The Screeds of the Reagan Haters

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCXVIII

What a disappointment! Harley Sorensen is on sabbatical.

Oh, well. Mark Morford does not disappoint. Nor do others who gleefully (if only sometimes obliviously) proclaim how out of touch they are with America and Americans.

I arrange these in generally increasing order of offensiveness — though I must admit that such things are difficult to gauge, and I may have put one or another in the wrong place. You may gather quite a bit merely from observing that the likes of Robert Scheer is up first.

Don't miss the one who denies Reagan ended the Cold War by giving the credit instead to a state-department flunky who wrote a paper a few decades ago. (I'm not making this up.) And don't miss the college student who begins two consecutive paragraphs with these two sentences: "The anti-Christ is dead.... I do not intend to dishonor the man...." (Honest, I'm not making this up.) And don't miss the one who cites as evidence of Reagan's insincerity the "testimony" of individuals confined to institutions because of extreme mental problems. (I mean it: I am not making this up.) And don't miss the one who thinks that Reagan "murdered" sodomites because Reagan thought that other people might think his son (Ron Reagan) was a sodomite. (I swear: I am not making this up.) And, don't miss the concluding piece: it really helps, despite its posturing, to put the others into some perspective.

BTW, do not for a moment accept any assertion of fact from these left-wing loonies without reams of iron-clad corroborating evidence.

And believe you me, Faithful Reader, some (at the least) of these bitter losers don't just hate Ronald Wilson Reagan. They hate America and Americans. Reagan was/is merely the personal emblem of what they hate in our country and our nation.

First, Robert Scheer.

I liked Ronald Reagan, despite the huge divide between us politically. Reagan was a charming old pro who gave me hours of his time in a series of interviews beginning in 1966 when he was running for governor, simply because he enjoyed the give and take. In fact, I often found myself defending the Gipper whenever I was confronted with an East Coast pundit determined to denigrate anyone, particularly actors, from my adopted state. Yet, looking back at his record, I am appalled that I warmed to the man as much as I did.

The fact is that Reagan abandoned the Roosevelt New Deal — which he admitted had saved his family during the Great Depression — in favor of a belief in the efficacy of massive corporate welfare inculcated in him by his paymasters at Warner Bros., General Electric and the conservative lecture circuit. Though Reagan the man was hardly mean-spirited, Reagan the politician betrayed the social programs and trade unionism he once believed in so fiercely.

Let's start with his leadership of California, where he launched attacks on the state's once- incomparable public universities and devastated its mental health system. Foreshadowing future trumped-up invasions of tiny Grenada and Nicaragua, he sent thousands of National Guardsmen to tear-gas Berkeley.

It also became increasingly clear that although the man wasn't unintelligent, his ability to mingle truth with fantasy was frightening. At different times, Reagan — who infamously said that "facts are stupid things" — falsely claimed to have ended poverty in Los Angeles; implied he was personally involved in the liberation of Europe's concentration camps; argued that trees cause most pollution; said that the Hollywood blacklist, to which he contributed names, never existed; described as "freedom fighters" the Contra thugs and the religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan who would later become Al Qaeda; and claimed that fighting a "limited" nuclear war was not an insane idea.

But to see him as only a bumpkin — as some did — was to very much underestimate him. Like Nixon, the Teflon president was a survivor who'd come up the hard way, and many journalists and politicians who didn't understand that invariably were surprised by his resiliency and savvy. Although he generally was compliant with his handlers, whenever the campaign pros or rigid ideologues got in the way of his or Nancy's instincts, they were summarily discarded.

Even when his ideas were silly, his intentions often seemed good. For example, one of his dumbest and costliest pet projects, the "Star Wars" missile defense program, which he first announced when I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1980, was touted by Reagan as a peace offering to the Soviets.

And his legendary ability to effectively project an upbeat, confident worldview managed to obscure many of the negative consequences of his policies. For example, he made the terrible mistake of willfully ignoring the burgeoning AIDS epidemic at a time when action could have saved millions. Unlike many conservatives, however, he was not driven by homophobia. Instead, Reagan allowed AIDS to spread for the same reason he pointedly savaged programs to help the poor: He was genuinely convinced that government programs exacerbated problems — unless they catered to the needs of the businessmen he had come to revere.

In the White House, he ran up more debt than any earlier president — primarily to serve the requests of what Republican President Eisenhower had, with alarm, termed the "military-industrial complex." (George W. Bush has broken that record.)

Apologists for this waste argue that throwing money at the defense industry broke the back of the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. But the Soviet Union was already broken, as Mikhail S. Gorbachev acknowledged quite freely when he came to power in the 1980s. Rather, what Reagan does deserve considerable credit for is ignoring the dire warnings of the hawks and responding enthusiastically to Gorbachev in their historic Reykjavík summit, where the two leaders called for a nuclear-free world.

