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Next Left Notes Is A News Magazine Devoted To Direct Action
by David McReynolds
A friend asked me if I was going to write anything about Reagan's death and I
said no, I didn't think I had anything to say. But given the wave of sentimental
genuflection that has gone on, I do want to remember him, his time, and his
place - if only so that those of you who very young when Reagan left the White
House will not feel you somehow missed his greatness. He wasn't, and you didn't.
In 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran for President I caught a half hour TV special,
a speech by Reagan urging a vote for Goldwater. I watched it, fascinated with
one of the best deliveries I had ever heard. Some rich conservatives also
watched it and hired Reagan as Governor of California, from which he went on to
be our President for two terms.
Sometimes my brother (who was a working journalist all his life and, in
retirement, follows the media) takes issue with the way I blame the media for
things it really isn't to blame for. Most of the time he is right. When one is
frustrated, blame the messenger. But in Reagan's case, the media has a heavy
burden - but then, so do the American people. After all, we have free elections,
and when we have finished rubbishing Reagan properly, we are left with the
reality he won two free elections.
For reasons I never understood the media gave Reagan a free pass. I don't hate
Reagan, I don't view him as evil, I don't see Reagan as the mad hatter in the
White House - that was Nixon. I do see Reagan as a hired gun, and a damn fine
actor, given the right role - and President is the role he played incredibly
well. In fact, never in my life do I recall any President who acted so
unfailingly Presidential. Democrats used to say we had a "Grade B actor as
President". How wrong they were! Some actors are born for a single role. The man
who played Col. Potter in Mash (sorry I don't know his real name) was a grade B
actor whom you will occasionally catch in old gangster films. But once he was
cast as Col. Potter, he was Colonel Potter. One could imagine him as nothing
other than Col. Potter. In the same way, Reagan was truly President. First
rate acting. As you watch all the clips this week, watch carefully - could
Clinton do this well? Or Nixon? Either of the Bushes? Not even old LBJ could
hold a candle to Reagan's performance.
This was a class act (class, in every sense of the word). But an act it was. He
governed from cue cards. He invented a past as if the White House were a stage
set in Hollywood. He referred to his military service - he had none. He
delivered as facts things which were clearly fiction - and yet the mainstream
press never wrote a special on "the curious, creative, and selective memory of
Reagan". He embraced the worst of States Rights - in this case the history of
racism. He made a speciality of attacked "welfare queens" who didn't actually
exist, while ignoring the "welfare royalty" who had bought his services. He
broke the trade unions when he broke the air controllers union (and the labor
movement is still paying a high price for not standing together then).
Frank Zeidler, former Socialist Party mayor of Milwaukee, noted that Reagan's
military budget and deficit spending guaranteed there would be no money left for
things that counted, from mass transit to decent housing to medical care.
Reagan managed to cast the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" which justified his
own sword rattling. The media today is crediting Reagan with ending the Cold
War, which is about as foolish as crediting the United States with winning the
Second World War.
My credentials as a critic of the late Soviet Union are well established. But in
the real world it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, which led the way
every step in the military race we knew as the Cold War. And it was Gorbachev,
not Reagan, who ended the Cold War.
How easy for a younger set of journalists and commentators to forget how
relatively modest were American casualties in World War II (not modest to those
who lost a loved one - these words are not meant to diminish the sacrifice of
those who served) if compared to those of the Soviet Union which lost, at a
conservative estimate, twenty million men, women, and children. The Soviet
Union, smashed by Nazi tanks to the edge of Leningrad, to the outskirts of
Moscow, to the center of Stalingrad. All of European Russia destroyed, devoured
by that war. If, this early June, we pause to honor those who died in liberating
Europe, surely we should also pause to remember that the Soviet Union bore the
heaviest burden. That history is one we do not study.
How handy it is to have evil empires - to turn our thoughts away from the things
about our own nation which are wrong and could be set right. For the young who
have no clear memory of Reagan, you won't get a good view this week. The man was
cold and distant, to friends and to family. He was, I have no doubt, easy to
get along with, plea for
things it really isn't to blame for. Most of the time he is right. When one is
frustrated, blame the messenger. But in Reagan's case, the media has a heavy
burden - but then, so do the American people. After all, we have free elections,
and when we have finished rubbishing Reagan properly, we are left with the
reality he won two free elections.
I don't rejoice at his death, nor at the miserable cause of it - a fate from
which any of us might suffer if we live past our sell by date. But his death and
the pomp with which we now remember his life, all the nonsense about his
greatness, reminds me again how deep is the need for Americans to face their own
history, including the fact that even while Reagan coped with the first edges
of Alzheimer's, our tax funds were used by the criminals around him to undue a
democratic election in Nicaragua, to finance wide scale murders in El Salvador,
Guatemala, and Honduras. There is an evil Empire - we are in it. Let us
rejoice that we are here where we can do battle with it, confronting the
reality of our history with painful honesty as we struggle for an honorable future.
David McReynolds
June 8, 2004
David McReynolds is a member of the Socialist Party USA National Committee
and a longtime peace activist in the War Resisters League.
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