Seneca Falls
The first headline I can remember reading - it was in the Boston Globe - was Johnson Orders Bombing Halt. I had only learned to read a few years earlier, while I competed with intensity with my sister for retrieving the paper from the driveway It never occurred to me to read it. The tiny size of the print was a code that it belonged to the world of adults, the sentences small beaded chains of the familar linked to the incomprehensible.
This headline, because it was in such large type - inches high - I read. The words in their black solidity on the page tumbled questions to their base. We've been bombing someone? The Vietnamese? This is what it is that presidents do then (I'd had heard of the President, knew his name, and his face): they bomb and not bomb. This is what newspapers do, they tell us of these things. Beyond that one page of comics in the back and the occasional picture of Carl Yaztremski toward the back, I never understood why newspapers had so many pages. Now it began to settle on me that adults had things to think about.
I was thinking about that Friday while I was watching the funeral proceeding for President Reagan, unfolding in real time in front of me. I had started the week by watching a PBS documentary on the life of Ronald Reagan, from the American Experience Series. Along about the third hour of that it also seemed to be unfolding in real time, but I watched it. And I noted all the testimonials, specials, special sections in the print media, the solemn pronouncements on our national need to mourn. Against this thickening of the bramble patch growing around the man through which one would have to pass to see the truly praiseworthy and blameworthy about the man.
against this I listen to his children speak about him, those for whom he was the greatest American Ron Jr., particularly cautioning against those who wear their faiths more than their hearts on their sleeves.
I didn't vote for him, either time I had the chance, it was during his presidency that I came to understand that I was a democrat. I remember those days, I don't need Tom DeLay or Dick Cheney to get up and tell me all about it. This aspect of the week long deification of Ronald Reagan was the hardest part to put up with. The wide and sweeping claims made in his name. On Monday the camera eye fell on a man who told it that he was in the military when Reagan came into office - and his pay doubled! So was I, and it didn't. That was just the start the claims. He won the cold war, single-handledly, crushing the (evil) Soviet empire. He restored our lost national confidence, ending our 'malaise', Which we knew about because President Carter explained it to us on TV. (I didn't need tv back then, I had T Rex). He also restored the American economy to its capitalist (free market) origins, ending socalist regulation of business. Brought businesses out from under the tyranny of unions. Ended inflation, cut taxes, would have balanced the budget too - if it weren't for all those "welfare queens and their cadillacs. In the middle of all this carefully planned Ceremony it struck me that someone was deliberately working to lock in the myth of Ronnie as the greatest American, confronting the greatest evil. I grew up in a time that took as a given that Facism and the Nazi's marked the apogee of mass culture industrial despostism, that desert flower of the modernism.
Every since Reagan took office I have been treated to the steady revising of the data. A slow equivilizing - even surpassing of facism by Stalinism as the first enemy of freedom. The one road to serfdom. the evil empire. The only true totalitatarianism, as opposed to occaisionally necessary authoritarianism. That the Thousand year Reich collapsed in the pit of its own ashes in only twelve years after setting half the world on fire escapes this crowd. Maybe if Stalin had been defeated and all of eastern europe and central asia had spent the last half century under good Ayran management. But it could never have. It is an important point that Nazism had far more twisted pathelogic energy than could every have allowed it to become the sad oppressive dysfunctional distopia that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe became. Facism was and will ever remain the more purely and destructively evil.
The realities, such that I remember, were that Ronald Reagan was fundamentally decent honest man, Sometimes narrow minded, cursery, and inflexible. And lucky! Luckier than his tractors, and detractors seem willing to admit. Many of his iniatives could have played out very differently with very different results with no disturbance to the universe's sense of inevitability.
Mikhail Gorbachov had at least a good of sense of the possibilities of the times as Reagan. More to gain for his own people, but also more lose for having that sense. Throughout this time, given the information flowing about through glasnost and peristroika initiatives I've always felt the Eastern nascent european green movements had a lot to do with break up of the Soviet systems of governance. I think the pollution problems and lack of any local input into industrial decision processes were the most real and concrete facts to the populations of Eastern Europe. Even more than the lack of endless consumer paradise, this is what told them their system was hollow and unresponsive. These things are what made democracy seem necessary and desirable.
Whether one believes in detante or star war missile shields. Co-operation or confrontation with the Soviet . There was always something about Reagan's foreign policy which seemed to seize on a problem perhaps already on the way to solving itself. Declaring an over arching centrality to it, against even to the exclusion of all other elements aspects, and particulars of the human condition as the one named situation mutates into something else, applaud victory and move on.
Today Reagan's succesors and chorus still congratulate themselves on the epoch ending fall of Berlin wall, Churchill's Iron Curtain, the United Soviet Socialist Republic. They jealously and churlishly guard the warm glow of their own adulation: Reagan Revisionism (Post, June 11, 2004) Charles Krauthammer Even as they seem blind to Russias current slow restoration to a police state. Or is it that it's plays at religious freedom, and market economies make it integrating and good enough. One of us! Perhaps, if we could only be more like them.
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