I saw with a sinking heart the news that Ronald Reagan's brain had finally ceased to... what? "Think" is too strong a word, and always was, even before Alzheimer's took hold.
My regret has nothing to do with Reagan himself being gone, of course - he was gone even when he was here, and should have been even more gone than he was, and again, this held true as far back as Death Valley Days. No, I won't miss him. But I could do without the deluge of maudlin drool that every media outlet in the country will be drenching us with for God knows how long.
There's something about our national sense of the "appropriate" that makes me think of embalming fluid. We'll be hearing, from NPR and the like, all kinds of solemn pieties about "paying respects" and so on. This from people who hated the guy when he was alive -- and for excellent reason -- but who can't bring themselves, now that he's dead, to speak from the heart and say "about time." This idea of rising above partisanship, or reaching down to what unites us as a people, or getting off the actual surface of the contentious earth one way or the other -- this fatuous notion is like formaldehyde in our veins, and turns every national occasion into a dusty parade of poorly-articulated mummies, arranged in stiff and conventional poses, shedding a musty funk of postponed decomposition.
Naturally, my favorite guy, John Kerry, led the conga-line of living dead: he wants us to "bow [our] heads in prayer and gratitude....Even when [Reagan] was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile." Kerry might have added, but of course didn't, that the old fool wore the same smile while he was slaughtering children in Nicaragua. But I guess all that matters now is that he made us feel good. Or some of us, anyway.
Posted by gracchus at June 8, 2004 03:30 AM | TrackBack