Dichroic Reflections

I do seem to be writing about him, after all

My first reaction to Reagan's death, actually, was , "Oh, I thought he'd died a while back." Oops. My second one was pretty much the same as my reaction to everything else I've read about him in the past twenty years or so: "What's all the fuss about?"

I didn't particularly like him when he was President (I wasn't old enough to vote either time) but I can't say I hated him. He really was a great President .... if you were rich, straight, male, and not all that concerned about people who weren't. He never struck me as being all that bright, but that's not a major flaw in a chief executive if you have advisors who are. Unfortunately Reagan had this tendency to appoint people who either ended up getting indicted or who suborned the purpose of their agencies. Ham Jordan springs to mind, and James Watt.

Trickle-down economics strikes / struck / has stricken me as cruel: how long were poor people supposed to wait for that trickle to drop? And isn't it ironic that they are the ones who can't afford to wait? Still, as with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, I don't believe Reagan was being malicious so much as oblivious to the pain of people whose problems were unlike his. That can do as much damage and cause as much hurt in the end and neither attribute has any business being part of a United States President, but still it's harder for me to get as upset over obliviousness as I do over malice.

I don't think Reagan should have gotten as much credit as he did for the fall of communism, just because I don't think any President has that much effect on the world. (Er, any President with enough of the rudiments of honor to be bound by our system of checks and balances, anyhow.) Still it seems likely that his influence and resolve at least helped.

I disagreed with a lot of his positions; I'm more concerned to make sure that a rising tide really does lift all the boats, not just the rich people's yachts, and that our freedoms extend to even those of us choose not to live like the Cleaver family. I don't think Reagan would have disagreed with those things so much as just not had them on his radar. I'm frankly baffled by some claims I've seen that he was one of our greatest Presidents. The people who knew Reagan are saying that he was a good man with a strong and unyielding code of morals whose Presidency was an epoch in this century. All in all that's not a bad epitaph.

And though I'm still a little baffled by all the fuss, well.... he could have been a lot worse.

Posted by dichroic at June 7, 2004 01:55 PM