If you have a spare $15,000 lying around and are into this sort of thing, you might like to place a bid on Lot 160: A glass vial, 5 inches long, which allegedly once contained a blood sample taken from former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, allegedly, as he clung to life after he was shot early in his first term.
There’s a lot of “allegedly” going on with this story. That the brownish scum inside the tube might not actually have Gipper origins doesn’t seem to faze bidders with deep pockets who are into this sort of thing.
According to the director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, the auction of his foundation’s namesake’s blood is a “craven act.” Others at the foundation have questioned the legality of selling someone’s blood, mostly because the foundation owns the rights to Reagan’s “name, likeness and image” — and blood, apparently. @@http://www.reaganfoundation.org/@@
Others still, which including the rest of America that isn’t employed by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, are just grossed out that people would want to buy Reagan’s (or really anyone’s) blood.
Relics are weird. Strictly speaking, a relic is religious in nature, something corporeal left behind by a saint or other holy figure like a skull, bone fragment, locks of hair or mopped-up blood congealed on a piece of fabric. Nowadays, a relic can be any old thing taken from a once-living person such as Albert Einstein’s brain, Napoleon’s penis or some residue of Ronald Reagan’s blood. @@http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/relic@@
Considering the Republican Party and its ardor for Reagan, it wouldn’t be too surprising if some well-heeled, adventurous, and (very) eccentric GOP-er decided to buy the vial of blood and build a church of St. Reagan around it.
One of the enduring myths of our age is that Ronald Reagan was a good president. I suppose he was better at the job than Jimmy Carter, but in the annals of Republican presidents, Reagan is no Warren Harding. His legacy and his name (that name — alliterative, symmetrical) better serve the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a brand than the man did while in the White House.
Every election cycle, office-seeking Republicans scramble to give their campaigns a warm, fiscally serious, Reagan-y glow. Why, just a couple days ago, the Honorable Congressman from Wisconsin and possible running mate, Paul Ryan, gushed about Reagan and in the same breath said that Mitt Romney (the presumptive loser of this year’s election) will “save this country” by pursuing Reaganite policies. @@http://paulryan.house.gov/@@ @@http://www.mittromney.com/forms/welcome-layout@@
Of course, Ryan delivered his mash note to Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., — the Mecca of affluent, racially insecure Tea Partiers.
By distorting the Reagan legacy, the right wing of the GOP has royally screwed this country. Ronald Reagan’s administration has become an impossible ideal of conservative governance, leading policy-makers in the Republican Party to chase after a mirage of their own creation. It would be appropriate, then, if the contents of Lot 160, the blood in the vial, didn’t originate from Reagan — that it too was a scam.