Exit Stage Left

Ronald Wilson “Dutch” Reagan, 1911-2004

by Shelton Hull

Ronald Reagan lived through 16 presidencies, among them his own, which ran from 1981-1989. Two cancer surgeries and an assassin’s bullet failed to stop him. At one time in my youth there was speculation about who would win a battle to the death between Reagan and Jason Voorhees; I regret to say that, at the time, I failed to give the 40th President his due.

The news of his death reached the population just after four pm on June 5th, and the hype followed immediately. It is worth noting, though, that despite having had ten years to prepare for the moment we all knew would come some day, broadcast media’s coverage was awful– the same old clips and phrasings familiar to casual observers: “tear down this wall!”, “slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God”, etc. No attempts were made to flesh out the man’s life or legacy beyond the same talking points we’ve heard in the 15 years since he left office, and that’s a shame because Ronald Reagan had a very interesting and thoroughly-documented life– a life that those too young to remember his reign would surely find entertaining.

One of my earliest memories is at age six, riding shotgun in my mother’s green Pontiac LeMans (ooh, if I had that now!) with my head out the window, yelling “Vote for Reagan!” to other motorists who surely greeted the interjections with a mixture of head-patting amusement and bizarre-world confusion. I may have been the only afroed Jesse Jackson fan to support Reagan that year; I had little political consciousness at that point, but he was a great TV President and his opposition was so far outclassed in 1984 that even a child (prodigy) like me could recognize.

I now understand why my instinct led me in that direction: the Democrats should have nominated Jackson to articulate the concerns of the black community, which was then being assaulted by narco-gangs from one side and police from the other, but instead internal racism led them to nominate Walter Mondale, a decent guy who took one of the worst beatings in the history of American politics and precipitated his party’s slide toward irrelevance. It’s one thing to do the best you can and come up short, but still another to not even try– a lesson Democrats have failed to learn 20 years later.

Obviously, a lot of really shady stuff occurred under Reagan’s watch, most of which he never admitted knowledge of. As time went on, his critics seemed to prefer the idea that the Alzheimer’s had taken hold during Iran-Contra to the idea that Reagan lied under oath. The truth is irrelevant now: Reagan is dead, and most of the key figures from that time have been promoted under Presidents Bush “41” and “43.”

Commentators have suggested that that Bush “43” takes more after Reagan than his father, which is true at least cosmetically. Conservatives say this as a compliment, but liberals are implying that both were sort of absentee Presidencies. Either way, the meme really functions to the benefit of Bush “41,” whose continuous role in the nation’s elite, before and after the “Reagan-Bush era” has been so seamless that it almost defies characterization, and thus remains obscured and unexamined by pundits. For his part, Poppy praised his former boss for his “many contributions to the New World Order.”

Reagan’s biggest mistake as President was probably his handling of the AIDS epidemic. His failure to say the word publicly for several years in which the disease spread like wildfire around the nation effectively robbed a substantial portion of the population of the kind of calm that his voice could project under even the most trying of times (a trait subsequent Presidents have not been able to duplicate yet). However, the real failure was in the execution of policy– namely, failing to contain the outbreak at its earliest stages. Quarantine? That is the question, and surely a great many gay activists would have balked at the very suggestion, while agitating for all manner of panaceas. A quarantine of the initial cases in New York and California may have saved millions of lives; instead, some combination of fear of blowback and homophobia caused his administration to react slowly, delicately, which allowed the disease to incubate as its true nature defied definition within responsible medical circles.

It was this single critical error that colored my attitudes toward the Reagan legacy more than any other aspect of what is publicly-known about those times. I wrote an online column about three years ago, after hearing that he had broken his hip in a fall. My rhetoric was harsh and abusive, reactionary in the worst of ways– as the thousands of words of negative responses made clear. Not that they were right, or that I was wrong, but the reality is that people are made by systems just as much as the reverse, and to put an excess of blame onto a single person for what was a basically systemic flaw was an oversimplification of the sort young people tend to make. But all that is in the past, and we shall speak no more ill of the dead. As Bush “43” said, Reagan’s job is done.