Since I'm currently living in Washington, it's been hard to ignore the fanfare over Reagan, though I've certainly tried. The jets that flew over his Capitol procession also flew over my house, and the ceremonies on Friday were on TVs all over the city. DC was also very quiet that day as Bush had given a lot of people the day off. Meanwhile I just held my breath and waited for it to be over.
It's not that I want to jump up and down and spit on his grave - he was a father, a husband, and he leaves behind loved ones and I'm sensitive to their loss. And I agree with what I overheard someone else say, that as a US president his death was due a certain ceremony.
My objection is to the posthumous deifying of the man. I don't want to change the money in his honor, or anything else for that matter. And I don't want to pretend that he was the greatest president ever, although I admit that his presidency did have lasting effects. Whether all of them are effects we'd like to have, though, I'm not so sure.
There are a couple of things that come to mind most strongly when I reflect on Reagan. One, that he gassed the students at the University of California at Berkeley. (He called out the National Guard as governor of California and they gassed the student protestors.) I wasn't there, but I don't need to be - nor do I need to be an alumna of the school (though I am) - in order to feel that it was a violent over-reaction to dissent. Given the degree that he's being feted for having "defeating" the Soviet Union it might be nice if we didn't forget how he acted in such a Soviet style himself.
I also question whether he really did "defeat" the Soviet Union in the Cold War. I remember being terrified when I was in elementary school that he was being so provocative that he was going to get us all blown up. It may have been an oversimplified perception, but as I've gotten older I've noticed that fifth graders, with their less convoluted outlooks, often get things more right than adults who tend to get more lost in complexities.
(Gorbachev, who I do tend to think is more deserving of honor for ending the Cold War, himself credits Reagan for helping to end it. I don't deny that Reagan played a crucial role, but it may have been more to create the political realities that allowed Gorbachev to do what he did. Perhaps if these actions had been part of a flawless design I could congratulate him for it. But my sense of the history was that it was, like so much else, more a fortunate accident.)
The thing that bothers me the most, though, is that in fourth grade he made me cry. There was some nonsense about bringing school prayer back to schools, and for a brief period this directive manifested in a moment of silence after the Pledge of Allegience. It was just a moment of silence, we were told, not a directive to pray. As if that made it ok. I knew its purpose was for a moment of Christian contemplation. I wasn't Christian, I knew it wasn't for me. It was a moment when I became an outcast in my own country. As if the fourth grade wasn't trying enough.
There are some conservatives who have lambasted critics of Reagan as being partisan in refusing to go along with the flow in feting his fictional flawlessness. It's an unfair criticism for the most part because it serves no one's interests if we can't evaluate his presidency thoroughly and honestly, to face down the mistakes if we wish to celebrate the glories.
Lest I be painted with the same critical brush, I also wish to point out that I grew up during the Reagan presidency. That I've become a Democrat is directly due to him because as I gained my political consciousness I looked around and knew there had to be a better way.
Edit 6/15/04: What did happen in 4th grade? An article in today's New York Times says that unlike Bush, Reagan didn't mix religion and politics. That's not my recollection, but perhaps I'm missing something.
The article talked about comments made by his son at the funeral, trying to differentiate Reagan and Bush's invocation of religion into politics. Of course, from my understanding, Ron Reagan Jr., whose views I generally do respect, often didn't see eye-to-eye with his dad. But I admire the son for having tried to bridge the ideological gap between them.
Edit 7/10/04: Here's something I wrote about Reagan during his presidency. I was about 11 when I wrote it.