burying Caesar

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

I wish I could say that I had moral objections to Reagan and his flawed national policies from Day One of his eight-year term in office. The truth is, when Ronald Reagan came to power was inaugarated to office on January 20, 1981, I was four years old.

When I was six or seven, I wrote President Reagan a letter. I don't remember the contents of the letter, but the gist of it was probably something like this:

Dear President Reagan,
How are you? How is Mrs. Reagan? I am fine. I love America. Please write back.
Love,
Rachel

I was thrilled 4-6 weeks later when I received a bulky envelope in the mail from the white house. Inside was the standard press packet that interns send to wide-eyed, fan-letter-writing children. There was even a 5x7 print of a photo of President and Mrs. Reagan, with an automatically-drawn signature in the corner. It was impressive, in my six-year-old estimation, but not enough to make a loyal young Republican of me. (Somewhere in middle America, I'm sure there was a teenybopper with the same photo framed and hung in a place of honor on the wall next to her life-sized poster of Kirk Cameron.)

The Reagan presidency served as a backdrop for close to a decade of my formative years. Reagan was in office when I was eight or nine years old and wondering how I managed to be so lucky to have been born in the (greatest, most powerful, most prosperous -- fill in the blank) country in the world.

In that sense, I mourn for a piece of my childhood lost, but I've long since lost the naivete that made me believe that words from powerful men are always true. I didn't know that you could fight a war without ever declaring one; the only war I ever heard Reagan declare was on drugs. I didn't know that words not spoken could be as powerful as those that are. I didn't know that the most powerful man in the world could be a nothing more than a charismatic figurehead. In the days following his death, people have been throwing around superlatives like "greatest president of the twentieth century," and what I've pieced together of his actions hardly supports such hyperbole.

It was President Reagan's charisma that struck me the most as a child growing up, that during the golden years before the Iran-Contra scandal blew up, in every interview and every press event he gave, he played the part of a president -- regal, amiable, grandfatherly. When I was eight or nine, that was enough to earn my respect, if not my (rather worthless at the time) political support. It was enough to earn the admiration of a whole generation of neo-conservatives who followed him into public office, and that doesn't give me quite the warm-fuzzy feelings that "morning in America" might have.

And truthfully, when he told the world that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I felt genuinely bad, as one might for some distant cousin with a terminal disease -- disengaged, but curiously concerned. If, as Douglas MacArthur once said, "old soldiers never die, they just fade away," so then do old presidents. We were spared watching Reagan fade and grow older -- the flag-covered coffin is the last image any of us will have. It's a fitting end, perhaps, for a president for whom appearances were so vital.