Letter from a friend

 

My reply:

Thanks for including me in this mailing, and since you must know I'm not going to be too sympathetic to your point, I interpret that as an invitation to explain: what gives? Reagan great?  Much less: "greatest"?  Are the masses really twits, or is it the intellectuals who have thinks upside down?  As usual, Orwell supplies inspiration that applies to the elites-of-the-left's brainless disdain, even hatred, of Reagan and Reaganism (i.e. pitiless anticommunism, relentless pro-Americanism):  "Some things are so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them - no ordinary person could be so stupid."

   The first thing to say is that any list of any greats in any subject should refrain from naming them in order.  I always prefer a top 5 or 10 "Best of" sort of sorting, because it is futile to try to compare or rank indispensable people of different eras.  How can anyone say Washington was not that: indispensable, or Lincoln?  Without their unique vision and talents, there'd be no America to debate the greatest citizen of.  Or how about from our own time, FDR?  Each, when a lesser mortal could have made popular but catastrophic decisions, made the correct, difficult, and salvational ones, often in direct contravention of both the popular and elite wills.  Surely saving the nation from both itself and its enemies can qualify a president for greatness, and each of those three did that.  Indeed such a charge is their oath, "... to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic", but not all fulfill it equally, or at all.  For the moment, let's restrict this listing to presidents, and leave other influential Americans of great character, imagination and strength, but less overt power, like Oprah or Ben Franklin, for a separate category.  My favorite presidents list would include Washington, Jefferson, J. Adams, Lincoln, TR, FDR, Truman, and one other (more on him later).

   The demographic manner of this survey raises an interesting question, and the inherent subjectiveness of any such list is clearly problematic, without an agreed-to way of defining "great", tho I've offered a reasonable definition in the first paragraph, from the Oath of Office.  And of course we must factor in the "availability heuristic", as the nerds call it.  This 2 dollar phrase only means that people tend to forget old stuff and remember the most recent.  (This defect of the popular mind leads to such inanities as the recent spate of top 100 lists that have been annoying, gnat-like, media consumers lately, filled with movies or songs, say, of the last 20 years which are clearly of dubious value, which ignore items of much greater art or import to previous, now graying and fading, generations.)  We also fail our children in ignoring or downplaying the role of the American Revolution, in their education.  How can anyone not acknowledge the contributions to the entire world of such great and enlightened thinkers, whose only debilitation is recession into the past?  You'd practically have to hate America to do that.  Oh, yeah, right...

     What traits made the greats?  Is there more than salvation in moments of existential crisis?  What of TR's defining personality, from which so much of the American character and so many of our modern values descend?  What of Adams and Truman's great common sense and moral clarity?  What of Reagan's winning strategies in the Cold War?  That may make him the most important or greatest American to non-Americans, whose lives are inarguably improved by his having led us to victory in the Cold War, but his domestic legacy is much less concrete and easily pinned down than some, like FDR, who also "saved the world" during his tenure.  But FDR had disastrously misjudged Joe Stalin, to the great cost to the citizens of E.Europe and beyond, and can be criticized for much of his domestic legacy's later harmfulness.

   So what of their flaws?  How to define "greatest American" when you can find failings in every human?  If saving lives globally is up for consideration, how about Dr. Saulk?  You mentioned Oprah, and what of her record of saving ignoramuses from their own stupidities, helping to break the chains of self-destructive behavior?  She's a great person, but how can we compare her contribution to humanity with that of Franklin, also in your list, who invented the lightning rod, fire departments, the notion of an unfettered press and so much more it would take a book to list them.  He certainly has contributed vastly to the world's betterment and enlightenment, as well as saving countless lives and property.  And what a randy guy!  He makes my short list of favorite people of all time! 

