Pardon me if I fail to mourn Ronald Reagan in the approved fashion this week. I'd rather give some thought to those who won't be mourned, but ought to be ...
[Crossposted from Reading A1, the NY Times front page project]
My condolences go to his family, and to everyone who feels his loss as a bereavement. I am unable to share that feeling, but I credit its genuineness, at least in most instances. (I exempt the political opportunists, from George W. Bush on down, who will treat Reagan's death as money in the bank, but that's a topic for another time.) Of the man himself, I know little and have nothing to say; Reagan will be justly praised for his good qualities, and his bad, whatever they may have been, will be passed over in appropriate silence. (De mortuis nil nisi bonum.) Of what he represented in life and will represent in death, to the mass of Americans who are attached to him as a figure almost of myth, all I can do is hope for the best.
I do plan on spending time in remembrance these next few days, but not in remembrance of Ronald Reagan, precisely. Ronald Reagan will have an abundance of mourners, some paid, many sincere. (Of the paid, let Todd Purdum's contemptible hagiography in today's Times stand for all.) The tributes began flowing as soon as his death was announced, and will be impossible to avoid. But who will spare some thought for all those who were trodden underfoot in Ronald Reagan's triumph? There will be no profit in remembering them, no airtime devoted to their stories; they have endowed no think tanks and own no media conglomerates. They have slender purchase on our sympathies: in the political world we have (largely) inherited from Reagan, we feel with the strong and the celebrated, and Reagan's victims were always weak, unlovely, hard to see and easy to look away from.
Nevertheless, against the grain for just a moment, a few words for those who lived—and died—in the shadows of the Gipper's sunny optimism:
- the tens or hundreds of thousands dead in Central America at the hands of the Reagan Administration's proxy murderers;
- the millions of South Africans whose oppression at the hands of the apartheid regime Ronald Reagan condoned and thus extended;
- the Lebanese and Israeli dead, and the dead American Marines, slaughtered when Reagan fecklessly approved Israel's invasion of Lebanon;
- the tens of thousands in this country dead or needlessly afflicted when the AIDS epidemic raged, and Ronald Reagan did nothing;
- the thousands and tens of thousands of the mentally ill whose lives were shortened, or further blighted, when Ronald Reagan demolished the mental health care system and condemned them to life on the streets;
- the tens and hundreds of thousands of children who Ronald Reagan condemned to greater poverty and worse hunger when he gutted their housing subsidies and their food programs;
- the workers, millions of them, whose wages and (even more) whose hopes contracted under Ronald Reagan's relentless assault against the right to unionize;
- the poor in their millions, who Ronald Reagan made a career of villifying (in the most genial way possible, of course) and leaving exposed to social violence and decay.
The list could go on, of course, but I'm no scholar of the Reagan years. These are simply the examples that come most readily to mind.
As an executive—in his moral obtuseness, his cronyism, his indifference to democracy and constitutional government—Ronald Reagan was the perfect pattern of the leader who now afflicts us. He promoted bad men to power (Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, Oliver North, John Negroponte) and let them do as they pleased, the people and the law be damned. As a politician, he lent an aura of spurious good feeling to policies of greed and to the depredations of the rich on the poor, which he never failed to celebrate. He offered himself, in all humility and with down-to-earth charm, as the center of a cult of fascist image-making and calculated deceit that continues to dictate the shape of our politics a generation later. He gave us oligarchy, and called it democracy. He gave us lies, and taught us to thank him for them.
When Ronald Reagan goes into the ground, my thoughts will be with those he dispossessed, the chaff of the Reagan revolution, who our courtier press have no time for. I invite any of you reading this to make the same kind of memorial. If you feel the need of an icon to focus your thoughts, try remembering Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Remember the country they gave their lives for, a country whose aspirations for justice and equality had no place in the Reagan ascendancy. Mourn that country, if you need to mourn: and remember that it still lies in our power to see it live again.