Reagan

I have a lot of memories of Reagan, like everyone who lived through eight years of his presidency. Reagan without question is central to the growth of my personal political views. The fact that I was such an ardent young Republican during the beginning of his presidency no doubt in part stands to explain the extremity of my current opposing political stance. My first real memory of Reagan was New Years 1980, when Mom and Dad were so fired up about his candidacy, and were so excited about the Republican ascendancy that they correctly predicted was going to occur along with it. This was New Year's Eve, and this was what Mom and Dad were celebrating! Yes I do come from obscenely political stock. And the Revolution happened – Reagan won, the G.O.P. recovered from the post-Nixon hangover, and the 80's began.

I remember when he was shot, I was in either seventh or eighth grade, I was in shop class, and I remember being completely shocked when fellow students, upon hearing the news, started actually cheering the assassination attempt, and saying how happy their parents would be at the news. I understood that some people didn’t like him as President, but even then, this blew my mind that people would actually be ecstatic at the prospect of his being murdered. This was more than a handful of students too, so it was a bit of a wake up call, a slap in the face to my rose-tinted version of a gloriously, happily Republican world.

Then of course I started growing up, growing (I hope) a bit wiser, joined debate and in debate started enjoying the intellectual pleasures of playing Devil’s advocate, constantly forcing myself to question my own inherited beliefs – and the closer attention I paid to actual facts and policies, the more I watched myself slipping away from the Right to the Left. Iran-Contra was probably the last nail in that particular coffin. By that point, my dread of the military-industrial complex was near fully formed, and Iran-Contra seemed to be a standing confirmation of all that that dread embodied. So for me personally, Reagan himself stands as the embodiment of misguided policy put in place with a sunny, distracting smile, and all the dangers that that implies. In the process, he also represents for me my move across the political aisle, and into at least somewhat more conscious political awareness. More ambiguously, he seems to stand for the potential for a man to be manipulated dangerously by the men surrounding him. But that’s a subject for a later time…

Of course, when Mom and Dad visited L.A. for the first time a couple of years ago, I was more than happy to drive them out to Simi Valley to the predictably hagiographic Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Simi Valley, in all of its alien arid suburban-wasteland-in-the-sun-baked-desert "glory", somehow feels like the perfect setting for the Reagan Library, but you'd have to experience it to understand. And watching those images of that charming smile, listening to his masterful rhetoric, reliving his inimitable ability to stay sunny even after having been shot, telling Nancy, "Honey, I forgot to duck," it’s easy to recall why he was so unshakeably popular. It was an interesting journey back into the sunny, unconscious idealism of my youth...