   But really, your letter is one of astonishment that anyone could see Reagan as any sort of hero, much less great.  Much less that the nation as a whole (Ass wholes?) could agree (thru whatever questionable process) that he belongs anywhere near such a list.  You betray your unreconstructed '60s-style liberalism herein.  No hard-core liberal I know of--and I know a lot of them--will acknowledge what obvious sincerity lay behind the appearance at his funeral of people like Gorbachev, Havel, and Sharansky.  They cannot bring themselves to see the obvious truths (a pitiable condition, if they were worth the pity; their unremitting self-loathing, lying about history, abuse of language, betrayal of Liberalism, and chronic anti-American bullshit deprive them of that basic humane right), that RWR was the driving force behind the defeat of Soviet communism, and that that struggle was in fact a Manichean one, on a global stage, and that we (the West) were in fact, by any measure, the good guys.  Noam Chomsky can go eat shit and die.  (Anyone reading this who thinks Chomsky has anything correct or even useful to say needs to demand a refund on their University education, and can start their proper understanding of Mankind by reading this.)

   So, about Reagan, given that he saved the world from the complete abject evil of communism (not just Stalinism's practice, but Marxism in theory is anti-human in the extreme) saving hundreds of millions of lives and billions of futures in the process, then to answer your vehement question WHAT IN THE HELL IS OUR COUNTRY COMING TO??  in all seriousness, I'd say "our country is coming to" its senses.  It's the American and global left that is nucking futs.  The farther left, the nucking futtier.  I say this as a long-time liberal who has examined the record of his own ardently-believed positions' ultimate effects on people and places, and it's an ugly picture.  The ideas of the left have failed, and for good reason:  most of them are past smart back around into dumb.  The average person is too connected to the real world of bosses, children and animals, unlike our insular leftist elites, to fall for their too-clever-by-half BS.  Thank you, Mr. Orwell, for reminding us of the obvious.  Intellectuals are so obsessed with the hidden, that they can miss the most clarion clues in their hunt for supposed deeper truths.   Theory must never precede experience, but this idea is alien to them.  Today, in many fields far beyond politics, theory often precludes experience.  (And postmodernism sucks everywhere...)

  This popular proclamation elevating RWR is more proof, as if any were needed, of the continued, and accelerating, decline of the left in America (and conversely of the good sense of the majority, who in our bi-polar politics must then choose the lesser evil, the GOP).  It is a decline its most ardent and activist members have worked very hard to achieve, proffering some of the worst, most ass-backward and anti-human ideas ever promulgated among civilized people (I here omit the very far left of the poly-sci spectrum, Sovietski and Maoist totalitarians, who were anything but civilized, but do include the likes of their Western defenders, like that truly demented and much-loved-by-most-leftists totalitarian freak, Noam Chomsky, and his myriad probably-well-intended but hyper-ignorant, rhetorically-aggressive disciples for whom the deserving torture has yet to be conceived--perhaps forced watching of Alan Greenspan's economic testimonies to Congress on a permanent C-SPAN loop...).

   One more thing to consider when assessing Reagan's place in our nation's story:  the utter wrongness of all his critics' prognostications.  I was thoroughly brainwashed to be a fully dudgeoned liberal Reagan-hater by the time of the 1980 election.  I was convinced by all the artists and polemicists of the left that we'd surely be getting WWIII out of this warmongering "Ronald Raygun", "Zap!"  Predictions were dire!  (But even then I was no joiner; I cast my first presidential vote for the independent).  Of course, what the world actually got was the disintegration of an implacable and truly evil hegemon, and the rebirth of its salvational, benign one.  I was reminded of those hollow misunderstandings of anti-communism and vicious calumnies about conservatism by the many hysterical predictions of today's leftwits of certain quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, made by some of the same people--who deliberately keep themselves ignorant about military matters--who were so wrong about RWR, and had led us--demanded us--into ignominy in SE Asia before that.  Having been wrong on every major foreign policy judgment of the last 40 years did not seem to deter any of them this time, however.  Indeed, David Horowitz, one of the tiny sample of original New Leftists (the '60s radicals) to actually examine the movement's record, has declared it to be the First Law of the Left:  "Never look back."   If they did, they could not live with themselves. 