Let it be remembered, then, that in the closing scene of his presidency Reagan embraced the peacemakers, rejecting the cheerleaders of Armageddon and was then loudly castigated by the very neoconservatives — most vociferously Richard Perle — who have claimed the Reagan mantle for the post-Cold War militarism of the current administration.

Second, Jimmy Breslin (ellipses in original).

I offered my small prayer for Ronald Reagan when he was shot by this Hinckley. I said another prayer for him when I read this graceful note that he issued about his Alzheimer's.

Having said this, I now strongly endorse a suitable memorial for him.

Ronald Reagan belongs on a $3-bill.

You are supposed to honor and respect the dead. But you also must respect the truth, and live for the living - and this funeral has gone on for almost a week. I am in a car and I hear the radio announcer, who is supposed to be telling you news, whisper:

"The color guard quietly leaves the casket viewing area and marches with the colors towards the two hearses; they are taking no chances and have a backup ... "

I was waiting for him, or somebody next to him, to let out a sob.

For the funeral of Ronald Reagan, they took the body from Beverly Hills to Simi Valley, the white Los Angeles suburb, where it stayed for a day and a half or so then they drove it in one of these two hearses to the airport and flew it to Washington and then they had a march and afterwards put the casket into the Capitol for crowds to pass by and now there was to be another march and a religous service and then a drive to the airport, where the casket will be shuttled back to the airport south of Los Angeles and in a hearse to the final ceremony at his library on Friday. That is quite a funeral. They buried George Washingon in half the time.

You keep thinking of Harry Truman, whose code was, "Do not impose." He left an order that there were to be no eulogies at his funeral.

This man Reagan was 93 years old and out of it with Alzheimer's for many years and I don't see how anybody can summon grief. They proclaimed it a deep religious ceremony. Which it is not. His whole weeklong funeral is cheap, utterly distasteful American publicity.

The great American news industry, the Pekinese of the Press with so much room and time and nothing to say, compared Reagan to Lincoln and Hamilton, they really did. This is like claiming that the maintenance man wrote the Bill of Rights. And almost all the reporters agreed that Reagan was the man who brought down Russia in the Cold War.

Just saying this is absolutely sinful. The Cold War was won by a long memo written by George Kennan, who worked in the State Department and sent the memo by telegram about the need for a "Policy of Containment" on Russia. Kennan said the contradictions in their system would ruin them. Keep them where they are and they will tear themselves apart. We followed Kennan's policy for over 40 years. The Soviets made it worse on themselves by building a wall in East Berlin. When they had to tear it down and give up their system, Kennan was in Princeton and he sat down to dinner.

I thought that children were taught this. Instead, all week, reporters told us that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Beautiful.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. He was as real as the line he used to keep his fame alive. "Win one for the Gipper."

The line was complete Hollywood, down to agents who fought over it.

In 1938, a radio show, "Cavalcade of America," had a segment about coach Knute Rockne of Notre Dame and his star back, George Gipp, who was dying of pneumonia and supposedly said to Rockne, "Someday, when the team's up against it, the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they've got! Win one for the Gipper."

Warner Brothers bought the radio segment and assigned screen writer Robert Buckner to put the "Win one" line into his otherwise original screenplay of "Knute Rockne All American."

Pat O'Brien was Rockne and Reagan was George Gipp. Reagan delivered "Win one for the Gipper" extremely well; he was a lot better actor than he was supposed to be.

When the writers of the radio show saw the movie, they realized that this guy was getting their best line. "Win one ... "

"Where is ours?" they asked. Warner Brothers made a quick settlement and the film was released with Reagan's famous speech.

But for a television release, the line was taken out of the film because Warner didn't want to pay any more. It is back in the video, my friend Harry Haun notes in his book, "The Cinematic Century."

In government, he was as real as his trademark line. He was a callous man with a smile who cut taxes in 1981 and left this city and state without funds for such things as help for dependent children. He proudly hurt the boroughs of this city more than anyone before or after him. If you live in Brooklyn, the record shows that Ronald Reagan hated children. The city and state had to raise taxes to make up for money lost because of Reagan's great conservative movement. Reagan then raised taxes six times. He walked off, leaving us an enormous deficit but with a smile on his face that even the Gipper's fakery couldn't help us with.

Third, Christopher Hitchens.

Not long ago, I was invited to be the specter at the feast during "Ronald Reagan Appreciation Week" at Wabash College in Indiana. One of my opponents was Dinesh D'Souza: He wasn't the only one who maintained that Reagan had been historically vindicated by the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Some of us on the left had also been very glad indeed to see the end of the Russian empire and the Cold War. But nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles — a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife — the one that you remember — because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

However, there came a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington and when the Marriott Hotel — host of the summit press conferences — turned its restaurant into the "Glasnost Cafe." On the sidewalk, LaRouche supporters wearing Reagan masks paraded with umbrellas, in mimicry of Neville Chamberlain. I huddled from dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be real. Many of those friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.

