About

This blog had to be made. There was no stopping it. Sooner or later, someone would realize Ronald Reagan is too good of a character in American history to not warrant made up ghost stories about him.

Truthfully, this blog will doubtfully have very many ghost stories, let alone ghost stories featuring the Gipper (Reagan’s evil-ghost-alter-ego). It will be more of a pot-pie-pourri of comical comments on music, news, and global issues that may somehow be related to Ronald Reagan, but in all likelihood, it’s a stretch.

So why did I call this site “Ronald Reagan Is The Ghost In This Story?” It began with my first paper for a class at Carnegie Mellon called “Introduction to World History.” It’s possibly the worst class I’ve taken in my college career, and the required lectures never fail to be relentlessly boring. The first paper was about globalization, and I lifted an idea from poet Beau Sia for my introduction:

My first year at sleep away camp was not very good. The first night we were there, my whole cabin camped out and told ghost stories by the fire. Counselor Chuck told us he had a good one – it was the most frightening tale ever told on the grounds of Camp Firewood. “It was about all of the individuality of the world being sucked out by a global economy set on homogenizing society.” Needless to say, I could not sleep that night and my entire camp experience was ruined by Counselor Chuck and his entirely too scary ghost stories (Sia).

Inadvertently (or so I think), through his super-spooky campfire tales, Counselor Chuck created the earliest formations of my ideas on globalization. However, as I have developed my own ideas and opinions on globalization I have learned there are always two sides to every ghost story. Now I present a tale of a global economy that expands trade and decreases impoverishment, but also magnifies wealth gaps, undermines government policies, degrades the environment, and yes, homogenizes society.

The ghost in this story is Ronald Reagan. The global economy could never reach its full potential until the fall of the USSR at the end of the Cold War. Thomas Friedman maintains the idea that globalization is the replacement for the Cold War system that came before it (Friedman 1999, 7). While the Cold War system was marked by two super powers and an economy ruled by national presidents and dictators, globalization is marked by one super power and an economy ruled by corporate presidents and … dictators.

The rest of the paper gets pretty boring, with only a few more references to Counselor Chuck and none to Ronald Reagan.

So you see, it was either this name, or AdamtheFiasco.blogspot.com, but apparently some guy named Lupe already took that idea. He makes good music though, so I guess it’s cool.