Ronald Reagan: Where Greatness Lies

In his December 8, 1986 journal entry, author Leo Lerman had this to say about Ronald Reagan:  “This man was shallow, a second-rate actor, utterly dependent on superficial Irish charm - the kind the morning milkman or letter carrier or any man in the street has.  He was destined to be used by strong, self-seeking, unscrupulous men wanting power not for state, but for self.  The man may be honest, but he is stupid, which in his position of highest power is criminal.”

Lerman had more to say about Reagan’s “smiling, good-fellow self” which I will not repeat here. No, I will confine myself to Mr. Lerman’s more moderate criticisms, i.e., the ones in the passage above.  

I’ve been thinking about Reagan these days because I’ve been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.  Goodwin’s books have invariably been both enlightening and engaging to me and Bully Pulpit is no exception.  One of its main messages is the powerful effect that capable authors like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens had on public opinion in the early 1900s.  It’s hard to think who has such influence today.  I suppose Jon Stewart’s Daily Show comes close, but it’s kind of humiliating to realize that comedy shows today are where we have to go to find influential critical commentary about political and corporate shenanigans.  A hundred plus years ago, serious writers could generate a tidal wave of reform just by reporting what Standard Oil and its flunkeys in the Senate were up to.  How times have changed.  Sigh.

Equally fascinating is a second theme of Bully Pulpit: the way in which Theodore Roosevelt, working against the leadership of his own Republican Party, used government to make life better for Americans at the expense of the big corporations.  Before Roosevelt became president, corporate money thoroughly controlled the GOP and the GOP served those moneyed interests.  Roosevelt changed much of that by establishing regulations aimed at protecting citizens against their depredations.

Ronald Reagan, of course, did the opposite.  He initiated an era in which the government – long the protector of the people – came to be viewed as a hostile alien entity.  And by encouraging a belief in this bizarre notion, he enabled the corporations to once again exploit and abuse ordinary citizens in a way they had not done for decades.  That’s why middle class incomes have become stagnant while the one percent has basked in unprecedented wealth - since about 1980.

But I don’t believe that Reagan screwed middle class Americans on purpose.  I agree with Lerman that he was simply not very smart - and certainly not smart enough to be president.  He thought he was doing the right thing because he listened to the wrong people.

Reagan had been a Democrat in his youth, and for good reason.  His hometown was hit hard by the Depression, and his family, like many others, faced the prospect of poverty and homelessness.  Only government intervention - Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal - saved the Reagan family and many of its neighbors from this fate.

But later in life, once he was married to Nancy, Ronald Reagan bought into the right-wing Republican philosophy of his wealthy father-in-law.  Even though his well-being as a youth had depended on government intervention, he decided, once he was wealthy, that “the government is the problem.”  His very shallowness served him well here, allowing him to ignore the bizarre contradiction of his about-face.  His biographer, Lou Cannon, said that Reagan was always uncomfortable around intellectuals.  No wonder.  By the same token, I imagine snake oil salesmen must be uncomfortable around real doctors.

One of the least appealing qualities of Reagan was his bigotry.  Granted, he was a sort of good-natured dude, and he didn’t come across as a snarling bigot in the style of, say, Jesse Helms.  But bigot he was.  Two of his most outrageous and disgusting gestures along these lines were his touting of “states’ rights” in his 1980 Philadelphia, Mississippi, speech and his portrayal of an irresponsible “welfare queen” living high on honest taxpayers’ money as though she were a fair depiction of poor black families during his campaign.  Yuk.

Despite his stupidity, Reagan was not without talent, and herein we find the sources of his political success.  He was competent enough in backslapping bonhomie, but his real skill lay in public relations.  The “superficial Irish charm” of which Lerman wrote came to the fore when he was on television and through that medium he reached millions of Americans, many of whom were no more knowledgeable about the world than he was.  When he said “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” millions of people, many of whom depended heavily on government protection or support, believed him and they watched with approval as he dismantled many of the reforms that his predecessors had put in place.  

Of course Reagan didn’t bring about anti-government hostility single-handedly and he isn’t solely responsible for the rapacious way in which corporations have once again come to exploit ordinary citizens.  But more than any single individual, he, with his shallow but clueless charm, made greed-is-good corporate ruthlessness possible.

His anti-government policies were not born in the thin soil of his own consciousness; they came from those “strong, self-seeking, unscrupulous men” in the background about whom Lerman wrote.  Reagan was merely their public face.  He was, in fact, not so much a president as a press secretary, a spokesman for those who stood to benefit from a pro-corporate, small government philosophy.  And that’s why I think it’s reasonable to consider him “great” in some sense.  He was, in my opinion, the greatest presidential press secretary of modern times.

Let me wrap up by recommending Goodwin’s Bully Pulpit.  The book is a veritable inspiration.  It shows how an awakened citizenry can actually make government an active force that protects the weak – that is, almost all of us - against the strong - those we have come to know as “the one percent.”  In short, it points the way out of the dreadful era into which Ronald Reagan’s ingratiating charm has led us.