Fourth, Tom Carson.

He should have died alone — a long, long time ago. But oh, no, not him: outliving his century by four years, his presidency by 16, and his own mind by a decade, Hollywood legend Ronald Reagan was 93 when he went to rejoin his makers — Thomas Jefferson, Louis B. Mayer, Lew Wasserman, and Barry Goldwater, in that order — on Saturday. A noted fantasist, Reagan is perhaps best remembered for the eight years he spent believing he ruled an entirely fictional United States. To the old trouper's delight, this was a delusion shared by most of his compatriots, which is why his imaginary nation still subsumes ours to this day.

At his funeral, there will no doubt be buckets of false poetry, grievously misrepresenting the man — yes, even if Peggy Noonan shows up, doing her best to be Walt Whitman to his Abe: "When Star Wars Last in Gorbachev's Dooryard Bloom'd." Real poetry is something else again, and you'd be horribly mistaken to think the following suggestion is sarcastic. Please understand I love the place; my proposal is made in a sincere spirit of tribute to an enemy. I think that Reagan, like no other American, deserves the honor of being the first person ever embalmed at Disneyland.

In the true capital of his America, one-upping Lenin in death as he did in life, he could lie in a glass box before Sleeping Beauty's castle — midway between Frontierland and Tomorrowland, right where Main Street debouches onto Carnation™ Plaza. (Oh, you bet: I know my way around Walt's kingdom, and why don't you? Are you some kind of commie?) Picture his sleep. Can Napoléon at the Invalides top this? A hundred years from now, that famously hawk-nosed profile is illuminated by the Electric Parade. Tomorrow's children gaze in awe as Tinkerbell slides down to kiss it, understanding that here lies the man who saved them from the rest of the world's great, killing Something-or-Other: doubt.

Ronald Reagan is the man who destroyed America's sense of reality — a paltry target, all in all, given our predilections. It only took an actor: the real successor to John Wilkes Booth. In our bones, we had always been this sort of bullsh*t-craving country anyhow, founded on abstractions: not land (somebody else's), not people (Red Rover, Red Rover, send Emma Lazarus right over), not even shared history (nostalgia isn't the same thing, and try pulling that Civil War Shinola anywhere west of the Rio Grande). Just monumental words and wordy monuments, with two convenient oceans between them and circumstance; from Nat Turner's status as three-fifths of a man — even though we ended up hanging all of him — to Reagan's child Lynndie England (b. 1983, the year we invaded Grenada and lost 241 Marines in Lebanon), any shortfall could be blamed on something lost in translation. But it was Reagan, whose most profound Freudian slip was the immortal "Facts are stupid things," who beguiled us into living in the theme park full-time, and so much for the Declaration of Independence's prattle about "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" — actually the only time we ever expressed much concern for those. Since his 1980 opponent, Jimmy Carter, was about the sorriest embodiment of the reality principle imaginable — Three's Company's Mr. Roper on the world-historical stage — facts didn't have a prayer.

Starting with the way he broke the air-traffic controllers' strike in 1981, an augury of things to come from which the labor movement never recovered, Reagan certainly demolished the American left — what passes for the left, anyway. Since repeating "what passes for the left" strikes me as tiresome, I'll abbreviate it: WPFL. As you may recall, under veteran station manager Jesse Jackson, WPFL switched to an oldies format soon after the Great Communicator took office, and has remained too much on the defensive to come up with a new songlist since. Instead, in one of the great through-the-looking-glass paradoxes of Reaganism, "progressives" have become, in practical terms, reactionaries — cluckingly trying to protect this or that milestone (equal opportunity, Roe v. Wade), against a right wing that's singing "If I Had a Hammer — Oh, Wait: I Do." Meanwhile, so-called conservatives have been on a quarter-century radical spree, zestily pursuing their own version of "If it feels good, do it." From inside-trader Michael Milken to Oliver "What Constitution?" North, the worst disgrace to a Marine Corps uniform since Lee Harvey Oswald hung his up, to describe the Reagan era as any sort of rebuke to permissiveness is pure folly.

Even so, what most WPFL subscribers probably remain too hidebound to see — much less acknowledge — is that, as a cultural construct, Reaganism had beauty. Even if you knew better, it was seductive. The best description, or possibly just evidence, I know is the oddly forgotten Talking Heads song "Road to Nowhere," from 1985's Americana-flavored Little Creatures. A hymn that evolves into a march tune and then a full-on cattle drive, complete with "Hah!"s and get-along-little-doggie percussion, it's one of David Byrne's most insinuatingly phrased preacher rips, with imagery swiped straight from the Gipper himself: "There's a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it's all right." Even as the odyssey the listener is being asked to sign up for turns flagrantly nuts — "Maybe you wonder where you are/I don't care" — the song's eerily dissociated exuberance inveigles you; you still want to join. If it's an anti-Reagan song at all — and with Byrne, who ever knows? — it's anti-Reagan in the same sense that "Heroin" is anti-shooting up.

