I recently ran across an “obituary”
written about Ronald Reagan at the time he died. You can follow this link to the full article, but here is the essence of it:
Even
at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying
to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed
salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. I secretly wept on
the stairs the night he was elected President, because I understood
that the kind of shitheads I had to listen to in the cafeteria grew
up to become voters, and won. I spent the eight years he was in
office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone
is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and
mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone
else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as
they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his
down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you
watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for
anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed,
slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an
informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas
oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr.
Strangelove. He put a genial face on
chauvinism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about
being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our
founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His
legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,
the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of
America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the
country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor
and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the
streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the
corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the
center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between
Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and
Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies;
his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph
of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokes-models
like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he
appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American. If
there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would
contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and
the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's
Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.
The main thing I took away
from this, despite its articulate harshness toward a
particular dead person, Ronald Reagan – sometimes really good
insults are fun and have their literary place! - was that I have
been making a mistake for the last forty years in thinking that the
USA took a selfish turn somewhere in the mid 1970's. It had seemed to
me that the Reagan-Thatcher era was a turn away from social justice,
civil rights, concern with poverty and the well-being of other people
to a conscious, programmatic, greedy, unashamed, selfishness.
I think it was the very
vehemence of this obituary that made me feel that, no, it wasn't just
Reagan. It was about the country that voted for him. It now seems likely to
me that the USA did not suddenly make a deep change around 1975, plus
or minus a couple years. It just doesn't fit, because a society's
culture, like an individual's culture, is very old, I would even go
so far as to say that it's probably true that the more one thinks one
is new, independent, different, the more one is just taking for
granted the traditional assumptions, unshakably and grotesquely because
unconsciously.
The problem is old, but
what is perhaps new, if anything, is that it is now becoming more
stark than ever, with more direct discussion of it, more articulation
of the consequences and nature and meaning of it. Current,
astonishing, articulate and well-funded efforts, such as to have guns in
classrooms and in churches, or to let people who don't have money die
on the street, or to destroy public libraries and schools, sound new,
crazy, murderous, monstrous, ultimately self-destructive. But they are just the working out of the
consequences of very old assumptions.
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