Eugene Jarecki
Eugene Jarecki
Eugene Jarecki is an American author and a dramatic and documentary filmmaker based in New York. His works include Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Reagan, Freakonomics, Quest of the Carib Canoe, Season of the Lifterbees, The House I Live In, anderror. Why We Fight and The House I Live In were both winners of the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, in 2005 and 2012 respectively...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
CountryUnited States of America
behind blinds enormous image keeps level man movement nostalgic present propaganda reagan resources seeks sort thinking toward tremendous
Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks - through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda - to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us all, and keeps us all in a warm, happy, nostalgic state, thinking of a man who can do no wrong.
appeal money needed public run taller tougher
The thing that happens is that politicians run on tough-on-crime rhetoric. You appeal to the public and say, 'Let's put more money into taller fences, tougher laws, tougher sentencing, handcuffs,' and where does that money come from? Well, immediately, it comes out of all the money needed for corrections.
analysis complex group himself involved party public reagan rejects
The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.
boat felt following interview man somewhere time
By the time I got to him, I felt like I was following an international man of mystery. He was on a boat somewhere in the Bahamas, and I had to get myself out there, which I did, Dramamine and all, to interview him.
fashion mean holocaust
We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.
media challenges age
If you watch the evening news, Dr. Kissinger is very often brought on to sort of be the statesman of his age and to reflect dispassionately on world events. And so a film challenging his legacy, a film that assesses charges that are quite grave against him, is something that is touchy for the media to show.
growing-up mean kids
I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.
party people tea
It was widespread that the politics of Tea Party people would be foreign to Ronald Reagan and they would be seen by him as frivolous and uninformed.
significant-things lessons negative
Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.
simple quality fine
Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He's not the simple, folksy figure that he's often portrayed as.
discussion
You can't have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.
favors amnesty should
To say that Reagan teaches us that we should be against amnesty for illegal immigrants is to contradict what Reagan himself stood for - that he was in favor of amnesty.
jobs people four
If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early 70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. Thats what youre up against.
thinking complicated marvelous
I don't think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don't think he's primarily marvelous; he's complicated.