2004-06-10 12:03 PM
Return of the Reagan Youth
With all of the fawning over the recently-late Ronald Reagan, I'm feeling like the only person in the country who wanted to drive down to Simi Valley to pay my respects... while delivering a surreptitious jab to the corpse with a sharp stick to make sure he's really gone.
When I picked up my Sunday paper, I expected a front-page story about Reagan's death, and maybe four pages in the middle of the news section. But he got a full-page photo and an entire commemorative section. A section! This is in the Bay Area, people, where the Reagan hate was almost as intense as the Bush hate is now. I mean, it could be a Hearst thing, but you'd think that they wouldn't run a section like that unless people were going to read it. Where did all the Reagan love come from, anyway?
This cartoon nailed many of the reasons people didn't like Reagan. Let's not forget several others: the cutting off federal funding of the mental health system, which contributed to growing homelessness starting in the 1980s; the fact that he didn't even mention the word AIDS until almost the end of his term, let alone do anything to help; his long-standing hostility towards environmentalism, embodied by his choice of secretary of the interior; and Shrub's new friend, trickle-down econ omics.
But it took a few days for anyone to even mention that Reagan was not universally loved. Instead, we got uncritical stories about his legacy, an interview with his worshipful undertaker, and my personal favorite, this column, in which the columnist defines herself, without a hint of irony, as one of the "Reagan youth." (I remember people using that term around that time, and it wasn't intended as a flattering comparison.)
But Reagan is dead, liberal's become a dirty word, and selective nostalgia is in. Remember when our president thought welfare recipients drove Cadillacs and that ketchup should be classified as a vegetable for school lunch programs? Good times, good times.