It helped that, just like a play, nearly all the worst stuff happened discreetly offstage, as far as most of the American public was concerned — like the thousands who died of AIDS on his watch or the 20,000 casualties in the Nicaraguan civil war Reagan promoted, illegally, when Congress tried to thwart him. I can still remember my patriotic thrill when he pronounced the thuggish Contras "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers"; so far as I know, George Washington never went in for mortaring hospitals, but that may only be because he didn't have mortars.

Sure, the Iran-Contra scandal was a worse threat to American democracy than Watergate — short-circuiting our whole system of government, as opposed to diddling an election that was a lock anyway. But nobody was about to impeach smiling Ron over it, partly because nobody really understood how it worked. Something people did understand, but noticeably couldn't get outraged about — for many go-getting American psychos, it was part of the turn-on — was the callousness that the Reagan administration's social Darwinism urged all good citizens to see as a virtue; even allowing that Democratic social programs hadn't fixed the inner cities' problems, why it was either more humane or more sensible to let them rot was never explained. But after all, if urban African Americans wanted to escape gangs, poverty, and despair, there was always the army.

At the core of the Reagan legend is the mantra that his presidency made America feel good about itself again — an interesting claim for Republicans to make, since it sounds like just the sort of self-esteem therapy they snort at when say, first-graders are the beneficiaries. Not entirely inappropriately, the picture it conjures up is of a commander in chief playing Julie Andrews as the governess in The Sound of Music: "You've brought music back into the house, Ron." In individual cases, bucking up a patient's spirits when his or her material situation isn't improving — or is, in fact, deteriorating, as ours was from infrastructure to multitrillion-dollar deficitis to yawning disparities between rich and poor — is usually accomplished with drugs; Reagan was one. In a wonderful Herblock cartoon from 1986, a headline reporting that the U.S. has just become the world's leading debtor nation is greeted by hordes of celebrating Americans all holding up proud forefingers: "We're number one!"

Mystique he undeniably had. No other chief executive has been so at ease with his own preposterousness, baffling everyone who ever tried to analyze him. The formidable Garry Wills wrestled the enigma in Reagan's America: Innocents at Home, and emerged never having laid a glove on the man; indeed, Wills has never been the same since. Nixon is comprehensible; Reagan is not. He was affable but remote, folksy but not human, so completely the actor that his fraudulence was his integrity; unlike poor Nixon, who couldn't ask for the time without raising the suspicion that he meant to steal your watch, Reagan was at his most convincing and disarmingly sincere when he was spouting transparent balderdash. Up to a point, anyhow — in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells a remarkable story about watching a presidential speech in a roomful of people with severe aphasia, a condition that impairs or destroys understanding of verbal content but leaves its victims preternaturally alert to the authenticity of facial expressions, mannerisms, and tone. Every solemn, ringingly earnest sentence out of Reagan's mouth had the patients rolling on the floor laughing.

Of course, it's possible that Sacks could have revisited the lounge a decade later and witnessed an identical reaction to a Clinton speech. But Reagan's elusiveness unnerved even admirers. Trying to pin down her ex-boss's disconcerting effect in What I Saw at the Revolution, his adoring speechwriter Noonan came up with a distinctly creepy comparison — to the Gentleman Caller in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, all bland good will and upbeat talk that somehow add up to unfeeling hogwash. Then again, Noonan has more than a little Blanche DuBois in her, which explains why her later encomiums to her great captain have gotten as hysterical as Blanche sending S.O.S. telegrams to Mr. Shep Huntleigh — and getting an answer, even though he's imaginary.

If Blanche Noonan ever worries about the posthumous rep of the man who mistook his country for a hat, though, she needn't. Overseen by Grover Norquist, the Reagan Legacy Project has had all this well in hand for years. Besides working to stick Reagan's name on as many buildings, streets, ships, and mountains as possible, the organization's goals include carving his face on Mount Rushmore and putting his face on the dime. Even George Will huffed at "trying to plaster Reagan's name all over the country the way Lenin was plastered over Eastern Europe, Mao over China and Saddam Hussein all over Iraq." Norquist's basically Stalinist propaganda technique — enough memorials, and it could take a century to unconvince future generations that this was a great man — is sure some way to honor the most famous anti-Communist of all time. But to be fair, Reagan only objected to the "Workers of the world, unite" part, not the cult of personality.

