Americans Do Not Worship Their Leaders

There's been much commentary over the reaction of North Koreans to Kim Jong Il's death. Some think that the outbursts were staged by the North Korean government for the international media, which is possible. Others think that the grief is genuine, which is also possible. North Koreans are indoctrinated to believe that their leader is god-like. Thus, the leader's death is literally like the death of a their deity. I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between.

But we all know that Americans don't worship their leaders. For instance, when former president Ronald Reagan died, he received the same amount of mourning as someone like Fred Astaire or Bing Crosby. Glenn Greenwald recollects the banality of the Reagan's funeral as follows:

For the next six days, his body was transported to, and his casket displayed in, multiple venues around the nation — first to a funeral home in Santa Monica; then to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, where it remained for two full days as over 100,000 people paid their respects; then onto the U.S. Capitol, where his casket was taken by horse-drawn caisson along Constitution Avenue, and then lay in state under the dome for the next day-and-a-half; then to a state funeral at Washington’s National Cathedral presided over by President Bush and attended by dozens of past and present world leaders; and then back to the Presidential Library in California, where another service was held and his body finally interred. Few U.S. Presidents in history, if any, have received anything comparable upon their death; as CNN anchor Judy Woodruff observed the day Reagan’s body arrived in the capital: “Washington has not seen the likes of this for more than 30 years.”

Each one of those mournful events was nationally televised and drenched in somber, intense pageantry. At the center of it all was the prominently displayed grief of his second wife, Nancy, to whom he was married for 52 years. The iconic moment of the week-long national funeral occurred on the last day, at the internment, when she broke down for the first time and famously hugged and kissed her husband’s casket, while holding a folded American flag, seemingly unwilling to let him go immediately before his body was lowered into the ground.

But the most notable aspect of that intense public ritual was the full-scale canonization of this deeply controversial, divisive and consequential political figure. Americans — including millions too young to remember his presidency — were bombarded with a full week of media discussions which completely whitewashed Reagan’s actions in office: that which made him an important enough historical figure to render his death worthy of such worldwide attention in the first place. There was a virtual media prohibition on expressing a single critical utterance about what he did as President and any harm that he caused. That’s not because the elegies to Reagan were apolitical — they were aggressively political — but because nothing undercutting his deification was permitted.

Clearly there was nothing unusual about the treatment of Reagan's death by the media or the American public. I live in DC and I remember people lining up to view Reagan's body in the Capitol. Some people even traveled across the country to do so, including people who did not like Reagan. But there is nothing unusual about that. In fact, people always wait in line for hours and travel across the country to view the body of someone who has died. It's quite common in the U.S.

We also know that the public does not treat the Democratic presidents much better than Republican ones. Just listen to this Newsweek editor's unflattering comments about Obama. Or look at this boring Newsweek cover. Or this picture of a slightly enthusiastic sign outside one of Obama's campaign headquarters in Florida. At best this is like members of a Bon Jovi fan club showing their support. 

I do feel that the North Korean people have been so heavily indoctrinated by the North Korean State, they believe that their leader is a deity. I'm sure that many do honestly believe that their leader, their god, has died, and they are searching for purpose, wondering who will provide for them. But we do not have this problem in the U.S. That is because Americans do not worship their leaders.

Comments

[Mike Crawford]

Americans are just as self-deluded as the North Koreans who now moan and weep over the death of Kim Jong Il. The one thing that’s universal about modern human beings is that most of them will fall for almost anything if it’s stated by an “official” source.