Like Tupac's, the Reagan Hologram Is a Delusional Lie

When the Tupac hologram graced the stage at the Coachella Festival this past April, I was offended on the most personal of levels. The stunt tapped into one of my biggest hip-hop pet peeves: the beatification of dead artists by living MCs, in order to position and/or compare themselves to the fallen saints. Here were Snoop and Dre, their days of G-Funk era Candyland antics behind them, calling upon a three-dimensional image of their deceased comrade to join the aged stars at some overpriced festival full of college students.

This junk is implemented over a bleak backdrop, one that suggests the deaths of Big and Pac were somehow brought about by rap music. In this narrative, many relevant facts are omitted. For example, the meticulous investigation of retired detective Greg Kading or, I don't know, the fact that Tupac is on camera kicking a gang-member in the head hours before getting shot. Cite this kind of stuff too much and you begin to tamper with a timeworn topic-generator that interprets all rapper disagreements in terms of the most fatal of possible scenarios. People like to make a big deal about the fact Ice Cube and Common squashed beef after the Tupac/Biggie murders, as if we all believed there was a fighting chance the star of “Are We There Yet?” might get blasted by Lonnie Lynn. It's a joke.

It was within this context that Tupac was brought back in some farcical spectacle, having apparently squashed beef with Dre from heaven, to ask Coachella what the fuck is up. As far as egregious grave robbery goes, I rank it just below that Duets album Diddy unleashed on us, answering the question, "What would Korn sound like on a Biggie song?" something no one was asking, besides maybe Satan. Coachella featured one of the most thrilling, complex, and culturally important musicians of the all-time was reduced to little more than an effulgent maraschino atop a high-calorie ice cream sundae, to be contemplated later over Red Bull vodkas in the confines of dimly lit bars, "Dude, seriously, what the fuck was up with that Tupac hologram?"

Similar sentiments dominated public discourse after Clint Eastwood addressed an invisible President Obama at the RNC last week, the renowned actor appearing either inebriated or elderly and flushing the modern GOP further down the sinkhole of surreal lunacy. The entire thing was so painful that, when the camera caught a visibly perturbed Paul Ryan, I thought, "Oh, maybe he really is as intelligent as Romney says he is." The speech was the strangest of lead balloons, not just because debating a nonexistent person isn't the greatest of rhetorical devices, but also because Eastwood drifted into areas of commonsense and logic.

For instance, he began mentioning Obama's empty promise to shut down Gitmo, perhaps the most disgusting of the Bush-era's enduring legacies, temporarily unaware that the people in front of him would have gladly given the concept of torture a standing ovation if presented with the opportunity. Perhaps he had failed to watch the festivities the night before, when voter suppression motivated the crowd to hoot and holler. Furthermore, when Romney ran for the Republican nomination in 2008, his stance on the illegal prison basically involved expanding its scope and converting it into some sort of War on Terror theme park.

Now we learn that the festivities could have included a speech even more Pynchonian than Dirty Harry talking to a fucking chair. Hologram Reagan almost made an appearance outside the convention. Tony Reynolds, founder of a crowdsourcing website and obtainer to the rights of a Reagan speech on startup businesses, has been in contact with AV Concepts, the company that helped bring you that horrid Tupac moment. Reynolds was waved off by the RNC when predictable fears erupted over the fact a hologram would overshadow Romney. Nonetheless, it's coming, says Reynolds, if not by the end of the year, in 2013.

Unlike the Shakur hologram, the Reagan one makes perfect sense to me. His path from the screen to politics wasn't as much a journey, as it was a choreographed evolution. The essence of his celebrated speeches and definitive rhetorical moments can be spotted in, say, The Voice of the Turtle or The Winning Team. He always had a difficult time separating the space where reality began and fantasy ended, once infamously prattling on to the Premier of Israel about how he had helped liberate the concentration camps, despite being in Hollywood for the entire war.

In this sense, the hologram Reagan is more authentic than the actual Reagan; it's certainly the one we remember and the one that even President Obama aspired to tap into when he said that the Gipper "tapped into what people were already feeling." The real Reagan is a much thornier subject. Unlike Bush, or even Romney, he always sported the characteristics of an angry guy and embraced a specific kind of patriotism that depends, primarily, on others’ suffering.

If you thought that the stuff about Reagan being "The Teflon President" was overstated, imagine the eruption that would have occurred if Bush had referred to Obama as an "invalid", like Reagan did to Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. Romney was recently derided as a race-baiter for cracking a joke about his birth certificate? Reagan told the same tired story about a specific “welfare queen” with an unlimited supply of aliases who picked up her food stamps via limo. And when told the story was a giant fabrication, he kept rolling with it. Here's Bush when asked a question about why people hate him so much; within a less than a minute he is, somehow, talking about the "discord" that existed during Abraham Lincoln's administration. So cute!

Now here's Reagan telling some people to shut up. “He lost his cool and even that turned out to be to his advantage…”

The lineage of this kind of thing is all kinds of problematic and unbearably played out. Mos Def wants you to believe it's dangerous to be a rapper. The Game wants you to know that he would keep his semi cocked back, even if Shakur was resurrected, a statement that barely makes sense. Raise your hand if you honestly believe, if Biggie appeared as a ghost to Jay-Z, he would say some shit like, "Get stoned everyday like Jesus did."

Meanwhile, it’s easy to say that Romney lacks the charisma Reagan possessed. But how much of that was projected by a lapdog press and a conservative movement that nowadays forgets they disowned Reagan in the end, like they always do, for being insufficiently conservative. We’ve always projected our own biases and legends upon those we canonize post-mortem. Die a hero or live long enough to be a villan, or die later and be repackaged without the inconvenient facts, like your tax-hikes or the fact you bragged about having sex with Faith Evans. But now we’re even more convinced it’s real, because we can project that caricature on a stage.