June 11, 2004
Farewell, Ronald Reagan
Last night, for hours I watched the mourners visiting the late president's casket in the Capitol Rotunda. Isn't C-Span wonderful? No voice-over, just the quiet dignity of the changing of the military honor guard, the mothers shepherding well-dressed children in the line, soldiers offering salutes, Lech Walesa kneeling in private prayer. I found the procession hypnotic and watched it past midnight, riveting despite a lack of anything resembling traditional entertainment values. Just wanted to make sure that Mr. Reagan had company, in person from more than 100,000 people, and electronically from stay-at-homes like myself.
What stood out for me were the thousands of mourners clearly in their mid-20s to mid-30s, some fighting tears. Reagan had a set of values and beliefs that Americans born three generations later have fervently adopted.
It's a remarkable generational transference. When I watch specials on Reagan, such as MSNBC's Headliners and Legends bio, I am struck by the profound innocence on the face of Ron as a young lifeguard and actor. He kept his hair in that antiquated but poignant wavy style hearkening back to Dick Tracy cartoons -- one my little brothers wore as late as the early 1960s.
You would think, no way would anyone under age 90 find Reagan so cool. And nothing is more important to some Baby Boomers than being hip. But Reagan is cool as can be to Boomers and even, apparently, much of Generations X and Y.
To me, Reagan was infinitely hipper than Jimmy Carter -- Reagan wanted our country strong and the world free. He was cutting-edge hip despite that innocent, bygone-era face with the Irish twinkle to the eyes (like my mom's) and modified pompadour and gentle smile, which even now wows young Americans tired of endless sleaze from Madonna and rappers and others who just don't comprehend how much nice and decent this country can be.
I had originally feared (believe it or not) that at the viewings in liberal California and liberal Washington, D.C., that almost no one would come. I know from working at the Washington Post the overwhelming antipathy toward Reagan and conservatives in general among D.C. journalists and residents in general.
Judging from interviews with people waiting in line near the Mall in Washington, Americans from the Midwest, Virginia, and other places, including Northeasterners like myself in the minority of our communities as conservatives, made a yeoman's effort to give the former president a proper, respectful and well-attended sendoff.
Typical of journalist's low-grade but evident hostility are comments such as this from Washington Post associate editor Bob Kaiser, in his online chat, reminding us that AIDS "became an epidemic when [Reagan] was president." Huh? Was it Reagan, or Dionysian gays, who encouraged promiscuous rough-stuff in the bath houses? When will the absurd lack of responsibility for behaviors that spread vile germs (not just HIV and STDs, but amoebas and all sorts of things) stop? From the unintentionally revealing Kaiser:
My gay brother Charles Kaiser, himself a very good writer, wants us all to remember that Reagan really did almost nothing about AIDS, which, sadly, became an epidemic when he was president. Charles is right. But Reagan was far from alone in neglecting this crisis when it first emerged. Indeed, I think it's a measure of how America has changed in 20 years that we look back now at the beginning of the epidemic with some dismay at the way our government and leaders handled it.
Typical of Washington, D.C. and Maryland liberalism is this question posted to Kaiser from Jessup, Md.:
Why isn't the press covering that the legacy of Ronald Reagan's civil rights policies was to divide the nation along racial lines? The lines to see his casket were almost all white, and except for Colin Powell it was hard to see any person of color at this "state funeral." Its a travesty to applaud this type of legacy, and an embarrassment for the nation.Robert G. Kaiser: Referred to this earlier. Thanks for the comment. I too was struck by the crowd in the Cathedral.
Oh, well. Here we have two errors. One, the lines weren't all white, unless one choses to ignore steady numbers of black and Asian mourners, including some ostentatiously proud black servicemen who stood at full height and snapped off powerful salutes.
Two, there is a postmodern assumption that America's white majority cannot be doing anything right unless masses of minority groups lend their stamp of approval. We may have to live with the fact that U.S. minorities, barring what seems to be a "talented tenth" who happily have wandered off the victimology plantation, were not too happy with a president who preached liberty over equality of results, knowing that the latter is both impossible and even if possible would require totalitarian state apparati to achieve.
I haven't ever been able to live surrounded by the American majority that elected Reagan and that quietly paid their respects at his library in Simi Valley and at the Capitol. I've always been marooned in the world of journalists and liberals, in the U.K., Washington and Baltimore. (As Reagan lived surrounded by Hollywood liberals.)
When I worked in suburban London in the early 1980s, on the copy desk of a health magazine, I had a boss named Martin, from the North of England. Like most journalists in the U.K., he was a committed leftist, and loved to mock the president he called "Ronnie Ray-Gun."
Martin viewed the Soviet Union as some sort of benign experiment in collective ownership, and the United States as belligerent, aggressive, irredeemable racist, etc. etc. Nothing Martin said (he had never visited the U.S.) jibed with my extensive life and travels in my home country. Whenever he trotted out his aspersions on the president and displayed warmth toward the Soviets, I tried to point out that if the world is a jungle, you have to be prepared to defend yourself, that the Eastern bloc shot defectors in the back, that the Western way of life was under attack and needed a vigorous defense.
It's two decades later, and I hope that Martin holds a fuller understanding of the way communism had indeed landed on the ash help of history.
Bravo to his compatriot, Prince Charles, who made great effort to remember and honor a fallen American at the National Cathedral today, and to Lady Thatcher for her grand appreciation of the nation that produced Reagan:
Nothing was more typical of Ronald Reagan than that large-hearted magnanimity - and nothing was more American.Therein lies perhaps the final explanation of his achievements. Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them. He and they loved America and what it stands for - freedom and opportunity for ordinary people.
As an actor in Hollywood's golden age, he helped to make the American dream live for millions all over the globe. His own life was a fulfilment of that dream. He never succumbed to the embarrassment some people feel about an honest expression of love of country.
He was able to say 'God Bless America' with equal fervour in public and in private. And so he was able to call confidently upon his fellow-countrymen to make sacrifices for America - and to make sacrifices for those who looked to America for hope and rescue.
With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today the world - in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself - the world mourns the passing of the Great Liberator and echoes his prayer "God Bless America".
(Incidentally, the vicar who presided at my first wedding at St. Alban's, the tiny church adjacent to the National Cathedral, the Rev. Theodore "Ted" Eastman, performed some of the readings at the funeral.)