No doubt, it will work, too. I lived in Hollywood in the '80s, and back then, the legend was that Reagan's star needed the most upkeep on the Walk of Fame: It was constantly being defaced by vomit and urine. (Even or especially in Hollywood, it's possible to feel far from Disneyland.) But it's hard to pee on Mount Rushmore; you'll only end up wetting your own face. So watch it, kids. Static crackle, signal fainter: This is WPFL, signing off. If you ask me, the best that can be said for Ronald Reagan is that, if George W. Bush gets re-elected, we may yet end up missing him.

Fifth, Brandon Niemeyer.

The anti-Christ is dead. That was my initial reaction Saturday afternoon at a Cincinnati hotel bar to the news of former President Ronald Reagan's death. I know it's an insensitive sort of statement to the news of a death of someone grandly touted as one of America's "greatest presidents." Frankly, though, he is one of the worst presidents we've had.

I do not intend to dishonor the man, but I'm tired of the rose-colored glasses worn by many when examining Reagan and his presidency.

From his "loveable" gaffs (once saying that 80 percent of air pollution comes from natural vegetation) to his more sinister efforts to undermine Social Security and other programs, Reagan screwed over the American people.

For many other Americans, myself included, Reagan's presidency represents a dark period of American history. Savings and loan scandals, national debt skyrocketing and slashing economic safety nets all taint the Reagan years.

All this on top of his wife's recommendations via Joan Quigley, a psychic who would go so far as giving schedule recommendations. Yes, they consulted a psychic about national policy.

Reagan and members of his administration broke the law by selling weapons to Iran to fund the contras, who had been waging a brutal guerrilla war against the popularly elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Despite reports of death squads by right-wing militia and the Boland amendments forbidding the actions, Reagan (via Oliver North, John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane) sold the weapons to Iran.

Reagan's economic policies nearly destroyed the security of the American economic system. Reagan, during his years as president, refused to pass new minimum wage laws to counter the decreasing value of worker's take-home pay, falling 27 percent in its value during his tenure.

Using the theory of what is now coined "Reaganomics," he cut taxes - mostly for large businesses and the upper class - in the hopes of increasing economic growth. Through this growth, the American people would see the benefits, and federal revenue would also increase to cover the tax cuts and increased spending.

Unfortunately, this has yet to work out for us. After 20 years, most Americans are worse off than before Reagan.

Reagan also attempted to undermine the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade in 1981 by endorsing a Human Life Amendment. The amendment, which failed, would not only have banned abortion but also gone so far as to ban some forms of birth control.

Reagan also opposed Title IX, a law that fought against sexual discrimination in schools receiving federal funding. In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), the Supreme Court ruled that Title IX was only applicable to the specific program receiving the funding. Four years later, Congress fully restored the bill.

The Gipper waged campaigns deeply rooted in racist rhetoric - "black welfare queens" - to attract white voters to his campaign. By using "state's rights" in his 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered 16 years before, Reagan was deliberately using racially charged shibboleth to connect to his audience.

While such a phrase today is relatively ambiguous, 24 years ago, people knew its implication regarding race, especially in Mississippi.

Reagan also attempted to secure a tax exemption for Bob Jones University in South Carolina. The university was not granted exemption status because of its segregationist policies.

Bonzo's bedtime buddy also claimed the 1965 Voting Rights Act was "humiliating to the South." Funny how a law that allowed black people in the South to have a political voice was "humiliating," while keeping them from voting was good.

Women, blue-collar workers and minorities suffered during the Reagan years and the neo-conservative movement that followed.

Sixth, Mark Morford.

Let's get this straight. Ronnie Reagan allowed AIDS to flourish for years after it was discovered and did next to nothing to stem its virulent, lethal tide, and wouldn't even utter the word until the end of his term, when it was too late.

Ronnie Reagan denied the existence of the nation's homeless problem that he largely created, and then blamed the problem on not enough people caring to get out there and get a job as he meanwhile slashed civil services and assistance for the poor.

Ronnie Reagan pillaged the U.S. Treasury and ballooned the deficit more than 100 percent during his term. He gave the wealthy enormous tax breaks and gouged the living crap out of health care and social services and increased defense spending so much you'd think America was on the verge of being attacked by giant marauding alien centipedes.

Get that man's face on the dime!

History credits Reagan with ending the Cold War and putting the final nail in the already-collapsing Soviet coffin. Which he did, sort of, but not really, mostly via a massive, budget-reaming arms buildup and via strong-arming the world and launching Star Wars and by playing nice with all manner of dictators and then surprising everyone by siding with Gorbachev on disarmament.

All while selling some slick, bloated version of an uber-patriotic, thick-necked, sanitized America to a dazzled populace who were utterly hypnotized by the man's silky-smooth ability to make toxic policy sound like Disneyland.

