Posted 5:56 AM by Paul
Remembering Reagan

Reagan died a few a few days ago, an event that if had it happened in the mid 80s would have prompted wild street parties and days of feasting in the kind of circles I knocked around in at the time. But twenty years later it seems a bit churlish to celebrate the demise of a 93 year old who spend the last 10 years racked by Alzeimers completely unaware that he was once the most powerful man on Earth.

There was a predictable hagiography of the "man who defeated Communism". The jury is still out on that one as it may have collapsed without any help because it was so fundamentally crap. Besides, 1.1 billion Chinese live under a regime which claims Mao and Marx as it's ideological forebears. So, maybe Communism is not dead just comatose.

There were a few dissenting voices from the "wasn't he a great President" including my good friend Carol Leimroth, a peripheral American living in Paris. She forwarded me a series of satirical cartoons showing a cross section of the American public commenting on their late president. Here are a few of the captions.

- He tripled the national debt but he had such charisma

- He supported apartheid but was always personable

- He backed Saddam but made us feel good about ourselves

- He crushed workers rights but he was someone you could sit down and have a beer with

- Star Wars turned out to be an expensive fantasy but he had such infectious optimism

- He traded arms for hostages and diverted money to drug running death squads, but he never lost his sunny disposition

- He looked the other way when Salvadorean allies raped American nuns but he had the self-deprecating humour

Predictably Margaret Thatcher was at the funeral, as was Reagan's old adversary Gorbachev. This reminded me of George Orwell's observation in 1984 that the ruling elites of East Asia, Eurasia and Oceania were not at war with each other but at war with their own populations.

Blair was there. He never misses an opportunity to rub shoulders with the big boys. Putin and Chirac did not attend as they were otherwise engaged - running their countries I suppose. A Tory columnist reminded his readers that Blair had supported a parliamentary motion in the 80s "condemning America's evil campaign in Nicaragua" Well at least he got something right when he was young. Now Blair and many of his acolytes are desperately over-compensating for their youthful radicalism, by supporting all things Neo-Conservative coming out of the White House. It as if the whole of Central America was simply a backdrop to their personal political journey from the arrogant Left to the arrogant Right. Anyone disagreeing with them is dismissed as indulging in "fashionable anti-Americanism" . This is quite rich in so much as anti Americanism was at it's most fashionable when they were doing it.

I wonder what they would have made of the Mary Knoll nun from the Mid-West who I sat next to on the plane from Managua to Houston in 1994. A tiny woman in her late 60s she was on her way back home to celebrate her older sister's 40th wedding anniversary. They had played in a big jazz band together (she showed me some photos) just after the war. She told me that she gave up music when she "got the call". She wasn't talking about a telephone conversation with the bishop. She left for Central America to serve God and the Poor and big sister got married and raised a family. Apparently, they didn't talk much about politics and she revealed a little shamefacedly that big sister had supported "that Ronald Reagan"

She told me how ashamed she was of her Government and they way they had supported the Contras, but she remained optimistic.

" If only people back home knew about the terrible things that are done in their names maybe they would turn against Bush. The Sandinistas did some bad things but I've met Daniel Ortega and I do believe that he his heart is in the right place. Besides they brought running water and electricty to our village for the first time."

Finally she touched on the rape and murder of some of her sister nuns in El Salvador and a dark shadow seemed to cross her face. But like Reagan she never lost her sunny disposition. Her faith in God and in people was unshakeable.

I wonder if she is alive? If she is dead, my guess is that she is lying in a simple grave in northern Nicaragua, her funeral attended by her sisters and local people who had been touched by her kindness - understanding that not all Americans were like - "that Ronald Reagan"