Not to be too crass, but I can't help but think that our country is suffering from a disease like the one that just took the life of President Ronald Reagan. Judging from the coverage on the television, in the print media and on the radio, it would seem that Reagan was the best American president of the past century. This simply isn't how I remember it.
Reagan certainly had clear picture of the direction he wanted to take our country. And, history seems to have given his policies much of the credit for the end of the cold war. However, many people aware of the real story within the Soviet Union, would argue that it was a broken system that was falling apart perfectly well on its own, with or without any outside support from Reagan and his defense spending policies.
Beyond personal charisma, Reagan left an awful lot to be desired from a US president and we should remember this. This cartoon portrays the Reagan presidency a little closer to how I remember it. Download remembering_reagan.jpg
I am reminded of a passage from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
"If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
Let us therefor agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
Please be clear that my intent is not to compare Reagan to Robespierre. That would be a horrible comparison, and its flaws would invalidate the legitamacy of my thesis.
Because of the parallels that people are drawing between the current president and the nostalgia-tainted image of president Reagan, I think that it becomes increasingly important to remember the real presidency. Reagan may have been a great guy, but that doesn't mean that he was a great president.
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