RIP RWR

I was sad yesterday when I heard the news that Ronald Reagan was dying, sad when I heard he was dead. I think that Reagan was a nice person who in many ways did his best for the country, and who did some good things for it. It is heartbreaking that he spent the last ten years of his life afflicted by Alzheimer's, a hateful disease if ever there was one.

I do not think that Mr. Reagan was a good president, but I think he tried to be and I think that matters. I also think that, upon a person's death, it is reasonable to emphasize accomplishments rather than failures. Although Mr. Reagan is in many ways the man most responsible for shifting my sympathies away from the Republican party, he was certainly right when he called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire" and certainly right to exhort Gorbachev to tear down the wall, and both of these things resonated powerfully with me. If you read about him joking around after being shot, or read his letter in response to the boy who wrote him asking for a federal grant to clean his room (because his mother had referred to it as a "disaster area") you can't help but be charmed by the man. I only recently discovered that Reagan was a good writer who did much of the work on his own speeches. His hyperbolic optimism, although not something that I myself found helpful, apparently buoyed the spirits of many and helped much of the country out of a sort of malaise into which it seemed to have fallen.

Some on the right have chosen to try to deify Mr. Reagan. This is unfortunate. It's unfortunate that the right has this inclination to deify its heroes, but it's especially unfortunate given that these efforts only serve to emphasize Mr. Reagan's shortcomings as president. He was charming and avuncular and he did his best, but it is folly to pretend that he was heroic, or that he was, in the words of some on the right, "the greatest president since Jefferson." I suppose that it is inevitable that the right will be apoplectic in its outpouring of adulation for Reagan in the coming days and weeks, and the left will not. The right will then be apoplectic about the left's lack of patriotically correct apoplexy, and so on. It would be heartless to relentlessly emphasize the profound failings of the Reagan administration upon the man's death, but it would be equally irresponsible to ignore them completely. Instead, I think we should simply be sad at the death of our former President, a man who loved and served his country. Now is, perhaps, a time for emphasizing what was positive in his life and administration, recognizing that such assessments, made at times like this, are in some sense not intended to be fully accurate and objective. Maybe--just maybe--a person's death is not the occasion for perfect objectivity.