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This guy walks into a bar and says... - Jun 7, 2004 - Printable Version
- I Wanted Ronald Reagan To Live Forever
by Ken Shade
Boy, do I hate this! I have been dreading this for twenty years.
I wanted Ronald Reagan to live forever.
I didn't want him to live forever because I consider him a hero. I don't believe in heroes. I have some, despite my best efforts (Joseph Carey Merrick, Muhammad Ali, Thomas Paine, Rachel Carson, George Harrison, et alia), but I don't believe in them. Heroes are people, and people will always let you down. There are people who have called me a hero, and that is about as distressing a thought as I can imagine. They have used this terrible appellate on me Have we, as a race, become so weak and vapid that even I am worthy of being called a hero?
No, we have not. What has happened is that the word "hero" has become devalued, and Ronald Reagan is chiefly to blame for that.
Modern conservatism traces it's cosmology back to the Romantic Era, as opposed to modern liberalism, which was born of the Enlightenment. Whereas liberals put a lot of faith in plans, ideas and the social contract, conservatives hearken to the Romantic notion of a great, heroic figure who will set the world aright. My favorite composer from that era, Beethoven, dedicated his third symphony to such a figure, Napoleon. When Napoleon turned out to be all too human, Beethoven ripped the dedication page from his composition.
The symphony lives on. The name "Napoleon" is now an insult one attaches to the domineering and grandiose new supervisor at work.
Still, Napoleon, like so many other larger-than-life figures who have failed or become tyrants, is regarded as a hero by some. Heroes have a wonderfully calming way of making a complex world seem less threatening. They ride into the small Western towns of our collective unconscious, shoot the cattle rustlers, kiss the voluptuous schoolmarm and ride into the sunset, leaving us feeling warm and safe in a world with problems we can grasp.
Reagan was not an intellectually gifted man, but he possessed the innate cunning to know how to appeal to our need for hero worship, and use it to his own ends.
On October 23, 1983, terrorists drove a truck bomb into a United States Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 242 soldiers.
This was the day the word "hero" lost all meaning.
In order to deflect attention from his insane policies in Lebanon and the massive military intelligence failures which led to the catastrophe, Reagan's writers and handlers came up with the word "hero," and began using it more often than the letter "e."
All of the soldiers who died were now "heroes."
The officers who commanded them were "heroes."
Reagan was a "hero" for sending them there.
All rational discussion of what happened to them, how it might be prevented in the future, and whether they should have been there in the first place became impossible. Anybody who questioned the President's policies suddenly was accused of dishonoring the "heroes," and claiming that they "died in shame." Calling them heroes had the added benefit, to Reagan, of diminishing the tragedy of their deaths in the public eye. They were no longer young men who died in terrible, senseless violence. They were transformed, by the use of one word, into young men who were glorified by being blown up in their sleep for freedom. (The question: "Whose freedom?" was never adequately addressed, since the person asking was always accused of a lack of patriotism.)
Personally, I feel that people who join the armed forces are owed a lot more respect than that. They agree, knowing up front that they may die, to set aside their own judgment and do an ugly job when asked. Since they do, we owe them the honor of not sending them off to die to enrich certain companies, solidify the manly reputations of our leaders, or secure reelection for people with the power to make war. I think we should only send them when there is a valid reason, but maybe I'm old fashioned. When they are sent to fight, kill and die for immoral or dubious aims, there is plenty of shame involved, but it is the politicians' shame, not the soldiers'.
Yelling "Hero!" oversimplifies their commitment and sacrifice. It makes them less than human. It makes them into comic book characters that we don't have to feel bad about when they die.
"Hero! Hero! Hero!" worked so well for Reagan that he never let go of the idea. Everybody who had ever worn a uniform was called a hero. Everybody who supported his aims was called a hero. Every person he could persuade to appear for a State of the Union Address photo-op was a hero. Once, during one of Reagan's biannual "I'm tough on crime" charades, his administrations was hailing the fact that they had added to the list of crimes for which the law prescribed mandatory execution. "To take the life of our heroes in the performance of their duty will not be tolerated," they said.
The "heroes" in question were federal poultry inspectors.
No federal poultry inspector has ever been killed in the line of duty, but I agree, it should not be tolerated! Any chicken who kills one should be mechanically separated and turned into McNuggets!
