RONALD REAGAN
adrien rain burke
I got over hating Reagan years ago. Once he left office, and his power in the world was gone, he ceased to interest me, although he was apparently the first of our Puppet Prexies. He became a bumbling shell of a man, helpless to carry out whatever malice still lived, unfulfilled, in his heart. He has been succeeded by others as bad or worse.. I don't even hate him for the traffic jams his corpse, in its posthumous travels, caused in my own San Fernando Valley.
But I am angered by the lachrymose tributes to his skill as a "communicator," his triumphs in bringing "freedom" to so many, and his "optimism." Oh he read his lines well enough, but most of what he communicated was nonsense – or lies, which in the lingo of the day equaled "plausible deniability." And I have my doubts about his overall score as a "liberator," too. That leaves optimism, and I can't argue with that.
When it came to the slaughter of innocents in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, you gotta hand it to The Gipper. 50,000 dead in Nicaragua. Another 50,000 Indians in Guatemala. Whole villages burned alive in El Salvador. Day care centers and medical clinics shot up by Contras (the drug-dealing, baby-killing equivalents of our founding fathers) determined that no Sandinista scheme for the betterment of the poor should succeed. Nuns raped; priests murdered, torture accepted as never before. He presided over all that – he must have known! – and came up smiling.
When he became governor of California, my mother was watching the swearing-in ceremony with me, and she pointed at the screen, "look at his mouth," she said, "there is a mean man." And I never saw a shred of evidence to prove her wrong. "One may smile, and smile, and be a villain," Shakespeare wrote. Reagan was the old granddad everybody likes, or the one about whom it is said, "he was such a nice, quiet old man." AFTER all the shallow graves have been discovered in his backyard or basement. The trouble is, the bodies were right in front of us all the time: they just didn't matter, because Reagan made us all feel so GOOD about being Americans.
I've been cursed all my life with an inability to make the necessary patriotic distinctions between US – those who deserve to live, who deserve the protection of our lives and freedoms – and THEM – those Indians, and poor people, and brown people, nonAmericans or UNAmericans, whose lives don't matter at all in a scheme of things like Reagan's – or the Bush family's, for that matter. So while he sermonized the world with pious talk about liberty, I could not be distracted from the Reign of Terror Reagan visited on the poor of Central America.
Alzheimer's is said to be a cruel disease, but sometimes it must be a mercy to forget. A conscience would be a fearful burden after such a life, and, if you were so encumbered, Alzheimer's would be a kindness. After a while, I suppose, Reagan forgot everything. Judging by the crowds lined up to cry over the remains of the murderous old granddad, so did we.
