About a week before Ronald Reagan died, I found myself watching Evita on TV during a lazy afternoon. When the funeral preparations began seven or eight days later, it was hard not to watch the events unfolding on CNN, MSNBC, CSPAN, ABC News, Fox News, PBS, the Discovery Channel, the Weather Channel and Crazy Willy’s News Hour on the city local access channel without feeling like I had just stumbled into a rerun.
Evita opens with masses of mourners pouring into the Casa Rosada to view their beloved leader’s corpse as it lies in state. Citizens throng to the building, heaping it with flowers and weeping as they mournfully tango in back alleys. Here in America in the New Millennium, we had got the same thing. Well, minus the tango. The body of the President was flown to Washington after laying in state in California and even though the general public wasn’t allowed to view the flag-draped coffin in the capitol rotunda until 9:00pm, the line to get into it started just after 5:00 in the morning. Some were there as honest mourners, grieving for a president that they whole-heartedly loved for his policies. Others were there by not-so-happy accident, vacationing in the nation’s capitol and taking in the show while they’re there. There were politicos and pollsters, presidents and priests, the passive and pro-active. And through it all was a town dolling itself up for the final farewell of an old flame.
America loves its funerals more than anything, and Washington is the crown prince of the death parade. Riderless horses, boots turned backwards in the stirrups; It’s all part of the show really, and no one gets a bigger curtain call than the star, the President of the United States.
It is in our nature to be self-congratulatory and to make everything an event. (Witness how many awards shows there are on television from February through April.) We love a good funeral for the same reason we love watching real people make a fool of themselves on reality television: it makes us glad that it isn’t us. When someone dies we throw controversy to the wind and embrace that person fully. In some ways, this tendency to ignore the bad and focus on the good is one of our most endearing qualities as a people. It shows that we are forgiving, that we love and honor both our heroes and our anti-heroes. The American penchant for simplification is our greatest gift to our fallen brawlers, our old generals that don’t die but just fade away. Of course, it also allows us to sweep the ugly parts of a person under the rug and ignore the damage done to the rest of the house.
Being President comes with a high price. We’ll let you be the ruler of the free world, but you’ve got to pay us back with one bitchin’ goodbye party. Poor Ronald is the first one in a while to live up to his end of the bargain completely by returning one last time to the city he is inexorably linked with. Washington hasn’t had a presidential funeral in 30 years, all previous presidents since Johnson in 1973 having been too inconsiderate to want to enjoy the media circus from the comforts of their own home states. And so, Washington takes its opportunity to take notice. Main roads get shut down. Banners are draped. Crepe bows are tied on the necks of the public doves. Traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
So why in all this pomp and circumstance was I left feeling a bit like Evita’s Che, sitting alone in an empty movie theatre contemplating “Oh What a Circus” it all was? This time, America, not Argentina, had gone to town over the death of an actor called Dutch.
To say that there are similarities between The Gipper and Madonna’s portrayal of the infamous Argentine First Lady is to say that Tiger Woods is sort of a golfer. The resemblance is especially obvious while watching news reports of mourners thronging to the Capitol building and Presidential Library in Simi Valley and reading in the Washington Post about how groundskeepers for the Capitol Building have been going crazy planting last minute flowers in an effort to give the late President a good send-off. When Eva Peron died, the flowers piled more than six feet upon the walls.
Even the real-life stories of Ronnie and Eva are companions. Both began their lives in the public eye as performers. Both were regarded as being pretty bad at this and it was suggested to both of them that they pursue other fields, although both continued with some success in movies and radio. Their valleys turned into peaks as they moved from acting to politics, arguably not a great leap. The big difference from there was how they left one scene and moved to the other. Ronnie was practically forced out of his acting career after that monkey incident in the 1951 film Bedtime for Bonzo and ended up as Governor of California. Eva took advantage of her connections and married an up-and-coming general. They both enjoyed a long career as celebrated public speakers, policy makers and controversial leaders.
But what of the Che Guevaras? In Evita, a young man modeled after the famous Argentinian revolutionary narrates the story for us, taking us from Eva Duarte’s humble beginnings in the poor village of Los Toldos all the way through her triumphant inauguration speech from the Casa Rosada’s balcony to her eventual losing battle with uterine cancer in only her mid-30s. And yet in the face of such a sweeping life, Che the narrator is hardly able to conceal his anger and bitterness towards the anti-heroine. “The Queen is dead, the King is through,” he sings almost gleefully upon her death. “She’s not coming back to you.” Where is this archetype in the Ronnie version of the story? The unfortunate thing is that such outcry is almost entirely missing. The modern Ches now find themselves publishing articles in online journals, not in the public forum. (For the record, I don’t consider myself a Che Guevera in any sense, although I do think motorcycles are kinda cool.) To criticize was deemed insensitive and un-American and every would-be naysayer to the Reagan Administration had better just keep their opinions to their electronic, non-mainstream readership.
When we ignore a facet of someone (such as the opposition to their leadership decisions, for example), we allow ourselves to lose sight of everything that made that person fascinating. The silence surrounding Reagan’s faults casts pallor over whatever triumphs he garnered because it presents a false picture, a caricature of a life. We could memorialize him, turn him into a stone statue to be placed in sculpture garden or at least an animatronic stage in Disney World but without a counter-point, he will never be anything more than the man who loved Jelly Beans and jokingly told the nation that he was bombing Russia before realizing that the microphone in front of him was turned on.