Let's get this straight: Ronnie Reagan should have been impeached for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, for launching an illegal war on Nicaragua, for applauding genocide in Guatemala and death squads in El Salvador. Ronnie Reagan worked tirelessly to roll back abortion rights, affirmative action and civil rights and was instrumental in diminishing the voice and strength of the U.N. Ronnie Reagan opposed stem-cell research, which could have helped end the horrible suffering of the last decade of his own life.

Get that man's face on the 20-dollar bill!

Let us not forget: Ronnie Reagan's secretary of the interior, James Watt, was indicted on more than 40 felony counts for leveraging his connections at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help his cronies seek federal funds for housing projects. Nothing like a little prison time for one of your key Cabinet members to make your administration really shine.

As Tim Noah of Slate points out, Saddam's now-famous gassing of the Kurds, the horrific event that BushCo never ceases to point to as really really bad, occurred on Reagan's watch. And, in 1984, when Reagan's hawks received their first reports that Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare (using chemicals sold to him, in part, by the United States), they chose to shake hands with Saddam and ignore it.

Give that man's fluffy head a spot on Mount Rushmore!

Reagan the great government shrinker? Reagan the great decreaser of budget spending? Whatever. Truth is, spending actually increased by one-fourth, even factoring out inflation, during his term. Know who reversed that? Who actually decreased spending as an overall percentage of GNP and reduced the size of government during his term? Bill "Big Government" Clinton, that's who. Whatta jerk.

Can we forget the lovely winking deal Reagan made with the Ayatollah Khomeini to hang on to those 52 American hostages in Iran till after the 1980 election in order to make Jimmy Carter look small and weak? Shall we remember how Reagan took full credit for their release, when he had almost nothing to do with it? True American hero, that Gipper.

Ronnie Reagan tried to tell poor people that ketchup was a vegetable.

Ronnie Reagan was largely detested by his own children and wasn't exactly highly respected for his intellect by his own Cabinet, and his general vagueness and lack of nuanced understanding of how government works — not to mention how to pronounce the names of foreign leaders and countries — is matched only by the current least articulate least intelligent least educated least attuned least globally respected man who now stumbles though the Oval Office with a smirky Texas pseudo-swagger.

Reagan could be famously snarling, pinched, mean. As California governor, he fully cooperated with the CIA to investigate all those nasty commie uprisings in the UC system, ended the career of then-UC President Clark Kerr and famously warned student protesters, "If there has to be a bloodbath, then let's get it over with." What a sweetie. Is it too much to call Reagan "a cruel and stupid lizard" and "dumb as a stump," as Christopher Hitchins writes? You be the judge.

Ronnie Reagan deregulated major industry and essentially loosed corporate America upon an unsuspecting populace, including the savings-and-loan companies, all while opening the national treasury for his wealthy pals to loot. He promised a crackdown on out-of-control deficit spending while working furiously to double the national debt. "Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter," oozed a very proud Dick Cheney, sneeringly.

But let's be fair. Let's look on Ronnie's good side, the legacy, the reason tens of thousands are mourning the Gipper's passing and why an aging boomer nation is still held rapt by this most beguiling and masterful of proto-American Hollywood salesmen.

Reagan was, as widely noted, a pragmatist. He was a seductive charmer. Gracious. He stood by his warped ideals and admitted his mistakes and followed through on many of his promises, even if those promises mutilated progressive ideas and stomped on the environment and gave piles of money to the wealthy, all while sucker-punching the poor and the working class and promising them nice shiny pennies and a big heap of false hope if they'd just shut the hell up.

Which is why, I presume, there are any number of adorable GOP sycophants out there right now campaigning to get the Gipper's mug on the national currency. There are even some who want his face on Rushmore, who think it's not enough that we named a huge airport and an aircraft carrier and probably some nice road somewhere after him. After all, Ronnie gave the conservative agenda its beautiful, historic sense of bitter entitlement.

As for the mourners, they weep not because Reagan was such a profound intellect, not because he was such a generous humanitarian, not because he balanced budgets or worked to end poverty or because he, as Clinton did, brokered peace in Northern Ireland and came closer than any president in history to finally ending conflict in the Middle East, and nearly winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the process.

No, they want Reagan canonized because he was a wildly successful, hugely manipulative media presence. Because he charmed them to death, because he shaped American politics like no other president in recent history. This is what people are remembering: essentially, a surreal and often sad and yet indelible hunk of American history, a time when America fell under a slick jingoistic spell and conservatism found its voice and became much of what it is today: you know, mean-spirited and hawkish and ideologically lopsided, corporate sponsored, homophobic and fiscally reckless and more oriented toward one overarching agenda: military might uber alles.

