(Cross-posted from
Musing's musings.)
An old man, broken with the storms of state
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
Give him a little earth for charity.
--Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act IV, Scene 2, l. 22
Garrison Keillor eulogized Richard Nixon in the foregoing words a decade ago, and I think they are equally applicable now to Ronald Reagan, who died today at age 93.
As the title of this post suggests, I do not have much that is good to say about Ronald Reagan--the man or the president. My route to and from Galesburg last weekend to attend a retirement reception for one of my beloved undergraduate professors and mentors took me past the signs on the Illinois Tollway announcing the exits for Reagan's birthplace. As always when I pass them, I gave the ol' two-finger salute and a raspberry.
I can't speak to the state of Reagan's soul, but the results of his presidency, and his career in politics, were largely unmitigated evils. His foreign policy was disastrously confrontational, his fixation on re-fighting the Cold War which had already been won, plus his supply-side devotion to tax cuts, turned the United States in just a few short years from the world's biggest creditor nation into the world's biggest debtor nation--a legacy we're still living with, 20 years on. The "Reagan Revolution" re-energized the previously moribund conservative movement by putting an attractive face on some very unattractive policies and even less attractive motivations for those policies, the end result of which is the currently self-destructing régime of Commander Codpiece and Pretend-a-Dick. We can also thank the Reagan administration for sending Donald Rumsfeld to re-open diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein: that same Donald Rumsfeld who's made it his Job #1 to remove that same Saddam Hussein from power as part of ShrubCo's war on terra.
A little closer to home, we also have the Reagan administration to thank for kicking out thousands of capable, dedicated members of our armed forces, simply because they happened to be gay or lesbian. And don't even get me started on the disaster that was Reagan's AIDS policy--the man couldn't even be bothered to utter the word until halfway through his second term, when his buddy Rock Hudson died. The disaster of the previous six years never even appeared on Reagan's radar, when prompt and well-funded government action might well have saved thousands or even tens of thousands of lives. I only lost two friends to AIDS. Other gay men lost hundreds. Many in the gay community remember the 1980s as the era of endless funerals, thanks in large part to the negligence and the callous disregard for human lives displayed by the Reagan administration in its characterization of AIDS as a "gay disease" that resulted from a "lifestyle choice." Even if that characterization were true (which it is not), the Reaganite policies (as his own Surgeon-General, C. Everett Koop, told him) were a public-health disaster waiting to happen.
All that said, however, I cannot find it in me to crow at Reagan's passing. I will not try to characterize his diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease as some form of divine retribution for his malign disregard of the ravages of AIDS: the God in whom I believe doesn't work like that. As the Scriptures tell us, God's sun rises upon the wicked and the good alike, and God's rain falls upon the just and the unjust equally (Matthew 5:45). I will not rejoice that Reagan has passed, although I cannot truthfully say that I will mourn overmuch, either. I have no desire, as some have expressed it, to piss upon Reagan's grave. Neither would I go out of my way to visit it or to decorate it even according to the Jewish custom by laying a stone upon his burial place.
But I can and will, in the words of the epigram I quoted at the start of this post, allow Reagan that little patch of earth for the sake of charity. I will grant him a prayer at his passing, but no more. I should like to observe a period of abstaining from criticism out of respect for the grief of his family, but I rather doubt that's going to be possible since I fully expect the Goopers to indulge in an hysterical orgy of laudatory prose that will begin even before Reagan's body is cold in his grave and that could conceivably carry through the campaign season. I am regrettably confident that they will take even more than their usual liberties with the facts of the matter in their rhetoric, and therefore we liberal/progressive folk will be forced to correct the record even if it means ignoring the old Roman maxim nil de mortuis nisi bonum, "nothing but good of the dead."
God has granted to Mr. Reagan the grace of a happy death. I hope God will spare us from the worst of the rhetorical excesses that death will bring. Amen.
Updated to reflect Reagan's death.