I have no difficulty grieving for the star of Bedtime for Bonzo but I won’t shed a tear for Reagan as a former President (Washington Post) whom I recall mostly with contempt, and with incredulity for the uncritical adulation rolling in now he is dead. Some progressive webloggers caution us to “be wary of giving fodder to the wingers who are just dying for the opportunity to see us gloat about Reagan’s death, and to spew venom at him and his legacy.” While there is no gloating, and I wish the Reagan family some solace in their loss, it is the rabid right’s problem and not ours, IMHO, if we resist the revisionist whitewash coming down the pike and give a candid appraisal of Reagan’s deplorable presidency. As someone pointed out, the Republican hue and cry about ‘politicizing’ the Paul Wellstone funeral several years ago means they would never, never use Reagan’s death for their partisan ends, now would they? In any case, I cannot help it that I will remember him for doing more, and more irrevocably, to dismantle the care for our least fortunate citizens than anyone until George W. Bush, bolstered by his incoherent ‘Reaganomics’; for bastardizing some of the most time-honored American ethical values in a ‘Republican Revolution’; and as a mean-spirited jingoist reaping ridiculously unwarranted credit for the end of the Cold War and the collapse of world Communism.

I am amazed as the groundless homilies uniformly describe him as the man who gave back “hope” and “optimism” to the nation. My first take was that that signifies little more than having been in the right place at the right time, since the nation had nowhere to go but up from Watergate and our defeat in Vietnam. But actually it is more than just being properly situated. The uncritical adulation for his ‘character’ reflects an idealizing projection onto Reagan of desperate American yearnings for a benign father figure to help us bolster our threatened fantasies of decrepit American grandeur and righteousness. The painful upheaval of the ’70’s had deepened and enriched American cultural adventurousness and humanism but it was as if the public found it unendurable and took the first opportunity they could to put an end to it. We needed someone like Reagan; who better than a B-movie actor trained for little else than being the target and embodiment of collective projections? The power of this process is exemplified in the public’s ability to ignore the breakthrough of more realistic glimpses of Reagan’s deficiencies. The most telling moment in the Reagan presidency for me was his ‘joking’ about unleashing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union when he thought the media microphones weren’t on. Similarly, the public could ignore the abundant evidence that, by the time of his second election campaign, he was a doddering and faltering man, already showing signs of dementia, with only a vague and unfocused insight about the issues needed to lead a superpower, and increasingly covered for by his wife and his entourage. (As a psychiatric resident during his second campaign in 1984 demonstrating at one of his Boston campaign appearances, I achieved some notoriety by going on record in an interview with Boston radio station WBZ to say so.) Twenty-four years after his election, the man-in-the-street interviews at his passing show us that that idealization is undiminished and, not surprisingly given where we find ourselves now, the yearnings even more intense. (And, in a similar vein, the kneejerk villification of the ’70’s continues undiminished.)

In the face of the distortions with which Americans see their worst presidents, the assessment of the world audience of the emperor’s state of undress is more telling. While the lack of esteem and confidence, the alarm, the loathing, with which Dubya is viewed by foreign observers is almost unanimous and unprecedented, there are parallels to the the recognition by the rest of the world that a country consumed with pop culture fantasies of gunslingers, chintzy romance and cops’n’robbers had gotten the icon it deserved when it selected an untalented two-bit actor like Reagan. (Now, if it had been a comic genius like Jerry Lewis, it might have been a different matter, right?).

Reagan is often referred to as the model whose presidency Dubya is trying to emulate, and indeed Dubya does follow in his footsteps in many regards. Reagan was the first postwar president who made a virtue of not being very bright (Nixon was not very bright either, but showed no recognition of it), tapping into the same anti-intellectual current in American culture that Bush exploits so well. In an understatement about a man who never learned to do much else besides following a script, Nancy Reagan reportedly said, ‘He doesn’t make snap decisions, but he doesn’t overthink, either.’ But Reagan could get away with his folksy tone because it was, true to his origins, full of homespun wisdom (The Scotsman ) and humility of which Bush’s cocksure public presence is entirely devoid. And while Bush and his neo-conservative handlers appropriate the populist Reagan as the patriarch of whom they are the spiritual heirs, Reagan did not think much of the Bush dynasty and ‘Reagan Republicans’ do not feel well served by the patricians (American Conservative). Reagan’s ideological platform, rigid and simple-minded as it was, was organized around a principled opposition to big government, while the Bushes’ is unprincipled support for government of and for the big. There is a sense in which Republicanism ended when Reagan was succeeded by Bush Senior.

But I would be remiss if I did not throw in another parallel between the two execrable presidencies, aptly drawn by billmon:

…But all this pales in comparison to Reagan’s war crimes in Central America. We’ll probably never know just how stained his hands were by the blood of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of defenseless peasants who were slaughtered in the Guatemalan highlands, or the leftist politicians, union leaders and human rights activists kidnapped and killed by the Salvadoranian death squads, or the torturned in Honduran prisons, or terrorized by his beloved contras.

Did Reagan’s men covertly support these murders? Or did they just look the other way? Did Reagan ever know just what kind of charnel house he helped create? Or did he live completely in his fantasy world of freedom fighters and “founding fathers”? Either way, it was in Central America that Reagan most clearly earned that nickname the hippies pinned on him back in Berkeley: “fascist gun in the West.”

Looking back, it’s also easy to see the propaganda connections between Reagan’s war in Central America and the current Orwellian nightmare in Iraq. There were the same moral oversimplications – pure goodness versus absolute evil – the same flowerly rhetoric about freedom and democracy (to be administred to impoverished campesinos with machine guns and torture chambers.) There was the same lurid hype about the dire danger to the homeland – as when Reagan famously warned that Nicaragua was just a “two-day drive from Harlington, Texas.”

And of course, we’re even looking at some of the same actors – Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell. To a large degree, the Reagan administration’s covert wars in both Central America and the Middle East formed the template for how the war in Iraq was packaged, sold and – unfortunately – fought.

Another parallel between the two administrations is in the area of anti-ballistic-missile defense. Bush’s NMD Program shares with its antecedent, Reagan’s Star Wars boondoggle, their technological inanity. Historians have argued (not very compellingly, I find) that it was the threat of Star Wars that compelled Gorbachev to commit to mutual arms reductions; Bush’s NMD program will only destabilize the arms race and increase the risk of nuclear conflagration.

We were lucky when the sociopathic Nixon died that his criminality and disgrace muted the nostalgia of even the most partisan. Nothing will spare us from the outpouring with Reagan’s death. The timing is convenient; expect the volume to be turned up drastically during this election season on the Republican beatification and appropriation of his legacy (Washington Monthly ). We can certainly expect a sentimental, over-the-top Reagan tribute at the Republican National Convention this summer. Although the trend is well underway already, atypically while the icon is still alive although having faded into the twilight of the death-in-life of advanced Alzheimer’s Disease over the past decade, expect many more bridges, highways and public buildings to be named for him in states with Republicans in power inthe coming months.