness with which he incorporates them into his work. One early play, 'A Bright Room Called Day,' stirred controversy with its direct comparisons between Ronald Reagan and the Nazi Party. Although it is always dangerous to equate a writer with the opinions expressed in his or her works, in the case of 'Angels' the play's (if not Kushner's) political platform is unmistakable. The most villainous characters are conservative Republicans, the heroes tolerant and left-wing; and throughout figures like Reagan, George Bush and Newt Gingrich are subjected to continuous rhetorical assault, only incompletely parried by Joe--who is himself discredited near the play's end."
How revealing that Frank Rich would hail such a self-righteous, left-wing spectacle "gripping," "affecting," and "ravishing to watch."
For the rest of Rich's anti-Reaganite rant, click here.
• AIDS | Angels in America | Arts | Roy Cohn | Frank Rich | Ronald Reagan | Television
Prospering China Driving Global Warming?
Tuesday's front-page story by Keith Bradsher, "China Set To Act On Fuel Economy," approves of China's strict new emissions laws for cars and assumes as fact the theory of human contribution to global warming: "This country's economy is booming, and a growing upper class in big cities like this one is rapidly buying all the accouterments of a prosperous Western life, including cars. As China burns more fossil fuels, both in factories and in a rapidly growing fleet of motor vehicles, its contribution to global warming is also rising faster than any other country's."
Bradsher later adds: "The Chinese standards would require the greatest increases for full-size S.U.V.'s like the Ford Expedition, which would have to go as much as 29 percent farther on a gallon of fuel in 2008 than they do now in the United States, [An Feng, a government transportation consultant] calculated. Sport utility sales in China have more than doubled so far this year, but are still a much smaller part of the overall market than they are in the United States."
Bradsher, former Detroit bureau chief for the Times, has rather strong opinions on SUVs. His recent book "High and Mighty" includes snobbish contempt for what Bradsher terms "the world's most dangerous vehicle." The book indulges in liberal stereotyping of SUV buyers, who in Bradsher's view "tend to be insecure and vain....they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities." Can you imagine a Times reporter employing such broad stereotypes against, say, a minority group?
For the rest of Brasher on China's strict new auto standards, click here.
• Automobiles | Keith Bradsher | China | Environment | Global Warming | Pollution | SUVs
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org