100 Years of Solitude

REMEMBERING THE
GREAT PREVARICATOR 

By U. Netanya Tokef
Obituary Editor

With the usual suspects gassing on about Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday with a reverence usually reserved for true saints like Thomas Aquinas, Vince Lombardi, or Kim Kardashian, perhaps it's time to do what the Times is doing to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War: remember what really happened.

The Times's daily recapitulations make it clear that the causes of the Civil War were (1) slavery, (2) slavery, and (3) slavery, not some woolly nonsense peddled by Southern racists about states' rights or Northern aggression.  In that spirit, let's take a few thousand words [Really? – Ed.] to see how well the tale of the brave cowboy who won the Cold War, caused the sun to rise over America, and, like Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles, turned black night into day stands up to those pesky things we like to call "facts."

October 23, 1983: Mourning in America

Maybe Reagan himself had trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy, and maybe now thousands of right-wing bloviators and spineless "journalists" faithfully regur- gitating the talking points deposited into their craws have similar difficulties, but we don't.

We are told every day by conventional wisdom peddlers that, whatever his deficits of intellect or ethics, Ronald Reagan made Americans feel good about themselves, as if the greatest achievement of an American President is to serve as a guest host for Oprah Winfrey.  

Those of us alive during the Reagan Administration don't recall feeling so good about lots of things that ol' Ron peddled to a star-struck public.  We didn't feel so good about the pointless sacrifice of 241 Marines Ron sent to Lebanon because he had swallowed some crap peddled by Lebanese Christian politicians to the effect that their intramural bloodletting was really the Second Front of the Cold War.

We didn't feel so good about the atrocities perpetrated by U.S.-backed Contra rebels ginned up by Ronnie to overthrow a legitimately elected government that Ron and his neocon buddies didn't happen to like. And we felt even less good – in fact, we felt positively nauseous – when we learned that the President of the United States had broken duly enacted laws prohibiting supplying the Contras by attempting to smuggle arms to the Central American plug-uglies through the outlaw regime in Iran.

Who doesn't feel great when an American President stops to honor Nazi war criminals?

And then, so unlike the mythical cowboys of Hollywood Westerns on which Reagan modeled various of his mannerisms and photo ops who took full responsibility for their deeds, we lost our lunch when Reagan first lied about not knowing of the sordid trade with Iran and then tried to make it sound as if he was forced to take responsibility for something from a dream or an RKO B picture.

But there are so many other feel-no-good memories we have of the strangely aloof TV host turned President. Was it morning in America when Reagan laid a wreath at a German cemetery at which SS war criminals were buried to pay a debt to some hack German politician? Actually it was about 2 a.m. in America, because Ron's handlers wisely scheduled the repellent ceremony at a time when no voter could watch.

We have to admit he had a knack for making some folks feel good about themselves. When he threw raw meat to Southern racists in a speech given in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three innocent civil rights workers had been lynched within living memory, every cracker from Alexandria, Virginia to Midland, Texas felt good about their future in the Republican Party. They probably also felt pretty good about Reagan's ceaseless inveighings against "welfare queens" and "strapping bucks" on food stamps. (Don't blame Reagan; they all looked like to him, as he proved when he famously greeted his Housing Secretary with "How are things in your city, Mr. Mayor?")

Of course, if you were among the richest 1% of America, you felt great.  By the time Reagan had finished shooting holes in the federal budget, you had saved millions, and you continue to do so to this very day. Although his tax cuts were heavily tilted in favor of a rich white elite, or as Ron called them "his friends," he always referred to them as the "people's tax cuts." Just like the "People's Court" was a real court. (There's actually a more sinister association to the repeated misuse of the term "people's", but in the spirit of improving America's political discourse, we're going to follow John Boehner's example: we're going to hold our tongues and cry, but unlike John, not for America's richest taxpayers or health insurance companies.)

We're told that Reagan transformed America's political landscape. Well, he sure tried. Remember how he proposed cutting Medicare, against which he had fought for years, comparing it to "socialism" and "tyranny?" Remember how far he got? No wonder no one hurls those tired epithets at contemporary efforts to provide health care for all regardless of income.

What he really did was to spark the collapse of political responsibility in American politics. Before Reagan, Democrats wanted to increase spending and raise taxes. Republicans wanted to cut spending and taxes and balance the budget.

To Reagan, both positions, involving as they did dreary things like sacrifice, were for losers. He realized that he could cut taxes, finance the resulting deficit through borrowing, and then wait for someone else to gut spending on human needs. We're still waiting.

Reagan always like to pick fights he could win, whether against a bunch of overreaching air traffic controllers or a platoon of grandiose rabble-rousers on a Caribbean island. Before arriving in Washington, he had achieved political success by resolutely standing up to a bunch of hairy college students then known as "hippies."

How he and his fellow travelers railed against what they saw as the self-indulgent irresponsible hedonism of those hairy radicals!  And yet, both in his surprisingly sordid personal life and his decisions as President, he consistently indulged his political base without thinking about the effect of his actions on the next generation who would pay the bill for the debt issued to finance tax cuts for his fellow plutocrats.

He may not have been proud of the epithet, and after his Alzheimer's effloresced during his second term, he might not even have remembered the word, but in his irresponsible and feckless politics, he proved himself to be America's oldest, and, we admit, best-groomed, hippie.

Happy Birthday!