For The Gipper

Ronald Reagan passed away today.

I grew up in a fairly left-of-center house; my dad was a teacher who would have described himself fairly accurately as a moderate Democrat; I'm convinced that if my mother hadn't been married with three kids by 1968, she'd have been a hippie.

There was a time, in my teens, before my conversion to conservatism about 20 years ago, when I'd have probably agreed with this rather infamous piece of hate-speech by Village Voice, ahem, theatre critic Michael Feingold:

o U.S. president, I expect, will ever appoint a Secretary of the Imagination. But if such a cabinet post ever were created, and Richard Foreman weren't immediately appointed to it, you'd know that the Republicans were in power. Republicans don't believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.

Reading this today, I realize what a wondrous rejoinder Reagan's classic "Well, there you go again" was to the impotent, bilious sputterings of his, and our, enemies.

As to the imagination? I refute Feingold thus: with the ordinary life and extraordinary legacy of Ronald Reagan.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, I was a senior in high school. The seeds of doubt in my left-of-center upbringing were already there; Jimmy Carter's "national malaise" speech had already affected me with a deep sense of "how dare you?" But I couldn't quite see becoming a Republican. I coudn't quite see myself supporting that man, that being so reviled by so much of my family's social circle, and so many of my own in college.

But over time, when juxtaposing the worlds and the Americas envisioned by Reagan with that of his opponents - a world of malaise versus a world of hope; a world of coexistence with the threat of nuclear oblivion versus victory over it; a world of self-abnegation before tyrants and murderers versus a world where they were negated - my resistance to the idea of being one of those people faded as I tripped upon one of the key ideas of my life:

Ronald Reagan's imagination was better than that of his opponents.

And it still is. I doubt that George Bush would say he were another Reagan - but he's carrying on that same struggle today. The struggle between those who think America whose horrors must be managed by the larger world, and those who see us as a shining city on the hill, embodying still for all our faults the best that humans can strive for in a self-government. The struggle between those who think life is best served as an unquestioning cog in a soulless machine versus spent uplifting the dignity of man the individual at home and abroad.

The struggle between perpetual snivelling versus proud acceptance of, and living up to, our nation's singular historical mission.

Quick - who were the congresspeople, authors and media figures who attacked Reagan? Answer: Who cares? Their contributions are of no more value to this world than month-old newspapers. We remember only Reagan's deft, self-effacing and yet devastating rejoinders...

...and of course, his legacy: No USSR; the greatest butchers in history, erased from the pages of history. No Berlin Wall. The threat of nuclear annihilation eliminated in less time than it took to develop the MX missile.

The twenty years since my college conversion to conservatism and today's sad milepost are littered with the intellectual corpses of many Alexander Cockburns and Michael Moores and Michael Feingolds - all left, sputtering and impotent in the wake of a movement that is, Feingold be damned, a movement of the imagination, through and through. A movement of people who dared to imagine, who dared to rip away the mental cobwebs and sweep away the dust of despair that covered the great, exceptionalist dream. And Ronald Reagan sparked that imagination.

Rest in peace, Ronald Reagan. You were the greatest president of my lifetime.

Posted by Mitch at June 5, 2004 08:32 PM