Elegy for a cardboard cut out.

Ronald Reagan is dead; we shan’t see his like again in our lifetime.
I can recall a prescient political cartoon about candidate Reagan from Pat Oliphant circa campaign 1976:
Reagan is depicted as huge giant sized movie bill board arms outstretched with an avuncular grin on his face,
The caption reads “The Card Board Messiah!”
I am as fitting a eulogist for him as any, after all thanks to Saint Ron my youth came to end on the first Tuesday of November 1980.
No loss really, it was going nowhere and I knew it.
Ah President Reagan, those two words make me shudder involuntarily even twenty-four years later. Such is Saint Ron’s malefic character.
He was crude, ignorant, a sunny spendthrift, and a palpable fraud…. hardly a day went by when he didn’t say something stupid and churlish.
The government and the media were crammed with strange melodramatic fanatics-all resolute Reaganolators even then.
Dollar Bill Bennett, the scourge of college students everywhere, James Watt, La Famiglia Arbusto all got their start under Ronnie’s aegis.
Always a manager with an eye for the worst and the shameful, Reagan somehow overlooked thousands of able men and women in the U.S.M.C. to find one lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.
This is the gung ho jarhead that made contempt for democracy and the constitution fashionable among republicans up until the present day.
In time Reagan claimed victory over communism….yet he helped reduce America to a laughable second-rate economic power.
Ronnie revamped conservative orthodoxy to include self-righteously welshing on debts.
A vast horde of swinish lackeys and flatterers accompanied him to Washington and comported themselves with all the brutality and arrogance of Visigoths on payday.
This is when they weren’t praising Reagan’s abilities as “the great communicator and larding up his every accomplishment as a “revolutionary act”.
These louts and toadies are with us today…bloated, powerful, and even dumber than they were back in the days of the Reagan aufklarung.
Frankly I always thought Reagan talked to his audience like they were children and somehow made them like it.
Or maybe George Will liked being symbolically infantilized…I sure as hell did not.
For a while there I thought I was the only person in America who thought that gawd awful rouge they smeared on his jowls made Reagan look like an aging transvestite.
Saint Ron did have good fortune to have opponents in the Kremlin who were even more torpid and senescent than he.
Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and finally the frantic and publicity hungry Gorbachev all struggled and failed to come to grips with the California Kid.
They were a slack crew to rule over a corrupt and declining empire.
Poor Ron he had to “work”” every day to make these sick and exhausted Russians seem scary and formidable.
That was the gaudy parade that was Reagan’s first term, gusty bombast, neglect, treacly sentimentality….the public loved it or maybe they just loved the stable gasoline prices.
Me on the other hand…by 1983 I actually began gagging reflexively every time our increasingly naïve’ and jingoistic punditariat made use of that “catch in your throat patriotism” cliché.

Inevitably decline set in.

This faltering republic owes Fritz Mondale a debt of gratitude. For he conclusively demonstrated in their first presidential debate that Ronald Reagan was already hopelessly senile.
Fortunately as The Great Communicator’s second term progressed power passed more and more into the hands of his wife Nancy.

And if Nancy Reagan was ludicrously extravagant, petty, superstitious, and more than a little high strung, she was also a patriot and afflicted with a modicum of common sense.
I credit her with the collapse of communism, cleverly parodying the super power rivalry with her own ongoing soap opera catfight with Raisa Gorbachev.
Then the Berlin Wall fell, Bush senior got elected and Nancy and Ron returned to Santa Monica and the life of make believe cowboy ranchers.
To this day debts, neglect dopy jingoism and all…the GOP lives in the shadow of Reagan.
Sadly they have never been able to clone his unique political DNA.
Some have his dogmatism a’la GWB, others like John McCain his hawkish patriotism. To date no one has ever been able to re-assemble the total package.
Here though they are making a mistake, Reagan was a mutant a political dead end, no one else will ever have his opportunities for bombastic, mischief and ignorance.
The cold war is over and Reagan, the inevitable consequence of forty years of electoral frustration with the super power stalemate cannot be replicated in this modern world.
Not that the GOP won’t keep trying.

Still for all that, there was little deliberate mean ness to Reagan. He was detached and self centered but hardly a monster about it.
Tip O’Neill (a very shrewd judge of men) found the late President convivial company if cursed with ignorance and dogmatism.
This stands in direct contrast with the Bush family, up all night scratching away at their enemy’s list when they are not plotting to degrade and humiliate all those who oppose them.
Reagan always practiced a sort of flaky Buddhist detachment; he could hardly be bothered to recall the names among his children he and his wife were shunning.
He was the first U.S. President to have a genuinely fucked up family life and made few attempts to conceal it. From his failed first marriage, the whispers of substance abuse and homosexuality amongst his children, to the fact that Nancy ruled Ron the way Catherine the Great ruled Russia….The Reagan’s made family dysfunction feel cozy and normal for the first time ever.
That may well be Reagan’s lasting legacy in terms of social mores.
In the end Ronald Reagan would have made a great constitutional monarch for some small European duchy, Monaco or Luxembourg. Give King Ronald enough horses and a ranch to wander and he’d trouble his subjects not one whit.
But alas, he was our President a kind of brainless happy go lucky Calvin Coolidge…long on rhetoric short on real accomplishments. Millions mourn him tonight and will in due course make the most lavish demands on the nigh bankrupt public purse to memorialize him.
And THAT my friends is quintessentially Reagan-esque.
Goodbye Ron, don’t let the door hit you in the ass.
Dunno if there are horses where you are going but if you see Tip O’Neill tell him he has one former constituent who misses him.