June 24, 2004
when you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!
When you're in mourning for the Prez, buy some stuff!
I get email from a place where I can buy remaindered clothes for super-cool bargains. One of my favorite skirts came from there. It was listed as the wrong color so the original catalog couldn't sell it--too many returns. But I don't mind. I like both colors--the advertized and the actual.
This is the email I got from them today:
How bizarre. It seems to me similar to selling cotton candy at a funeral. The phrase, "beautifully packaged" is used twice. Is that what I should look for in a collectible? Should I be looking for collectibles that are politically meaningful? Should they have an emotional appeal, too? Should I be touched by Grenada's stamps? Is it really a feature that they are recognized by every postal authority in the world? Isn't that what defines a postage stamp?
I suppose I shouldn't expect so much from a discount place.
I've been reading about Reagan to try to understand why I have such a knee-jerk reaction to this guy. For reasons I had been unable to explain, I felt a need to distance myself from anything about him. I always want to skewer him on his own ignorance. I want to make him less than human.
So I've read about him and listened about him on the radio. People who saw him often, who worked with him, can recite great stories. I read an article in the New Yorker by his authorized biographer, Edmund Morris. I also heard him speak on the radio. He tried very hard to be balanced. I, of course, listened and read for what was horrible.
In trying to look for goodness, I did find that he was very devoted to maintaining his ideology. His memory was impeccable. He was called a statesman.
The eternal rumor of his mental fogginess is dispelled: "In all the years I observed Ronald Reagan until 1992...I never saw any sign of cognitive dementia," wrote Mr. Morris.
My friend the Queen suggests that I don't remember Reagan the way she does. I'm younger; I don't remember how the world was. She says that he inspired her with his speeches, that what he said was real. Although I rail against this interpretation, she sticks to it.
When I read the following paragraph, though, I wondered if, God forbid, I could be wrong: Children respond to sincerety rather than to smoothness, and, having watched [ Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush] adress young audiences, I can report that Reagan was distinctly the least successful. He talked just as he did to adults...and with benign indifference to whether any child understood him, as long as the applause was general.
Is it possible? Is the Queen right? Alas, I suspect it is true. I must admit some defeat. I didn't understand what was going on. I was reponding to the man. I don't dislike Reagan because of his politics.
I just dislike him.
In The Nation this week, Jonathan Schell (who Reagan likened to his would-be assasin John Hinckley) writes, "Let us not speak ill of the dead. Instead, let's remember the nuclear-abolitionist, peace-minded Reagan forgotten by his hagiographers."
Schell says this after feuding with the fellow and his policies for years. I say good for him. A big hearted man.
I am not as kind a person as that, however. While I can remember the vague promise of a farewell to nukes and some warm happy words that would make everything okay, I also remember Star Wars and all that other junk. Therefore, I shall lift bits and pieces from the New Yorker article that make me feel righteous and indignant. It will help me sleep well tonight. These are from his authorized biographer Edmund Morris in the New Yorker.
For all their emotional awkwardness, one cannot imagine [Carter or the elder Bush] ignoring their first grandchild, as Reagan did for two years, or walking away from the brain-damaged James Brady with nothing more than a cheerful, "Hi, Jim."
Ronald Reagan is inaccurately remembered as a warm man, and I think the voice (which he lubricated with hot lemon water) had much to do with it.
A man who professes to like everybody is by definition a man who cares for nobody in particular.
Former Senator Paul Laxalt...said, "I guess I know Ronald Reagan as well as anybody. Of course, we never talk about anything personal."
Sooner or later, every would-be intinmate (including his four children...) discovered that the only human being Reagan truly cared for was Nancy. For Laxalt, disillusionment came when the President called to thank him for his campaign help in 1984, only to pause in midsentence and audibly turn over the page of a typescript...For [his son] Michael Reagan, it was the high-school graduation day his father greeted him with, "My name is Ronald Regan. What's yours?"
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Ambassador," he greeted Denis Healey, the former Defense Minister of Great Britain, while the real British Ambassador stood by. "But I've already met him, " his Excellency complained, "eleven times."
This ode to a shag rug was written by Reagan in 1961: Across from where I sit...I can see certain paths pressed into the pile of the carpet...paths leading to a chair (big footprints), to a piano (feminine nine-year-old-size prints), to a corner handy for hiding (very small prints) and of course narrow side paths (middle-size prints)...to her chair. To me, these middle-size prints act as guy wires and girders holding all the rest together. I am glad that the carpet sweeper can never erase them.
In later years, his voice acquired more weight and an enchanting hesitancy that disguised the banality of his conversation.
When I mentioned the Suez Canal, he shook his head sorrowfully and told me that it had been a mistake to give it back to the Panamanians.
Jane Wyman, his first wife, left him for boring her.
Posted by dotty at June 24, 2004 11:31 PM