June 8, 2004 by lonbud

Death Of A Salesman

I was having a perfectly fine weekend, one of those clear, windswept spates of the Northern California year when a high yellow sun just makes up for the frigid energy sweeping down from Alaska and you can feel the hairs on your skin prickle in shirtsleeves. Then I heard Ronald Reagan died.

I imagined the warm and fuzzy reminiscences to come from the print and television media, and the wistful nostalgia for The Man Who Saved The World we’ve seen the past few days.

I got to thinking about the truth of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, about his willful ignorance of Saddam Hussein’s and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist potential; about his shameless embrace of some of the world’s most corrupt and bloodthirsty despots ­the Marcoses, Duartes, and Duvaliers; about his willingness to pretend the apartheid of the South African regime had no meaning.

I fumed to recall his duplicity in championing smaller, less intrusive government while presiding over the largest, most costly federal bureaucracy to date, and I wondered why, even at this remove, the vast majority of people seem unwilling to hold his leadership accountable for producing the greatest number of government officials ever to be jailed, indicted, or investigated for misconduct, malfeasance in office, and/or criminal activity.

I cringed to think of how his candidate for vice-president, George Bush the Elder, made a secret deal with Iranian militants to continue holding Americans hostage until after Mr. Reagan had a chance to unseat Jimmy Carter for the Presidency in 1980. Was dumfounded to explain the failure of our Constitutional processes to rectify his administration’s begetting a completely lawless, unchecked, shadow government that sold arms to Iran, used the money to support terrorism in Latin America, and implicated our country’s own intelligence agencies in an explosion of drug use among the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

Mr. Reagan presided over a domestic Savings & Loan industry scandal that cost American taxpayers many billions of dollars ­back when dollars were worth something- and committed the country to a course of developing a space-based missile defense system that, today, more than twenty years hence, continues to drain unconscionable resources from the Federal budget while providing no actual defense against an enemy that no longer exists.

I was reeling from these bilious flashbacks when I stepped out of the shower and noticed an inspirational quotation we have hanging on the bathroom wall. It speaks of having compassion for all beings and developing the heart, and I delighted to find a way to finally accommodate the entirety of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States of America.

In my heart, without benefit of knowing him personally, I can accept that Mr. Reagan was a kind and decent man, that he believed in his own heart the goodness and rightness of his every official act, that he was convinced a pure, indomitable American spirit would create and sustain a rising standard of Life for all peoples of the planet.

Surely he alone is not to blame that such is not the case.

The great irony of seeing Mr. Reagan in that light lies in his death. For how could such a good, courageous, visionary man be made to suffer the ignominy and horror of a decade of dying that is the curse of Alzheimer’s Disease? If the Buddhists are correct and every pain and hardship, every trial and tribulation, burden and suffering endured in this lifetime purifies one’s cosmic, karmic debt, Mr. Reagan has just made it a little ways toward becoming the mythic character history will try and relate.