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To Coin A Phrase  

Long in the forefront of peculiar coinage, Liberia has thrilled numesmaticly inclined cold war enthusiasts with their talking Kennedy coin.  It features audio of JFK’s storied “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in which he either saluted doughty Berliners or embraced pastry.

    The Liberians are known for their broadminded pantheon of heroes, with George W. Bush earning a stamp for some debt transactions.

Communism Point & Click

So little is left of the Berlin Wall that Reuters reports authorities have resorted to handing tourists a GPS powered device if they want to recreate that closed in feeling.

We know where the Wall went: vast chunks carried off to America for victory displays. Prime offenders are Presidential Libraries, which are cluttered with the stuff.

Let’s review:

George H.W. Bush has a cheesy salute to Berlin and all things Texan outside his museum, and indoors Wall as well. And Bush Secretary of State James Baker got a chunk for his Rice University Institute.

Ford has a piece, although the Wall rested undisturbed throughout his presidency.

Nixon too.

Kennedy saw it built on his watch.

The Hoover Library has a Wall piece, although he barely lived long enough to see it built, three decades after his presidency.

Truman hosted Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Westminister College in Fulton Missouri, and the campus now hosts both a plain chunk and a Wall “sculpture” – a piece with holes punched in it by Churchill’s granddaughter. She also sold one of these horrors to the Roosevelt library.

The greater glory of Ronald Reagan requires the most concrete, with Wall samples at his Dixon Illinois birthplace, alma mater Eureka College, at the federal Reagan office building in Washington, aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, at the Reagan Ranch Center, and at the Reagan Library indoors & out.

And they used to sell bags of chips.

Dreams From My Fathers

Barack Obama continues his stroll with greatness, now planning to hype the Reagan and JFK comparisons to dizzy new heights by taking his act to Berlin.

Other pols have gotten some of that Platz Pizazz too.

The Wall may be gone, but lives in voters of a certain age’s mental film archives. Combined with the incessant cable news dribble and drone about “iconic imagery,” he should have a good day.

And the expected Obama lovefest from Germany’s most left-wing city may resonate with those Americans who cringe at the image George W. Bush has projected abroad recently.

There’s a lot to overcome, even on the ground in Berlin. The justly hated new American embassy is convenient to the Brandenburg Gate, so over time all the world can come to appreciate this really nice college dorm building.

Before They Were Stars

Fortunate son Michael Reagan feels dad is under-appreciated, so he’s off to Berlin to locate a proper setting to mark Ronald Reagan single handedly wrestling communism to the ground.

Michael is holding an event at the Cafe Einstein, despite the famed scientist’s notorious red ties.

It’s not like Ronald Reagan’s connection to Berlin has gone unnoticed – Berlin Wall chunks litter the Reagan landscape.
Washington’s Ronald Reagan Building

kk Dixon Illinois

Reagan Alma Mater Eureka College [one of two there]

Reagan Library Indoors

Reagan Library Outdoors

Reagan Ranch Center, Santa Barbara

Reagan On Wall Slab Aboard USS Ronald Reagan

Local Heroes

The case often made for Presidential Libraries is that their localness, their dispersion out of Washington somehow furthers a deeper understanding of those who held the office. David McCullough says keep ’em down on the farm:

“…it is valuable for anyone trying to understand the life of a particular president should come to the place that produced that human being, where his memory is part of the story of that place.”

Or perhaps they just provide local opportunities to further embed ignorance. A recent visitor to the Nixon Library blogged about his experience, and he knows a whole lot of nuthin.

Berlin Wall chunks at Presidential Libraries celebrating administrations further and further from actual events in Germany are an enormous joke, and our lad’s not in on it.

“One of my favorite displays at the library was a section of the Berlin Wall – very fitting since Nixon played a pretty large role in its ultimate demise.”

Not on My Watch

And speaking of tear-downs, the visitor seems to have missed the whole removal/revision of the Watergate exhibit.

The former exhibit space

“There were disappointments at the library, however. Most notably, there wasn’t a section about Watergate at all. As I think back, I wonder if we missed it, but I don’t think we did – we walked through the entire permanent exhibit and I didn’t see anything. Of course, it’s a museum that pays homage to Nixon, so I wasn’t expecting monumental space devoted to the end of his presidency, but to not address it seems very short sighted.”