Too Absent Herald

I am feeling intemperate today. I am sure that somewhere around here is a measured essay about the above-named subject–and it might yet emerge before I am done, but right now I’m going in for a screed. The intemperance will last a while, probably, and the screed will appear in daily installments.

I mentioned in my entry yesterday a candidate who travels to Philadelphia, Mississippi for his first speech after getting his party’s nomination for President. The answer is: Ronald Reagan, 1980. I’ll get back to that in a minute, as well as to the current business about the CBS miniseries, the Republican efforts to turn Ronnie into our own Lenin, the fog of imbecility that has descended over the nation about this man just as surely as he has ascended bodily into heaven, and the disgusting transformation of this nation into the greatest collection of heavily armed, victimized children the world has ever seen.

But right now I want to say one thing: Ronald Reagan is a legitimate target for criticism, for anger, for fun-poking, and even for ridicule. No more nor no less than any elected official, he–and his “legacy”–is fair game, and the season is always open. This whole “oh, be nice…he’s got Alzheimer’s for God’s sake” garbage has got to stop. He is not my uncle. He is not someone thrust upon the national stage involuntarily because his baby fell down a well. He was the President. And this is the thing: Republicans, especially now that their boy is sanitizing the Oval Office with his Honor and Integrity, cannot shut up about how the President must be strong and free to act in this time of gathering demons. I agree completely. About the strength, anyway: about the demons, more later on. I want my President to be strong, to act, to think, to be tough.

A window on the thinking of the Republicans was thrown open a while back during what passed for a debate over the release of documents from the Reagan and Bush I Administrations. The defense for not releasing these things amounted to this: we have to keep these, and all other such Executive documents secret, in order to free the President and his advisors from the “chilling effect” that would descend upon them all should they have it in the backs of their minds that their words would one day be knowable to the electorate. Good God!

I am not kidding when I say that I want a strong Executive. And I am certainly not kidding when I say that I do not want my Executive filled with a bunch of pantywaists afraid to speak up out of fear that 12 or 16 years down the road, we’ll read what they say.

Let’s take Nixon: we’ve got lots of ephemeral stuff to read and listen to, and do they make up an embarrassing or unflattering portrait of a dysfunctional Administration? Of course they do, because Nixon was a Goddamn crook. The things he and his boneheads said and did are embarrassing because they ought never have been said and done. We have jails for a reason, and a Chief of Staff fits into an orange jumpsuit just as well as a crackhead does.

We also have a ton of documents and recorded phone calls from Lyndon Johnson’s White House, and some of those things are rather unflattering and even embarrassing, but I am grown-up enough to appreciate that what I am dealing with is a man, an honest-to-God man with an astonishing complexity who struggled with himself, his advisors, and his nation’s history (in this sense, Nixon resembles his predecessor, in his crooked way). And these documents and recordings themselves are the instruments of my maturity: I learn about what it is to be President from reading and hearing them. The current Republicans with authority to decide things like this are following their preferred path to turn us all into ignorant children, by depriving us of these historical lessons. Either the folks now in the Executive are weak-minded and weak-spirited before their task and our history, or, given that many of them were around for the Reagan and Bush I jobbery, they are afraid of what the law might have to say about those things they want us to not know. If you are afraid to say something to your President, get the hell out of the White House. Go sing Kumbaya like Bill Bennet says, or take up the life of crime in the private sector where it belongs. I am sure that Dick Cheney can write you a good recommendation letter.

Philadelphia Story
I haven’t gotten off track. All of these things are part of the package, since our current national imbecility got its head of steam up with Ronald Reagan driving the train. I could start anywhere, but today I begin in Mississippi.

Every so often there is an eruption among people who write about politics over Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in August, 1980. Last time, by my count, was last year during the Great Trent Lott Wreck of Aught-Two. People who call themselves conservatives, some of whom actually are conservative, write pieces for the National Review and post things on the American Enterprise Institute website, all defending Reagan’s appearance there. They ridicule people who call themselves liberals, some of whom actually are liberal, for their calling attention to this appearance.

The Republicans are all over the board in their defense. They say things like “Liberals say the speech was in Philadelphia, but it was actually at the fairgrounds, seven miles out of town.” Is it inflammatory to say, Yes, but Chaney and Goodman and Schwerner were killed nine miles out of town? It might be. I’ll wear that shoe this time, because I want to prove a point, a point that many have made before and yet never seems to get through the dense calcic deposits around the brains of those who defend Reagan’s speech: When you stand up in front of a crowd of Mississippians in 1980, sixteen years after the murders (1964 is closer to 1980 than 2003 is) and say “I believe in states’ rights” the echo off the hog barn sounds an awful lot like Ross Barnett’s 1962 speech about how he looooooves Mississippi. “…I loooove her heritage! I loooove her CUStoms!…” Is it racist to love Mississippi? Of course not. Is it racist to shout that you love her heritage, at halftime during an Ole Miss football game, in the midst of a crisis wherein some Mississippians will die in a riot over a single Black man who wants to get a PhD at said school? Possibly. The point is not whether Governor Barnett was a racist, and whether or not Reagan was racist interests me about as much as whether or not Shakespeare was gay. The point that interests me is that Ronald Reagan spoke before a crowd of people from the town just outside of which one of the most notorious and race-charged murders of the last century happened. And I don’t care how many conservative intellectual elites say differently, when you say “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi in August 1980, at the very least you do not mind if some of those people gathered before you understand you to mean “white people have been persecuted long enough”.

At the very least, Ronald Reagan was willing to let ignorant and fearful people feel ok about being ignorant and afraid, and vote accordingly. I don’t care how many hacks build their defense of this disgusting thing on assertions that states’ rights is a sound Federalist principle, because there are states’ rights, and there is “states’ rights”. One of them involves principle, and the other involves poll taxes, cross-burning and murder.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2003 at 10:43 am and is filed under the small stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.