Poring over the morning news I ran across a news entry that spoke about Reagan’s 100th Birthday. Much like how a very strong odor can key on a memory and bring a flood of remembered things back into your mind, so did this. I grew up with Ronald Reagan as President. I remember the Cold War with the USSR and I remember “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!” speech that Ronald Reagan gave.
This man has accumulated a halo around him that places him just beneath the Holy Trinity itself for Christian conservatives. The memory of this man and his presidency bring many overheard arguments between my parents as I started to learn that when two people are dedicated to polar opposites, that the law of attraction is mostly relevant for magnets. I don’t think anyone really regards the man, Ronald Reagan any longer. Death has transformed him from a person to a canvas, it has sucked out his 3rd dimension and converted him into a handy surface that anyone can use to their heart’s content. The man is dead, how could he complain at how his memory is treated?
Conservatives pray to him. They read what he wrote, what he said, and what he stood for as slightly less important than the New Testament in the Bible, but way more important than anything else. His political life has been transformed into a conservative ideal, and if you fashion a hand grenade of Reagan’ness and pull the pin and lob it into a GOP gathering they all will turn to the light and get very quiet and pray to the Reagan-y-Explody-Goodness. The fascination they have borders on the fanatical, there are terms for what they are afflicted with – you could call it hero-worship, enthrallment to the cult of personality, a whole host of things. For a segment of our political spectrum Ronald Reagan is the second coming of Jesus Christ. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to force the hand of the church and have him sainted.
Now, for the Liberals, Ronald Reagan is something just as precious, but completely opposite. He’s a flame-eyed monster bent on world domination and more shifty criminal acts than you can shake a stick at. Liberals remember the Contras and Sandinistas, all the underhanded dirty tricks and the policies that brought anger and rage. Death brought Reagan to a canvas and Liberals painted that canvas with their impression of the man, casting him not in a saintly light, but one of monstrousness and epic Mordor-class evil. For the conservatives savior, he’s the Liberals bane.
If ever you want a handy guide to political polarity, simply drop Reagan’s name and watch the response. If you see a halo, wistful eyes, and te-deum’s forming then you have yourself a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. If however you notice some frothing, restlessness, agitation, and perhaps the construction of effigies that are set on fire, then you are facing a liberal.
I personally celebrate the fact that he’s very much dead and can’t form any new political opinions or wield any political power. It’s not that I sought his death, that I prayed for his untimely demise, but I did thank the Light when he did die. This is in stark contrast to the oedipal-obsessed spawn of Reagan’s Vice President. For that son-of-a-bitch (the term is apt) I will hold a very large party and feast upon his death, celebrating the worlds freedom from that unbearable monster. Reagan is just as much a monster, but his corpse in the ground tempers my anger into a kind of wistful fuzzy disgust.
So, for the 100th Anniversary of Reagan’s Birth, I mark it with this blog post, I bite my thumb and I spit on the ground. And that’s all I’m giving it.
