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12 APOP CULTUR~ SOCI~TY WITH RoNALD REAGAN's PRESIDENCY IN THE 198os, POLitics and entertainment were increasingly intertwined, yet popular culture served as a political punching bag. Such paradoxes were legion. Business consolidation accelerated as audiences fragmented. New technologies such as cable expanded television's offerings while placing the networks' future in doubt. Reagan-era upbeat triumphalism vied with reminders of serious problems and considerable unease. Even the end of the Cold War in 1989 and an improved economy by the mid-1990s could not conceal signs of disquietude in places such as horror fiction, movies, and prime-time television drama. Athletes such as Michael Jordan climbed new heights of celebrity, but a range of troubles beset sports. Amid such contradictions was a dominant fact: the role of entertainment had never been greater or more important. The flood of popular culture 's images and sounds reached unprecedented levels, as advertisements, talk shows, hundreds of cable television channels, music, magazines, and games suffused American life. As the media scholar Todd Gitlin observed, amusements that had been "an accompaniment to life" had become a "central experience oflife." Predictably, such a huge source of influences on American society attracted substantial concern and opposition, again making such things as TV programs, movies, music, and video games heated censorship issues. No matter how much some Americans complained about popular culture, it was, nevertheless, becoming the driving engine behind the nation's economy. During World War II and the Cold War, national defense spending had lubricated that economy; in the 1990s, however, employment in defense-related industries plummeted, while jobs in entertainment shot upward. "Sitcoms," as one writer wryly observed, were supplanting "iron and steel as principal products." Even shopping malls depended increasingly on amusement venues to attract customers, conve- 442 WITH AMUSEMENT FOR ALL niently merging two American pastimes: consumerism and entertainment. When the sprawling Mall of America near Minneapolis opened with a sevenacre amusement park, it drew 40 million shoppers annually-"more visitors ," according to the media consultant Michael Wolf, "than Walt Disney World, Disneyland, and the Grand Canyon combined." Analogies within popular culture of a mainstream "big tent" and a competing variety of "sideshows " still made sense, but, in the United States as a whole, popular culture itself increasingly constituted the biggest of tents: an "entertainment economy " or, in the words of The Nation, "the national entertainment state."1 In notable ways, Ronald Reagan symbolized the movement of entertainment to the center of American life. Elected in 1980, he was the first president whose career had been in show business. Although his rhetoric invariably summoned up images of a traditional America, his career mirrored the rise of modern leisure and entertainment.2 Starting in the 1930s, Reagan had moved from radio broadcasting (especially as a sports announcer) to movies, a Las Vegas act, television, and advertising. In 1952, as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), he had rejuvenated his career by facilitating the move into television production of the Music Corporation of America (MCA). The MCA's Lew Wasserman wanted the guild to grant his talent agency a production waiver in the fledgling television business. Blocking him, however, were long-standing SAG regulations that barred talent agencies from producing motion pictures because of inherent conflicts of interest between agents and employers . MCA was willing to pay reuse fees to performers when their TV programs were reshown, a concession that other producers refused to consider . Reagan, who for years was an MCA client and Wasserman's close friend, presided at the July 1952 meeting when SAG's governing board agreed to what were, in effect, secret terms that allowed MCA's Revue Productions to produce television programs in exchange for reuse fees. A decade later, when MCA was under investigation for possible antitrust violations , Reagan told a grand jury that he could not recall any quid pro quo between MCA and the guild. An MCA executive nevertheless remembered: "Lew always told me the waiver was Ronnie Reagan." In 1954, television's General Electric Theater hired Reagan as its host, resuscitating his career. The MCA waiver deal was, apparently, instrumental in Reagan's muchneeded new start. "I think Ronnie did more or less what he thought he should-and then he was rewarded for it, with the GE job," said the SAG executive director Jack Dales. In 1960, Reagan again helped MCA, which had purchased Paramount Studio's pre-1948 library. Reagan returned as SAG president to help negotiate a settlement by which...

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