Month: June 2004

So…you might’ve missed this little story in all the D-Day hullabaloo, but apparently former President Ronald Reagan died. Due to my cable issues, I’ve thankfully missed much of the canonization and hagiography of the past few days, although I’m sure the GOP will repeat it all at their upcoming convention anyway.

I know it’s bad form to speak ill of the recently deceased, so I’ll let others handle straightening the record about Ronnie’s not-so-stellar presidency. But, given all the revisionist history out and about at the moment, I do think this is a good time to consider the thesis of Reagan’s America by Garry Wills:

Much of Garry Wills’s argument in Reagan’s America can be encapsulated by George Costanza’s advice to Jerry Seinfeld, prior to Jerry’s being polygraphed about his Melrose Place viewing habits: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Over and over again, Wills scrutinizes the tales and myths told by Reagan about himself in his private speeches, public addresses, and autobiography, and finds them to be embellished, exaggerated, and – more often than not – patently false. And therein lies his uncanny appeal for so many people: Reagan’s myths are America’s myths…As Wills puts it, “the truth about [America’s] actual behavior, whether on the old frontier or the new, is as threatening to our sense of identity as the terrorist himself.” (452) And because Reagan believes so thoroughly in his own American myths, many Americans could join him in believing them as well…[Wills writes,] “Visiting Reaganland is very much like taking children to Disneyland…It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better is one immunized against any troubling cursions of a real [American past.] If capitalist ‘conservatism’ canoot be rooted in the real past it works to obliterate, then it will invent a deracinating past, a nostalgia for the new, a substitute history to lull us in the time machine that travels on no roads, reaching goals no one could plan.” (459-460) In sum, “Reagan gives our history the continuity of a celluloid Mobius strip. We rides its curves backwards and forwards at the same time, and he is always there.” (440) Put differently, the appeal of Ronald Reagan for so many is that he offers us a simulacrum of American history that is both appealingly mythic and appallingly untrue.

Well, at the very least, the effusive eulogizing going on right now may help topple barriers to stem-cell research. And, no matter what one’s political persuasion, I think we can all agree that helping to eliminate scourges like Alzheimer’s Disease would make a wonderful asset to Ronald Reagan’s legacy.