   Reagan was not great in the way that Washington and Lincoln were, in terms of being truly indispensable and critical to forming America in the first place, or intellectually brilliant, to say nothing of imprinting themselves by example on our national character, nor was the "Great Communicator" even especially rhetorically gifted, tho he could deliver well a well-composed line, and we know he directed the composition.  Reagan was an inheritor of that fine character, and disposed honorably of his duty to the office and the people (unlike his recent Democrat successor, the serial sexual "her asser" and limitlessly talented pathological liar), in reclaiming for America the moral high ground on which it was founded and toward which all peoples strive, namely, to actually defend the natural rights of free people, and to loudly proclaim them universal.  (George W. Bush is his only heir so far in this regard, and will go down very well in history, I predict, tho with equal certainty, not in liberal history/myth!)  But he was a successful leader of his people who patiently and peacefully pushed foursquare against the vicious inhuman ideologues of communismo who had sworn to see to our demise.  Instead it is they, and it, which deservingly lay upon the ash heap of history.  One must remember that when Reagan said they were beatable, and deserved the thrashing, the Left thought they were permanant, and not really all that bad, you know?

   He also reversed the disastrous domestic slides into defeatism and moral relativism the Democrats and liberals of the last 40 years are always so lamentably eager to wet down, relighting the Cold War that they so shamefully abandoned, with the ultimate victory in that conflict, waged by way of his brilliant arms race, achieved without major, or even minor, war.  Surely you would agree that an arms race that bankrupts and defeats utterly a truly evil enemy is a superior strategy to that of WAR!?!?  Given the relative positions of power the US and SU found themselves in in 1979, we are indeed fortuned by the gods to have elected him and not the opposite party, or the world today would be filled with Sovietskis hard and lite, large and small, and there would be no one left standing with the decency and moral acumen to call them the evil they clearly were.  No one with an army or economy capable of doing anything about it, that is. 

So be not "frightened" or "livid", or even atwitter, the world is safe now, thanks to the Anglo-American Alliance ("Saving the World since 1939"), led in its most crucial years by Thatcher and Reagan.  Reagan did his job in a giant way, saving the world from a miserable, when it wasn't murderous, ideology, and the US from an abject, impovershing, and feckless one.  The American "twits" you should be worried about should be anyone who would vote for a Democrat after their cowardly, horrific, irresponsible, and witless record in foreign policy judgment lo these last two generations, especially now, during a time of unrestricted war declared by others upon us.  [Details upon request, or read this.]  It is surely notable, if not definingly metaphoric, that their last nominee for PRESIDENT was a dubious "hero" and then an executable traitor during the Vietnam War; this is not hyperbole..  It is literally incredible, for a party that wants to be taken seriously as defender of the nation.

Reagan, great?  Ask any of the dissident liberals--your natural allies, one would expect--of the ex-Soviet slave state*, or the people of Poland and the other mega-oppressed Warsaw Pact hostages how they felt at hearing his words "Evil Empire", while our esteemed liberal thinkers groaned and rolled their eyes at his unsophistication or predicted again imminent war.  .  Or ax the Chinese now that their leaders have abandoned the utterly inhuman and discredited BS (Belief System) of socialism for RWR's running dog capitalismo (democracy they have a much harder time with--they'd lose their fancy homes, food, and cars).  Right there I count about 2 billion people way better off on account of Reagan and Reaganism.  To which you would have to add the American casualties--to say nothing of the Asian dead (typically 20 or 30 to every one US soldier)--NOT lost fighting the possibly full-scale or the ineluctable proxy wars against a stronger and longer-lasting Cold War enemy, had the feckless and slow-learning left and the cynical Nixon/Kissinger detente/realist faction of the right wing continued their venal appeasements of the Evil Empire.  All of this misery, conflict, and death would have been the world's fate for decades to come, had the former liberal New Dealer not changed his mind, his party affiliation, and then the course of history.  Ronald Reagan, great?  Ab-so-fucking-lutely. 

Thanks again for the opportunity to adress this irrational prejudice.  Have a great day!

Mattunes
my sight:  http://www.kiss-the-sky.com   "If a man's education is finished, he is finished." ~~ Edward Filene

  * I'd recommend starting with this; then this; and if you still don't understand and really like punishment, as most liberals seem to (to judge from their electoral record and policy emanations), try this one.  To understand the reality of what actually happened in Vietnam--the crucifying crucible of modern liberalism, in which its half-baked notions burned to a crisp, and from which self-inflicted moral catastrophe the Democrats seem pathologically unable to recover--instead of the morbid and moribund fantasies of the antiwar left and the prowar right, I heartily recommend this book.