At present, there are morethreadsaboutRonaldReagan’spassingonthefront page than you can shake a stick at. No category is safe GQ, GD, even MPSIMS are choked with near-identically titled threads in which the exact same sentiments are espoused about a person who’s been as good as dead for years anyway. Is it THAT difficult to see if there’s already a Reagan thread before you start your own? “No time to check, i’ve got to be first!” Not that Reagan wasn’t very-well-liked by many people, but there’s such a thing as too much mourning.
Oh… and since this is a Pit thread, fuck fuck fuck damn bastard assholes.
God, by the time Reagan is finally buried, CNN will have to turn to science in order to create even bigger font sizes. Fonts so big that you can see them from space.
You know, this happens every time something unusually newsworthy happens. Threads pop up all over for a day or two or ten, then they die away, sometimes with help. It’s just the way things go around here. Not really worth getting worked up over, IMHO.
Actually I give Reagan’s family great credit for handling his decline closely. It’s not exactly analogous, but the prolonged decline of Spain’s Francisco Franco turned into an unavoidable media self-parody. The-news-outlets-of-the-day–even before Fox–made such a to-do of the deathwatch they stepped all over their own manufactured suspense.
“And now, breaking news!! Francisco Franco is still dead!”
Sheesh.
Eve summed it up pretty well. The board’s about to go down, so I’ll paraphrase as best I can:
MPSIMS: “Uvula Gladwyne dead at 86”
IMHO: “Would Uvula Gladwyne have been a star in the modern era?”
GD: “Should Uvula Gladwyne have gotten a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, despite [controversial event]?”
Cafe Society: “Uvula Gladwyne: A Life”
Cafe Society 2: “Your favorite Uvula Gladwyne films”
GQ: “How did Uvula Gladwyne die, exactly?”
The Pit: “Uvula Gladwyne was a [epithet]”
The Pit 2: “Uvula Gladwyne: The woman’s dead, stop picking on her!”
The Pit 3: “Enough with the Uvula Gladwyne threads!”
IOW, there’s often a lot more to be said about the recently deceased besides just the fact that they lived and died. There are a lot of angles from which to approach the subject. That’s why we have so many different fora: so we can specialize instead of lumping everything into one thread.
Yeah, this media saturation reminds me of Bob Hope’s death last year – a whole lotta nothin’ coverage for a man who lived well past his life expectancy and hasn’t had an acting role in fifteen years. I kept checking the news periodically to see if anything else happened yesterday, and apparently, nothing did. (Aside from Smarty Jones making his run to the glue factory.)
The worst part is flicking through the tv stations (Broadcast only, since I don’t get cable on the tv I was watching all day). Channel 2: helicopter view outside Reagan’s house. Channel 4: a slightly different helicopter view. Channel 5: “Man on the street” interviewing random people about Reagan. Channels 7, 11, 13: the CNN feed of a helicopter view over Reagan’s house. Channel 9: Person outside Reagan Library.
Are they expecting somebody to get on the roof and start wailing? Are they expecting the entire house to slide aside and reveal a field of nuclear launch tubes as a final farewell to the reds in Russia? What the hell can you possibly learn from 300 feet above the building?! Go back to the studio while some intern digs up the Reagan death montage from whatever filing cabinet it’s in, but stop pretending that we need to see nothing happening as it doesn’t happen!
The media meme about Reagan is that everybody loves him. This is obviously incorrect – a considerable percentage of the American population despises him. But the meme is that everybody loves him, so we’re all going to have to sit through a ton of shit on radio, TV and in the papers before anybody gets around to saying, “Well yeah, he’s dead, but he really fucked up when he was President.”
My mama always said, if you can’t say anything nice about a person, don’t say anything at all. Hence my lack of contribution to the “Zed (Reagan’s) Dead!” threads so far.
For what it’s worth, I was watching ABC’s coverage immediately following his death, and they did bring up criticisms of his policy, and mentioned specific numbers relating to national debt, etc.
Then they showed him personally destroying the Berlin Wall.