This, then, is what we have to thank Reagan for. A bruising, devious, glossy worldview, fiscal irresponsibility, the art of the slick media sound bite, humanitarianism treated like a disease to be eradicated.

And now, with his passing, it's only appropriate to try to show a little respect. After all, you have to give the man credit — he did indeed do a great deal to alter the timbre and direction modern American politics. His legacy is convoluted and eternally debatable and yet absolutely, undeniably extraordinary. He is the GOP's icon of finger-wagging righteousness. He is their demigod o' slippery prefab swagger. His attitudes and policies have had a titanic effect on the shape of modern American conservatism.

Problem is, that shape looks increasingly, and frighteningly, like a giant, bloody baseball bat.

Seventh, Geov Parrish.

Excuse me while I barf. I’m in no mood to join the joyful eulogies upon the passing of Ronald Reagan — remembrances that prove, once again, the staggering size of our country’s memory hole. I missed the 1960s. I grew up in Middle America, with Watergate, barely, and the benign buffoonery of Presidents Ford and Carter. When Reagan was elected president, it was an inexplicable, savage turn for a country that I’d never realized was capable of such things.

It’s not just that George W. Bush would have been impossible without Reagan. The presidency of Reagan himself was so bad, on so many levels, that as young adults a sizable number of us could only sputter in impotent rage, a rage summed up nicely by the Crucif*cks song “Hinckley Had a Vision.” It simply made no sense that an entire country could be run by sinister thugs, all because its spokesperson was a washed-up actor with the professional training to deliver the most ridiculous, venal lies with a calming “Great Communicator” demeanor.

Great Communicator, my ass. Tens of thousands of us died of AIDS on his watch, and he never even once mentioned the word. He also refused to adequately fund AIDS research — a critical delay that, we now know, could have saved countless lives. We seem to have forgotten that now.

We’ve also forgotten the corruption — not just the Constitution-shredding outrage of the Iran-Contra scandal, but a modern record for the number of criminally indicted officials.

It was the Great Communicator whose era gave us the term, and scourge, of homelessness. It was Reagan who launched an illegal war in Nicaragua, Reagan who unleashed and praised Guatemala’s genocide and El Salvador’s death squads. Reagan whose tax cuts and funding choices launched a class war at home, a class war still being waged, successfully, by many of the same officials, 20 years later.

And excuse me, but Ronald Reagan did not end communism. Hundreds of thousands of courageous people, in Moscow and Gdansk and Prague and across the communist bloc, deserve the credit for risking their lives to bring down tyrannical governments, often with nothing more than the willingness to sacrifice their own bodies. They risked everything. Reagan risked nothing but an inadvertent record deficit it took a decade and a Democratic president to heal.

To honor Reagan as the triumphant Cold Warrior, without even mentioning the courage of all those ordinary people, is an insult of staggering proportions. Ronald Reagan had a historic meltdown of an empire happen during his tenure; he was no more responsible for it than George W. Bush was responsible for another, less positive cataclysm in 2001. Less, even. At least the CIA knew something like 9/11 was in the works. They had no idea the Iron Curtain would collapse.

Last week, I mourned the passing of David Dellinger, a contemporary of Reagan’s who exemplified, far better than Ronnie ever could, courage and integrity and compassion. Dellinger spent his adult life speaking truth to power; Reagan spent his making things up for an audience. One was an apostle of selfless love; the other presided over the Me Decade.

Not all of us spent that decade obsessing over our investments and stepping over the homeless. For much of my 20s, I helped organize protests of hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall and at the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington, D.C. Most of us are still around. Most of us remember the profound sense of shock as we watched our country become a place we didn’t recognize, led by a genial, seemingly clueless man with an agenda that was on many levels simply evil.

Sound familiar? Forget the obituaries; I can hardly wait to unseat Ronald Reagan’s heir in November.

Eighth, Larry Kramer.

Our murderer is dead. The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world, is dead. More people than Hitler even. In all the tributes to his passing, as I write this two days after his death, not one that I have seen has mentioned this. The hateful New York Times ("all the news that's fit to print") of course said nothing about this. We still are not fit to write about with total honesty in their pages. Not really. Just as we were not fit for Ronald Reagan to talk about us. What kind of president is that?

I have been writing a long work of history which I call The American People. I chose this title because in every speech he ever made Reagan went on and on about "the American People." We of course were never a part of his American People. And we knew it. Year after year of his hateful and endless reign we knew we were not a part of the American People he was President of. He would never talk about us, of course, or do anything for us except murder us. There were no social services for us. There was no research into our health. Even as we were dying like flies.

