Goodbye

No, I am not going to eulogize Ronald Reagan. I am not going to join in the chorus of forgiving accolades and inflated claims of enduring glory. I will say that no one, no family, should have to suffer the painful, grinding, heart-rending decline of Alzheimer's and that Nancy Reagan, to her credit, proved to all her genuine devotion to her husband.

But beyond that, no farewells, tearful or otherwise, no musing on "the great communicator," no declarations of grudging respect. This was a man whose politics, whose policies, whose simplistic narrow-mindedness, whose paeans to greed disguised as "responsibility" and selfishness cloaked in "freedom," are things this people, this nation, this world would have been better off without.

This was the man who called Vietnam "a noble cause." A man whose economic policies were so out of whack with reality that at one point I was moved to say that his advisers "will soon be taking back predictions they haven't made yet" and which lead to a string of record-smashing (not just breaking, smashing) budget deficits that tripled the national debt in just eight years and drove the worst recession in 40 years. Whose answer to labor contracts was union-busting. Who slashed aid programs for the poor and blamed them for their own poverty while spinning folk talks and lies about "welfare queens." Who funded dictators and death squads in Central America while declaring the murderous contras "the moral equivalent of the founding fathers." Who ignored AIDS because "maybe the Lord brought down this plague," because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."

He claimed trees were the largest cause of air pollution. He mounted

a sustained attack on the government's civil rights apparatus, opened an assault on affirmative action and social welfare programs, embraced the White racist leaders of then-apartheid South Africa and waged war on a tiny, Black Caribbean nation.

He red-baited peace demonstrations. He sharply increased the danger of nuclear war, supported by a staff that called such a war "a physics problem" and actively pursued the idea of "limited" nuclear war. He opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by embracing the warlords, including the Taliban.

He strove to turn us against ourselves, to empty us of compassion, to make "I'm all right, Jack" our national motto. He celebrated conspicuous consumption even as the poverty rate increased and the gap between rich and poor, which had been slowly shrinking since the 1950s, ballooned.

Even claims made in his favor are wrong. AP says that

"Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War for liberty and he did it without a shot being fired," former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said Saturday. ...

In foreign affairs, he built the arsenals of war while seeking and achieving arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.

So much wrong in so few words. First, there were many shots fired and many bodies piled in which we had a hand, from El Salvador to Lebanon to Afghanistan. Second, the person who had the most to do with ending the cold war was not Ronald Reagan, but Mikhail Gorbachev, who recognized its insanity and looked for a way out, bringing far more dramatic change to the old USSR than Reagan's "revolution" brought to the US.

As for Reagan "achieving arms control agreements," it's such an absurdity that only someone wholly ignorant of the time (or a boldfaced liar) could have said it. In fact, Reagan did his damnedest to avoid any such agreements and the US had a policy of trying to spend the Soviets into bankruptcy under a foreign policy doctrine that even the New York Times was moved to call "a declaration of technical war." The US was notorious for moving the goal posts, for adding new or changed demands every time an agreement was (or was about to be) reached. Such accords were only reached when political reality made it impossible to avoid them.

And all of this is without even mentioning Contragate

At a counter-inaugural demonstration in January, 1981, after he was first elected, I called Reagan's win "the ultimate victory of style over substance." Subsequent events have proved me wrong; other campaigns since have been won on the basis of images even further removed from practice than was Reagan 1980. (In fact, Reagan 1984 was an example.) But it does remain a watershed in our history, the moment when we as an electorate clearly turned away from making an effort to understand what the hell was going on around us and toward empty-headed wishful thinking where we are now almost casually manipulated into voting against our own interests and desires.

No, no eulogies, no grudging respect, not even admiration for his skills as a politician unless I am also free to express similar admiration for the undoubted skills in their own areas of Willy Sutton, Ken Lay, and Osama bin Laden. The only thing I will grant to him is what I would grant to anyone: I'm glad you're no longer suffering. Goodbye.