ginandtacos - shut up and drink the gin

I love that quote, stolen from Casablanca, because it illustrates the immutable truth that the only thing in life that's as certain as death is the fact that, upon death, intrinsic evaluations of the life of the deceased become significantly more positive. Maybe it's just an instinct we are programmed with, a tool to help us cope with something we can't possibly understand. Or maybe it's a subconscious effort to try to score some positive karma in light of the fact that every person's death brings us closer to the realization of our own.

That given, what can we really make of the life of Ronald Reagan? He was deified by a large part of the population in life, villified by the rest, and pretty much universally lauded in death. Finer minds than ginandtacos.com have engaged in analyzing the effectiveness of the presidents, but objectively, Reagan can be summed up easier than most.

The 80s, yuppie, Wall Street, "greed is good" culture that is blamed on (or responsible for?) Reagan is something that is woefully misunderstood by most people our age. The late 60s and 70s were not a good time for America. We spent 6 years and 10,000 lives getting our asses kicked in Vietnam. The 60s idealism burned out as quickly as it started. The arab oil embargo proved that the fate of our economy is not necessarily in our hands. We had a president abdicate after committing a number of felonies and lying about it. He was followed by an incompetent unelected president and a milquetoast liberal who let terrorists push us around.

In short, this was a country badly lacking in self-confidence. Reagan provided that. What seems to contemporary students or revisionist historians to be idle boasting, jingoism, or puerile macho swagger on Reagan's part was in reality exactly what the country needed. "Malaise" was Carter's apt description of what had settled over America. "The Great Communicator" was not so much of a President as he was an effective and timely group counselor. Like the Gipper he memorialized in film, he was less noteworthy for his accomplishments than for his inspirational, if syrupy, halftime speech just when the team was ready to give up.

In his positive column, we can list Reagan's tough-guy attitude towards the emerging Islamic anti-American sentiment in the middle east, his charisma, and his steely-eyed poker bluff with "Star Wars" which upped the ante in the arms race to the point that the Soviets folded. Not enough credit is given to the man for, in the words of Clinton, "restoring to Eastern Europe the right to control their destiny as nations and people". Some might argue that Communism collapsed under its own weight, but it is foolish to pretend that the (near-xenophobic) anticommunist stance taken by Reagan was - with a little help from an unemployed shipbuilder from Gdansk - the death knell of the corrupt regimes behind the Curtain.

In the minus column, we can see the negative effects of Reagan's third-grade (at best) macroeconomic policy, which created a rolling avalanche of debts, the effects of which we have not even begun to feel the worst. His misguided belief that "Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem" weakened almost every regulatory agency that we had worked for a century to put in place. Regulation is the problem? We lived for 150 years in this country without regulation in industry, and the country was run by robber barons. Life expectancy was 20 years shorter and the workweek was 6 1/2 days long. Lastly, he engaged in shortsighted foreign policy that saw anti-communism at all costs as the sole objective. Battling the Russians in Afghanistan was such a high priority that no one asked, "Gee, I wonder if these Mujahadeed guys we're arming to the teeth are a little nutty?"

Maybe the lesson to be learned is that the national discourse on politics has devolved to such a level that we can no longer remember how to see things in any colors but black and white. It's a political Madonna-Whore complex. Either Reagan was God or Satan. The life of Reagan, upon which everyone is now reflecting, puts the current administration's utter lack of worth in context. Gone are the days when we can have "Reagan Democrats" or look at someone's merits along with their faults. One is either, in the words of George W., "with us, or with the terrorists". Black or white. Either join the Fuck You Fascists or the No, Fuck You Democrats.

Maybe we can get back to the point where we can say "There are good and bad points in each political perspective", but the way that politics have devolved since 1994 (Thanks, Newt!) I think the only actions that could bring about that outcome are a civil war or - my preferred solution - a comet hitting the Earth with such force as to wipe out life as we know it and start over.