How could he not have seen us dying? The answer is he did see us dying and he chose to do nothing. There was no representation in his government of us. There was never anything for us but his ignoble dismissal of us. All of Washington, indeed the world, knew that Reagan hated us. How could they not? Most of them did, too. And when Daddy doesn't love you, who is there who will stand up to Daddy? This is a trick that Hitler used and which I believe the young Reagan learned from him. He never had to say much out loud himself about his hatreds; but everyone knew what they were. Gays were as hated under Reagan as Jews were under Hitler. It is a trick that both George Bushes have carbon-copied. We have not been included among their American people either.

I could never understand why Reagan's hatred of us was so intense and manifest and never-ending. Some of Nancy Reagan's best friends were gay, the self-loathing Jerry Zipkin, at one time her principle "walker," chief among them. It is said he taught her how to dress. In my play, Just Say No, I dramatized my own theory of why she and her husband kept gays off their agenda as if we were the plague, which of course, as in some hideous self-fulfilling prophecy, we became. Ron Reagan, Jr. That is why. It was no secret in an ever-widening circle that Ron Reagan, Jr. was suspected of being gay. In his freshman year at Yale (I believe this was his only year there; perhaps there were two) I have been told he had numerous gay experiences. I am well known at Yale. Indeed, I have established the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale to document the evil acts that American "history" has performed on us.

And just as damning of the son's reputation of course, because it could not be hidden, was that Ron Reagan, Jr. was a ballet dancer. This did not look good and was obviously exceedingly embarrassing to a father who rode so many horses. So off with the tutu and on with a wedding ring. Junior was married off and sent to far-off places in positions of low visibility. I have gay friends in Hollywood, equally closeted, who knew him and know him and protect him. To know him is to be sworn to some sort of pact of secrecy. What a hideous life Ron, Jr. must have led all these years. To be denied a life and to have been so utterly gutless about fighting back. (Well, we know all about that.) While his own mother was gallivanting around with some of the biggest fairies in the world. What hateful parents to have had in the prime of your life, "the great communicator" of a father out there communicating how much he hated you and his wife out there going along with this. I suspect by now Ron Reagan, Jr. actually believes he is straight. By now he may very well be. He may well have been all along. He just looked so suspicious, and of course it was this perceived suspicion that, one way or the other, is what caused his father to murder so many of us. Why does history not recognize this monstrous and never-ending history of hatred and the inestimable number of deaths it continues to cause?

People magazine called me for a quote on Reagan's death. "I wish he had died before he was elected" is what I told them. I wonder what they will run.

It is remarkable that two of the so-called "greatest presidents" have also allowed the greatest perpetrations and perpetuations of mass murder. Franklin D. Roosevelt was shamefully inept in dealing with "the Jewish question," (see my play The Normal Heart), most ironically since so many Jews were his most loyal supporters, the Jerry Zipkins of their day. No one really writes about this. Roosevelt is one of history's great gods. Just as no one really writes about Reagan and "the gay question." These two major murderers so far have got away with helping to cause the two major holocausts of modern history. Just as Jews are asked to never forget their Holocaust I implore all gay people never to forget our holocaust and who caused it and why. Ronald Reagan did not even say the word "AIDS" out loud for the first seven years of his reign. Because of this some 70 million people, so far, have become infected with HIV/AIDS. I wonder what it feels like to be the son and the wife of a man responsible for over 70 million people so far becoming infected with a virus that has killed over half of us so far. I wonder what it felt like while he was alive to ponder this. For surely he must have thought about it. How could he not? He has been called the consummate actor who came to believe all his lines. Does this not make his legacy even more grotesque? It should.

Hitler knew what he was doing. How could Ronald Reagan not have known what he was doing?

But of course no one is writing about this. Reagan too is one of history's gods.

So far he has got away with murder.

Last, Cuba.

Cuba clarified its position on former President Ronald Reagan, saying Friday that a harsh editorial aired on state radio after his death was not the government's official opinion.

"News media around the world have echoed said comments, presenting them as an official declaration by Cuban authorities," read a statement published Friday in the Communist Party daily Granma. The Associated Press reported on the radio editorial and described it as government reaction.

State-run Radio Reloj on Monday repeatedly broadcast its editorial commenting on Reagan's death, saying he "never should have been born." It lambasted his military policies, especially the "Star Wars" anti-missile program.

Reagan, a staunch foe of communism, died June 5 at age 93. His funeral was held Friday in Washington.

"The Foreign Ministry has been instructed by the Revolution's leadership to clarify that the comments made by that radio station do not constitute an official declaration by Cuban authorities, nor do they express their positions," the statement published in Granma said.

"President Ronald Reagan was a tenacious adversary of the Cuban Revolution, but the sense of ethics and honor of Cuban revolutionaries cannot be reconciled with the idea of emitting critical judgments or attacks in such moments of profound pain for their families," it said.

"That is the way Cuban leaders and the Cuban people have and always will conduct themselves," it concluded.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 06/21/04 05:44:47 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.