Oh, wait, that's what is happening to them already.
Never mind.
Anyway, the word "hero" still has not recovered. Everybody in a uniform is called a hero, and so are a lot of non-uniformed people.
Ronald Reagan went on to claim that every person who served in Vietnam was a hero; all police officers were heroes; people who stood outside Planned Parenthood clinics and screamed at teenage girls were heroes and so were the Contras. After the first Persian Gulf war, George Herbert Walker Bush, the legally elected one, referred to every single person who had served there as a hero. Clinton said that all DEA officials were heroes. George W. Bush, the un-elected one, thinks that everybody is a hero except John Kerry.
Here is a brief, and incomplete, list of people who are "heroes," as it has been used since Reagan: Lee Harvey Oswald, Pat Sherrill, Timothy McVeigh, Albert DeSalvo, Charles Whitman, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, General Westmoreland.
They are typical in the sense that calling them "heroes," quite obviously, oversimplifies their lives. All of these people were "heroes," but turned out to be less than heroic. No amount of labeling will make them, or the world we share with them, less complicated and scary.
They were, sad to say, human.
Ronald Reagan was human, too, and the orgy of hero worship since his death on Saturday will not change that. He was a political miscreant of the worst order and we should not forget it.
He rode into the White House on the back of one of the most dishonest, nasty, and possibly criminal campaigns in modern history.
He lied at least 300 times that I have seen documentation of.
He admitted lying and lawbreaking on national television, not that his sycophants cared.
He sold weapons to our enemies, used the money to ship weapons to the Contras, allowed the empty planes to bring cocaine back into the country and used the proceeds from the sold cocaine to further fund Central American death squads.
He claimed that 80% of air pollution was caused by trees.
He called ketchup a vegetable.
He ran up the biggest deficits in history, up to that time. (Bush has broken the record.)
He lied to and used his most ardent supporters, the Religious Right, by taking their money, support and organization, and never doing anything they wanted him to do on the social front. (Actually, I think that's pretty funny, but it still makes him a liar and a user.)
He took credit for the weapons systems and military reorganization of President Carter.
He claimed that mental illness didn't really exist among the homeless.
He opposed, then supported, then opposed, then supported extension of the Voting Rights Act.
He used the War on Drugs as an excuse for a war on the Bill of Rights.
He lied about the dangers of nuclear waste because his buddies in the nuclear power industry wanted him to.
He claimed, on at least two occasions, that he had been to the liberated death camps of Europe, and photographed the conditions there in 1945 as part of his service in the Army. He even said that he kept reels, so as to document the Holocaust. In fact, he was in Burbank during that time, making training films and spirit-lifters like Juke Girl, Cadet Classification and This is The Army. He never left the country.
He allowed his wife to engineer a cabinet-level job swap without his knowledge. His response, when told what Nancy had done, was: "Oh." (All Nancy-loving Hillary haters are invited to explain how they justify that while despising Mrs. Clinton for far less.)
His tax cuts only benefited his immediate circle of rich friends.
Nothing good ever "trickled down."
He stood on the graves of dead soldiers to make himself appear taller.
And, more importantly for those who want to idolize the man, he DID NOT win the Cold War. The Cold War was won for two reasons:
1) The sustained efforts of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush.
2) It was bound to happen anyway.
All my life I remember being told by conservatives that communism could not work. "It's inherently flawed. It will implode of its own shortcomings," they said often, and with great conviction. Then, when history proved them right, they rushed to claim that it was their hero, Reagan, who had done it. Couldn't they just be happy to be right? No, they couldn't. They couldn't because that would be to have faith in an idea, and they needed a hero.
Well, they can have him.
Ronald Reagan rests in peace. His terrible disease has run its course, and he suffers from it no more. I wanted him to live forever because I could not bear to see all of his meanness and ignorance ignored in the bacchanal of misty-eyed reminiscence that always follows the death of former presidents. If he is your idea of a hero, then you obviously need heroes very badly. Still, though, the parents, wives and children of the people he sent to war for his own greed and ambition miss them every day. The people who suffered needlessly in Reagan's eight-year effort to roll back social progress will never get those years back. The families and countrymen of the people everywhere who died to make Reagan your hero will never be completely at peace.
All of these are human beings, with all the contradictions and flaws that go with humanity.
They lived, they died, now they sleep.
Reagan, too.
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