a berlin blog
|
a berlin blog |
|
|
Monday, June 14, 2004 Twilight of the IdolsI was in a Yogyakarta apartment when I heard about Reagan; another American had a text message on her phone that made her laugh out loud. What was so funny? "Oh -- my friend back home sent me an SMS. It says, 'Not sure if you care, but Reagan just died.'" My own paper, SF Weekly, has declared itself a "Reagan-free zone," which is amusing, but the ban on Reagan chit-chat can't reach as far as this blog. The man's death is a big deal, even if he languished in an Alzheimer's twilight for years. He defined the ’80s the way Eisenhower defined the 1950s; he was a litmus test in a way not even Clinton (who was smarter) proved to be. I'm afraid Matt Welch is right, pace Marc, that Reagan found a proper international pose for his time; his line against Communism was the right idea in a broad big blurry way, and now Eastern Europe thinks of him, with some justice, as a liberator. But that was his big-screen image. Underneath, there was corruption, and here's a question no Reagan idolator has answered for me: If the old actor knew what he was doing with his arms-race bluff, which scared the Russkies into accepting Gorbachev's reforms but dug a deep trench of American debt, why oh why did he spend even more money to support nasty two-bit armies fighting on the imperial Soviet frontiers? Why not let the Sandinistas run Nicaragua for a couple of years (since they were democratically elected)? Why not let Osama bin Laden starve in Afghanistan? If Reagan knew the Soviet Empire was fragile, he must have known the Red Tide wasn't rising against our shores, so there was no need to truck with hateful murderous gangs in Asia or Central America. But Reagan's people -- Casey, Poindexter, North -- waged a vicious and cowardly and un-constitutional series of small Vietnams under the president's aegis of anti-communism that were just so much bureaucratic busywork. (Anti-communism came in handy for that kind of thing.) The plain fact is that Reagan didn't know: He got lucky. Gorbachev took everyone by surprise, and the acting president's happy hands-off policy with the idiots he hired led to a lot of dangerous nonsense, like Iran-contra. There. Now this blog can be a Reagan-free zone. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:27 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment
| |
|
|
 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
