Attack of the Ronald Reagan Statues
It's the centennial of the birth of the 40th US President, Ronald Reagan, and coast to coast statues of the Old Gipper are making news but for very different reasons.
It’s the centennial of the birth of the 40th US President, Ronald Reagan, and coast to coast statues of the Old Gipper are making news but for very different reasons.
Last week in DC, a 9-ft statue of Reagan was erected outside Terminal A of his namesake airport. According to Raw Story, the $900,000 bronze likeness was paid for by four mystery donors, who funded similar ones in Budapest, London and Simi Valley, California.
On the other side of the country, in Newport Beach, California, a statue of Reagan was already drawing protests when it was unveiled last month. Now this past weekend it was damaged when someone attempted to pull it down using what a witness says was his truck and something he tied to the public monument.
The British Daily Mail juxtaposed this weekend’s “toppling” of the Reagan statue in California with a similarly symbolic event during the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003.
The centennial of Reagan’s birth has had a powerful impact on the country’s conservative community, but all their attempts to commemorate the arch-conservative have not always been successful. The Los Angeles Times reports that efforts to replace the image of the 18th US President, Ulysses S. Grant, on the $50 with Reagan’s has “faltered.”
