An Aside to Ronald Reagan

[Eldridge Cleaver challenging Ronald Reagan to a duel. It was published in Ramparts in ’68, as far as I can find. You're welcome.]

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I have never liked Ronald Reagan. Even back in the days of his bad movies — bullshit flicks that never turned me on to any glow—I felt about him the way I felt about such nonviolent cowboys as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry: that they were never going to cause any action or allow anything to happen. They were just there, occupying space and wasting my time, my money and my sanity. There was a sort of unreality in their style. One knew that movies were into a make-believe bag, but the unreality espoused on the screen by the flat souls of such Pablum-fed actors as Reagan reflected to me—black ghetto nigger me—a sickening mixed bag of humorless laughter and perfect Colgate teeth, with never a hint of the real funk of life. Insipid, promising nothing and delivering even less, a Reagan movie was nothing to get excited about. There would be no surprises.

But what happened was that Ronnie landed a TV show. Equipped with opulent sponsors and some slick script writers, the mediocrity of his grade-B spirit was glossed over and concealed by the make-up of a rhetoric fashioned by a committee of crew-cut wordmongers. With all this going for him, it was natural for him to turn to politics when Hollywood’s keenest make-up artists began to find it increasingly difficult to deal with the wrinkles that were slowly turning his face into a replica of well furrowed, depleted single-crop soil.

He was in the best of all states to get into his thing. California had demonstrated its ability to relate to the politics of the absurd by electing to office such blobs of political putty as Richaird Nixon and Max Rafferty. And having picked the proper place, he could not have chosen a better style. Ronnie used a pat formula that said: pick the toughest problems confronting the people and launch blistering attacks upon all sincere efforts to come to grips with these problems; offer as an alternative a conglomeration of simple-minded clichés and catch phrases that go back to the Mayflower; sing The Star-Spangled Banner and smile broadly, effusively, as you wave the flag at the people; use a fighting “I’m fed up” form of delivery, and always remember that when nothing else works, there is always the tried and proven gambit of demagogic politicians, especially in California—viciously attack the perennial whipping boys of the American Dream: subversion concealed in the words of textbooks, the “decadence of universities and the misguided students being duped by a handful of professors who are under the subtle influence of the Communist Conspiracy.”

Well, it worked. Mickey Mouse is governor and Donald Duck is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. That is what we have to worry about. And deal with.

It has been said that the people get the rulers they deserve. I do not believe, however, that America has the rulers it deserves. The State of California, emphatically, could not deserve the rulers it has. Yet we have them, and this is an election year. And what an election year: this is the nightmare election year of the American Dream.

Everything is out in the open this year. Nobody is trying very hard to conceal anything. As usual, the key issue in the election is what to do about the niggers —only this time, the question is being rewritten to read, what to do with the niggers. From the point of view of the niggers themselves, the question has also been rewritten and now reads, what are we going to do about this shit?

A surprising development—one which offers the possibility, perhaps the only possibility, of a monkey wrench being tossed into the smoke dreams of the racists—is that a sizable portion of white Americans are in revolt against the system. So the issue of Law and Order, or Crime in the Streets, becomes key.

In California, Mickey Mouse looked out from his perch in Disneyland for an opening to get himself back into the act, having been kicked off the stage in Miami by a pig who had been in the game a little longer. From where he lurked, Mickey Mouse fixed his blank stare on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. He had received a tip that a situation tailored to his needs existed on that campus. Eldridge Cleaver – the apotheosis of the American nightmare: loudmouthed nigger, ex-convict, rapist, advocate of violence, Presidential candidate—retained by the Berkeley subversives to teach a class on the University campus, i.e. to corrupt the morals of lily-white American youth. So Ronnie Baby, doing his Republican duty, emerged from his pen to take up the cudgels of battle: “If Eldridge Cleaver is allowed to teach our children, they may come home some night and slit our throats. Therefore, the people of the State of California will not stand for this!”

Right on, Mickey Mouse. There are those of us who know what you are into, and we don’t like it. Furthermore, we are going to deal with it, with you, to put an end to your absurd oinking in the faces of the people. So that all those bullshit changes that you went through with the Board of Regents, forcing them to emasculate the course in which I was to participate as a guest lecturer, don’t mean shit. It displeased you, I understand, that even the Board of Regents did not buy you whole hog; that, in fact, they agreed to allow me to deliver one lecture.

Big deal. Who in the fuck do you think you are, telling me that I can’t talk, telling the students and faculty members at UC Berkeley that they cannot have me deliver ten lectures? I’m going to do it whether you like it or not. In fact, my desire now is to deliver 20 lectures. You, Donald Duck Rafferty, Big Mama Unruh, and that admitted member of the racist John Birch Society who introduced that resolution into the Legislature to censure those responsible for inviting me to lecture in the first place—all and each of you can kiss my black nigger ass, because I recognize you for what you are, racist demagogues who have their eye on the ballot box come November. The students and the faculty members at Berkeley are trying to salvage the American people from the brink of chaos that you pigs have brought on. Your thirst and greed for power is so great that you don’t care whether or not in your lust you destroy the vital processes of a barbaric society that is trying in its parts to become civilized.

I don’t know what the outcome of all this will be, but I do know that I, for one, will never kiss your ass, will never submit to your demagogic machinations. I think you are a cowardly, cravenhearted wretch. You are not a man. You are a punk. Since you have insulted me by calling me a racist, I would like to have the opportunity to balance the books. All I ask is a sporting chance. Therefore, Mickey Mouse, I challenge you to a duel, to the death, and you can choose the weapons. And if you can’t relate to that, right on. Walk, chicken, with your ass picked clean.