Reaganistory


His life was an American epic---small Midwestern towns boyhood, radio sportscaster who made up his own play-by-play while reading baseball game stats off the ticker, B movie leading man, governor of California, two-term President, and a man lost for a decade in the horrific wasteland of Alzheimers. All the grief that's pouring out now should be measured against the obscurity of that decade, when his staunchest supporters failed to support the kind of research that might have improved or at least honored his last years.

It's interesting what John Kerry chose to highlight in his official statement upon Ronald Reagan's death. He began it by recounting the relationship President Reagan had with the highest ranking Democrat, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. They would fight over policy and legislation, and then retire to the Speaker's office to tell tales, and share memories of their lives. A time before the bitter partisanship we've seen since the 90s, Kerry implies.

But the Reagan-O'Neill relationship signaled the end of an era that presidents and opposite party leaders had maintained for a very long time. Reagan's administration began the demonization of "liberals" that led to this era of smashmouth politics, in which the icons of righteous Christians engage in outrageous lying as a matter of course.

Now we're in the middle of this weird week-long media memorial. President Kennedy was assassinated on a Friday and buried on the following Monday, but Reagan's funeral service won't be until this coming Friday, almost a full week after his death. The justification apparently is that he was both Governor of California and President, so there are rites prescribed for both. It all comes in the midst of a presidential campaign with very high stakes, at a perilous moment in history. So risking the appearance of disrespect, but in the interests of the decisions we must make today, we feel compelled to offset some of the media gush with memories of a very bad decade for America presided over by Reagan and his administration.

He is remembered as the Morning in America man, the godfather of conservatism. In context however, his accession in 1980 unleashed an ugly mood in this country, that denigrated the poor and the values of giving, and especially the responsibilities of democratic government that had become accepted in America, and still are in the rest of the civilized world. The Reagan 80s saw the deification of selfishness, the cultural dumbing down and elevation of the most simplistic and vulgar Positive Thinking ethic in which self-marketing replaced self-improvement and self-knowledge; the Greed is Good era of Wall Street, and the replacement of art with the Art of the Deal (yes, the first golden era of Donald Trump.) The elevation of business success to define creativity and heroism, the Masters of the Universe,quickly followed by the junk bond and other business scandals which Enron etc. recapitulated in recent years.

We’re not going to question Reagan’s beliefs, but his function was as the public relations president, a qualification that he shares with the current one. He was a Democrat and a union leader when that was the politically popular thing to be, for a not exactly first rate actor or big star in Hollywood. But then the Blacklist threatened his career future, and the rich corporations like General Electric promised much better prospects with much higher speaking fees, so after Death Valley Days he became a pro-binness conservative Republican.

There were strange quirks to him as president, like his companionable relationship with Gorbachev at the moment his administration was working hard to bankrupt the Soviet Union, even though every cab driver in Moscow seemed to know more about the sorry state of the Soviet than did the CIA and especially the defense establishment, anxious to extend its free ride with the absurdity of Star Wars.

That was one sorry legacy among many others---as long as our attention is on that era, we’d better not forget those legacies because we’re living with them now, and they are part of our present and future. Star Wars alone wasted untold billions, probably enough to pay the Iraq bill, and continues to soak up money, with not only no reason for it to be, but with absolutely no evidence that it even minimally works. It has to be one of the greatest scandals of our time—but then we have so many we seem more than capable of shrugging off.

We owe Iraq and al Qaeda in large measure to Reaganites and their wonderful work in recruiting, motivating, arming, supplying, and training terrorists, and teaching them the importance of finance, especially through the drug trade. I doubt if Iran-Contra is going to be widely mentioned this week, or the travesty of Nicaragua and central America in general. Reagan the great communicator more than once compared the armed thugs called the Contras with the American Founding Fathers.

Reaganites also began the increasingly tragic policy of privatization, which has enriched conservative Republican donors but caused untold suffering to those who can't make ends meet, go to a decent school or get health care. Our national infrastructure continues to deteriorate because Reagan and his ilksters wanted to get gubmnt off our backs. And of course his name is forever preserved in Reaganomics, which gave us the debt and deficits we had to waste an entire 8 years of a rare Democratic presidency to erase. But 8 years was apparently long enough to erase the national memory, so we got us another Republican who created more debt and deficits faster than a speeding non-silver bullet. So we can look forward to more corroding infrastructure and financial constriction, not to mention empty social security and medicare coffers, just when global warming increases disasters and diseases everyone will look to gubmnt to deal with, and that's just for starters.

We doubt we'll be around to hear it, but by the next decade there will turn out to be a good reason that two recent presidents, Reagan and Bush jr., famously retorted that they didn't care what history said about them. It's not going to be as nice as sappy anchorfolk are making now.

And what is George jr. going to say at the funeral? Too bad the affable icon and his family had to suffer through nine years of a devastating condition, but junior needs the rabid religious right vote so nix on that stem cell research, sorry, but politics trumps all.

There was a movement in Congress recently to get rid of FDR’s image on the dime and replace it with Reagan’s. No doubt it’s going to come up again now. A better idea might be to use this occasion to print a brand new denomination---not being in the class to know from personal experience, we’re not sure what the highest denomination paper bill is, but I’m sure after all these years of inflated incomes among the decreasing percentage of people who own most of the country’s wealth, there’s some market for, say, a $500,000 bill. Why not put Reagan’s picture on that one? For all his regular guy appeal (another legacy to George Jr. that George Sr. couldn’t quite pull off)Reagan remains most attractive to the supra income group. Let the people who can afford it look at his picture on their money. They're the ones who profitted from his legacy. We can mourn Reagan the man, but in remembering his presidency, we are mourning America.