Ronald Reagan enjoyed high poll numbers during his time in office and many regard him as one of the best presidents of the 20th century. One woman quoted in the Washington Post extended his executive privilege to making him part of the American icon-osphere when she included him as the third part of an old American triumvirate. To this woman, things are now “as American as mom, apple pie and Ronald Reagan.” He’s no longer a part of the world. What has made the man has transcended into something else, which means that he’s no longer real. And thus, his image starts to change. The woman in the Washington Post proves this more than anything. She isn’t mourning Ronald Reagan, she’s mourning Ronald Reagan. It isn’t the man, it’s the cartoon. It’s the impression of Reagan as the Conservative bastion, the Great Communicator, the president who relied on a psychic.
It’s difficult for me to understand how Reagan can be loved as president. My mother was a schoolteacher who was an opponent of many of his attitudes towards education. As an adult, I take issue with almost all of his policies. I was three years old on the day he took office, eleven on the day he left it and a Democrat every day in between. In primary school, my teacher held a mock election to illustrate to all of us eager learners at Galewood Elementary how the electoral process worked. It could have been because my own parents were avowed liberals themselves or maybe it was because in the menagerie of presidential portraits that lined her room, Mrs. Milligan’s Jimmy Carter was significantly larger than both Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but regardless of the motivation I distinctly remember voting for Mondale. To illustrate the concept of a secret ballot, we all kept our heads down on our desks and raised our hands to indicate a vote. In keeping with national trends and the fact that I grew up in a very conservative little town where I’m sure most of my fellow classmates weren't listening to NPR with their parents over breakfast each morning, Mondale walked in shame from the first grade classroom that day and lost by an overwhelming majority, both at Galewood Elementary and America itself.
What’s even more difficult for me to understand is how it is that the country can whitewash his tenure in the Oval Office so neatly. Reagan effectively ignored the concerns of most Americans during his presidency. Iran-contra and Reagonomics are issues that have seen their share of ink, but they are not the only ones. Total number of Americans diagnosed with AIDS by 1988: 36,000. Total number of times Ronald Reagan said the word “AIDS” in public before 1987: 0. Want to unionize? Not during the Reagan Administration. The firing of the LAX air traffic controllers is only one example of his aversion to the masses and their crazy commie idea of organizing so that they can’t be forced to work 16+ hour days and not be paid overtime. (The fact that the only airport within Washington D.C. airspace is now called Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is no small affront to many of those fired LAX employees.) The wall in Berlin was no more not long after he asked Mr. Gorbachev to tear it down, but a lot of walls remained standing in the United States. And by the way, how’s that War on Drugs coming?
Of course, there are excuses for his behavior. He was old, people argue. (He was rounding 70 at the time of his inauguration.) It was harder for him to talk about diversity. He wasn’t raised in a time where that stuff was talked about. This is true, but unless we’re talking about the AARP Executive Board, a president is not elected to make decisions for only the over-60 crowd. A president must lead all the citizens of the country, not just the chosen few. Ronald Reagan’s faults lie not in being an inhuman monster, but in the fact that he, like many other men who held his job before and after him, failed to understand that there are people who are not as privileged as he. The Greeks called it Hubris. We call it “Dude, what are you thinking?!”
It’s not all bad, however. There were significant accomplishments during his time. The Cold War was effectively ended, although it can be argued that saying that it was Reagan’s doing is like giving a painter credit for the sunset. We got to add a lot of cool phrases to the American lexicon. I love the imagery of the “shining city on the hill”, even if I think it’s disturbing that the city had to steep itself in so much muck in order to shimmer like it does. And who doesn’t want to swell with pride when thinking about America’s “rendezvous with destiny”?
During Reagan’s time the United States had a clear enemy that we could blame our problems on: The Soviets, the Evil Empire. As history moved forward, our enemies became more secretive, less obvious. We only have to look to Hollywood to realize how much easier it is to fight when the villain is obvious, dressed all creepily in black and kidnapping ingénues to tie them to railroad tracks. It was comforting at the time to know who our villains were. If we knew where they were coming from, we could surely protect ourselves from them. Ronald Reagan helped provide us with that sense of security. And all this is to say nothing of the boundless optimism he is credited with.
Only two months before his body was brought to the rotunda, I myself stood there as part of an organized tour of the Capitol. Watching on TV the coffin laying in the same spot where I stood, I remembered the tour guide reflecting on how so few Presidents had actually lain in state. I was reminded of the sorrow of the passing of leaders – John John saluting his father, the sad Victorian train traversing the distance one last time between Washington and Illinois carrying the body of the esteemed Mr. Lincoln, the symbolic coffins representing the dead astronauts of the space shuttle Challenger. The tragedy that lies in Reagan’s death, aside from that of the John Donne variety, is that his passing is more indicative of the end of a certain type of politics, at least for now. Partisanship, aside from all campaign promises to the contrary, is the order of the day. Our current presidents can not expect to have trust or friendship across the aisle. Just as there will be no more Ronald Reagan, there will also be no more Tip O’Neil. And American democracy is the worse for it.
