SUNDAY, JAN 5, 2014 09:00 PM +0900
Ronald Reagan and the occultist: The amazing story of the thinker behind his sunny optimism
The Gipper's warm "morning in America" worldview was directly shaped by his reading of occult thinker Manly P. Hall
MITCH HOROWITZ
ただ、これ、レーガンさんだけではなく、アメリカ人記者なんか、わりにもっている観念ではないかな。あるいは、有道氏みたいのがいまだに支持されているところをみると、そうした、使命感をもったアメリカ人はいまだにおおいのではないかな？
世界の人々を啓蒙、解放し、自国では、どんな夢も叶う、みたいな物語は、アメリカの核となる物語なのかもしれませんね。
Ｊａｐａｎ Ｔｉｍｅｓのコラムニストのブログのコメント欄など読んでいると、アメリカ人のなかには、アメリカが例えば、日本と対等だ、と死んでも認めたくないようなアメリカ例外主義信奉者がいまだに多いのに驚かされることがある。
Ronald Reagan and the occultist: The amazing story of the thinker behind his sunny optimism
The Gipper's warm "morning in America" worldview was directly shaped by his reading of occult thinker Manly P. Hall
MITCH HOROWITZ
Ronald Reagan often spoke of America’s divine purpose and of a mysterious plan behind the nation’s founding. “You can call it mysticism if you want to,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, “but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” These were remarks to which Reagan often returned. He repeated them almost verbatim as president before a television audience of millions for the Statue of Liberty centenary on July 4, 1986.
When touching on such themes, Reagan echoed the work, and sometimes the phrasing, of occult scholar Manly P. Hall.
From the dawn of Hall’s career in the early 1920s until his death in 1990, the Los Angeles teacher wrote about America’s “secret destiny.” The United States, in Hall’s view, was a society that had been planned and founded by secret esoteric orders to spread enlightenment and liberty to the world.
ただ、これ、レーガンさんだけではなく、アメリカ人記者なんか、わりにもっている観念ではないかな。あるいは、有道氏みたいのがいまだに支持されているところをみると、そうした、使命感をもったアメリカ人はいまだにおおいのではないかな？
Through his reiteration of this theme of America’s destiny, and his powers as a communicator, Reagan shaped how Americans wanted to see themselves: as a portentous people possessed of the indomitable spirit to scale any height. This American self-perception could bitterly clash with reality in the face of a declining industrial base and falling middle-class wages. Nonetheless, the image that Reagan gave Americans of themselves―as a people always ushering in new dawns―formed the political template to which every president who followed him had to publicly adhere.
After Reagan, virtually every major campaign address included paeans to better tomorrows, from Bill Clinton’s invocation of “a place called Hope” (and his use of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”), to Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can.” In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama echoed one of Reagan’s signature lines when he declared: “This is a country where anything is possible.” The one recent president who complained that he couldn’t master “the vision thing,” George H. W. Bush, was not returned to office.
世界の人々を啓蒙、解放し、自国では、どんな夢も叶う、みたいな物語は、アメリカの核となる物語なのかもしれませんね。
Ｊａｐａｎ Ｔｉｍｅｓのコラムニストのブログのコメント欄など読んでいると、アメリカ人のなかには、アメリカが例えば、日本と対等だ、と死んでも認めたくないようなアメリカ例外主義信奉者がいまだに多いのに驚かされることがある。
