Amazon.com Widgets
Membership: Join Now : Login

Reagan-lovers are dangerously unhinged

Author:   Matt Deatherage  
Posted: 6/10/04; 1:29:24 AM
Topic: Reagan-lovers are dangerously unhinged
Msg #: 850 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 849/851
Reads: 4675

There's just no other conclusion. I don't mean you're unhinged if you supported Ronald Reagan, for politics and progress come only when people of opposite views exchange them honestly and without rancor. I've come to oppose almost everything Reagan did, but the man was President of the United States via unrigged elections, and put well over twenty years of his life into service to his state and nation, followed by ten years of a disease that he did not deserve. Ronald Reagan served his country, and the nation rightly remembers him upon his death.

I mean that a huge number of Reagan supporters come absolutely unglued, as in "men in white coats should haul them away except Reagan eliminated the public mental health budget so there are no men in white coats" unglued.

Ted Rall, perhaps the only columnist in this country absolutely unafraid to use his first amendment rights anymore, opined that Reagan should have died in prison for his illegal invasion of Grenada and for sending weapons to Iran and Afghanistan (and basically inventing the Taliban), He added, "Anyway, I'm sure he's turning crispy brown right about now."

In response, Reagan supporters, who obviously disagree with Rall, send him death threats and repeatedly call him a "communist," a "faggot," "dickless," and so on.

You may think, "Well, those are extreme reactions to an extremely uncivil opinion, you have to expect that kind of thing in rough-and-tumble politics." Oh, yeah? Try Eric Alterman, a reasonable progressive columnist, an academic and author. Dr. Alterman dared to note that Reagan was not as popular as Clinton, created genocide in Central America, presided over prosperity-slowing deficits, actually grew the government he came to office to shrink, and sat on his hands for five years while AIDS got a foothold in America.

(Even I've been taken aback at the immense anger and hatred towards Reagan from people who've lost too many friends to AIDS, but I understand why. In 1976, while Gerald Ford was president, 34 American Legion members died of a mysterious disease they contracted at a Philadelphia convention, and the government went all out to find out what it was and stopped it. By 1986, AIDS had killed 21,000 Americans, but because most of them were gay, Reagan's administration had not only done virtually nothing about it, Reagan himself waited until 1986 to acknowledge publicly that the epidemic even existed. Many people believe Reagan let tens of thousands of US citizens die, and blocked research into the disease, because it only affected fags and he just didn't care.)

Why Reagan ignored AIDS is opinion, but that he did so is fact, as are other facts that Dr. Alterman noted: he confused movies with reality, regularly indicated belief in things that simply were not true, and according to one of his own children, "He makes things up and believes them."

In return, Alterman has received thousands of E-mail messages calling him a communist, a faggot, a moron, twisted, and my favorite, a possessor of "irresponsible idealism." As with Rall's E-mail, many of the messages are full of horrible misspellings (not typos), creative grammar, and other problems that partially interfere with the writers' heartfelt attempts to let their pure hatred and anger flow.

There are really dangerous patterns in these messages, and they fit in with some of the ones we see about George W. Bush. For example, to these people, the world is black and white. If you didn't like Reagan, you are a communist. There's no middle ground.

If you thought the government should have tried to stop an epidemic that has now killed millions of Americans, you're a homosexual. If you're not a homosexual, you don't care about AIDS. Ted Rall's correspondents, in particular, seem to take great relish in imagining all the homosexual acts Rall must have participated in to care that much about AIDS.

If you disagree with invading Iraq, then you're not American and should move to another country, or, according to some of them, die.

Mind you, this is the same political movement whose spokespersons continually state that Al Gore is mentally ill for criticizing President Bush's policies, but it's clearly these folks trying to crush all criticism of Reagan who need a bit of perspective.

Let's imagine a five-step scale for US presidencies - disastrous, bad, average, good, great. History will judge Reagan slightly on the good side of average. He didn't do a lot of what he said he wanted to do, he started huge deficits, he created the other side in the War on Terror through this ridiculous insistence that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, and he resisted the end of the Cold War for far too long, as Alterman points out. But he did preside over some prosperity, and instilled national pride that (usually) stopped short of jingoism. He famously said that government was the problem, not the solution, and while that's clearly false in many cases, the role of government is something we should think about and talk about, and he helped that along.

We've done a damn sight worse than Reagan in that office, such as those who history will judge as "disastrous:" George W. Bush, Warren Harding, and Ulysses S. Grant among them. Nixon may make it up to "bad," as Carter certainly will; George H. W. Bush will be "average," and Clinton will probably be just on the average side of "good" when all is said and done in a hundred years. On the presidential scale, Reagan was neither best nor worst.

Reagan's supporters know that, and that's why they're trying so hard to get something named after Reagan in every county in the United States, with recent attempts to rename the Pentagon for him (even though National Airport and the federal government's largest office building in DC are already both named for Reagan), put him on the $10 bill, put him on the $20 bill, put him on the dime (a conservative two-fer, as it would get rid of hated creator of the social safety net Franklin D. Roosevelt, an idea Nancy Reagan has already said she opposes), and to put him on Mount Rushmore. No, I'm not kidding.

That's clearly not enough overreaching, though, as every critic of Reagan, even those just based in fact, must be shouted down, and if that doesn't work, threatened with death or accused of being homosexual. These people are not interested in the law, the constitution, equality, or anything else. You either agree with them or they want you dead. You either believe Ronald Reagan was the greatest president ever or you are a faggot trying to destroy America with your faggotry. And if you point out any fact to these people that makes Reagan look like less than George Washington, you are a liar. It's black and white - Reagan is pure good, so anything that's not pro-Reagan is pure evil, espcially facts that prove Reagan wasn't pure good. Those facts are pure evil.

Alterman wrote, "To me the most astounding thing about Reagan was his ability to convince the many members of the media and much of the country that his fantasies mattered more than reality did.  In this regard, I think we can point to his presidency as the moment the country went off the rails in terms of a willingness to address its real problems, rather than the ones we wish we had."

Right now, the USA is running its biggest budget deficit ever. We are at war in Iraq, having invaded a country that did not attack us, to remove a threat that did not exist, and everything our leaders told us about why we had to do it has been proven wrong. The government is torturing people it picked up randomly off the street and using billions of our tax dollars to prevent anyone from knowing it or stopping it when it's found out.

Our nation is less safe than it has been at any time in my lifetime, defined as the probability of attacks that kill civilians in the United States, and the government is so desperate to hide this failure that it is actually issuing false reports to cover it up. The revised terror patterns report will shift from 2003 having the "lowest number of terrorist attacks in 34 years" to "highest level in 20 years," something the State Department says was a "clerical error."

There's plenty for us to debate and work on, and yet these people writing to Alterman, Rall, and other Reagan critics obviously believe their fantasy of Ronald Reagan's sainthood matters more than reality. They're willing to go all out and issue death threats over Reagan's legacy rather than face the problems our country actually has. They can't have gray. Reagan was a great president and Clinton was the worst ever. There's no middle ground.

The good news is that only about 30% of the country, the die-hard conservatives, has this problem with reality and reasoned discourse.

The bad news is that 30% of the country has this problem with reality and reasoned discourse.

Reagan was an average president who committed significant blunders but made Americans feel good. Why that isn't enough, I'll never know.

There are responses to this message:


[ Print This Page ]