Poetry - What Is It Good For?

The thing about our souls is that sometimes they need a little reawakening. About 20 years ago, while leading a Rollins group on a field trip in Mexico, I took a long-distance road trip with one of the students, a young man named Brad.  Brad was thoughtful enough to bring along a batch of cassette tapes that were brimming with some of my favorite tunes.  Listening to all that great music from Dylan, the Beatles, The Band, Pink Floyd, the Stones, etc., brought back a flood of memories and reminded me just how much I missed good, old, rock n’ roll music.  The demands I had faced as a tenure-seeking professor with a growing family had consumed my time so thoroughly for several years, that I had fallen into a rut where I had forgotten to stop and listen to the Guns n’ Roses.  It took a fresh gust of healing wind in the form of sweet old-time music to get my soul dusted off and back in business.

A similar thing happened more recently when, after listening to my friend Susan Lilley read some of her poems here on campus, I was reminded how happily I respond to honest-to-god, quality poetry.  I started then to look back into some of my undergraduate favorites, like T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and the works of Yeats, Auden and Ezra Pound.

On Eliot and Pound I have mixed feelings.  Great poets, but such flawed human beings.  Eliot was  not only a prototypical elitist snob (it seems to me), but was also, according to reliable sources, grossly unkind to his wife.  Ezra Pound was a gentle soul, if Hemingway is to be believed, but during WWII expressed all too much sympathy for the Axis powers and their "values."  Not cool, Ezra.

I still like the poetry of Eliot and Pound, more than I like the poets themselves, actually, because I have learned to separate the art from the artist.  Have to do it sometimes. (Yeah, you, Clint Eastwood.)

Reading "The Waste Land" over and over gave me a sense that the world, was once a thriving, spiritually charged arena wherein humans could act out their destiny, but that it had deteriorated into a bleak and meaningless . . . waste land.  Not sure why reading it gave me a good feeling, but it did.  And at least I learned who Sybil of Cumae was, that’s got to be worth something.

Now here’s one by W. H. Auden.

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a

   saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content 

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.

He was married and added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his

   generation.

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their

   education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

This is an interesting poem, no doubt about it.  And, though I would not in a googillion years want to cast aspersions on W. S. Auden, one of my favorites, I have to say, this piece does have a somewhat pushy quality.  With the two concluding lines, I picture Mr. Auden slamming his book shut and glaring into my face as if to say, “Did you get it?  Do you see what a loser this guy was?  And that his life was a total waste land?”    

Yes, Wystan, yes.  For sure.

If you want to find lots of poems these days, you can look at the New Yorker magazine.  Of course, in some cases, you will only know that they are poems because of the spaced out way in which they are printed on the page.  If it weren’t for the typesetting, you might mistake some of them for a series of typographical errors.

OK, here’s my rendition of what I see as a typical New Yorker poem:

Turn

I walked the sidewalk until a corner slowed me;
I saw the squatting bank across the street, a mountain rectangle;
I went the other way.

Some modern poems, a little too juicy for the New Yorker, have a different feel, but are just as obscure. You know, poems that sound like this:

April 2013

This cruel month, does it bring forth hordes of neoprene lilies,

Or do they,

Like the dogs of yesteryear,

Merely bark and hang their withered stems

In yeasty sorrow?

WTF? [editor’s comment]

I do not want to shortchange the New Yorker, however, since it is, in fact, a very cool magazine. Also, it recently published a poem that actually made sense, one by our own Billy Collins.  Billy is a resident at our Winter Park Institute and last Tuesday, Darla and I had a chance to hear him read some of his latest work.  He was, by the way, America’s poet laureate (two terms, if I remember correctly) and knows a thing or two about how words can be used to enliven hearts and minds.  Darla says that his poetry reminds her of Fred Astaire’s dancing: it is delightful to the senses and appears so graceful and easy - but the grace and ease belie an underlying vortex of skill and effort.

Here’s one of Billy’s from his latest book, Aimless Love:

Absence

This morning as low clouds

skidded over the spires of the city

 

I found next to a bench

in the park an ivory chess piece –

 

the white knight as it turned out –

and in the pigeon-ruffling wind

I wondered where all the others were,

lined up somewhere

 

on their red and black squares,

many of them feeling uneasy

 

about the saltshaker

that was taking his place,

 

and all of them secretly longing

for the moment

 

when the white horse

would reappear out of nowhere

 

and advance toward the board

with his distinctive motion,

 

stepping forward, then sideways

before advancing again –

 

the same move I was making him do

over and over in the sunny field of my palm.

A pleasure to read, indeed.  I can see the knight in the author’s hand, and the chessboard with the intrusive salt shaker.  And the very idea of absence, of someone or something missed, calls to mind for me the times I had to spend away from my cozy family when I was doing fieldwork in China.  (Though I’d be interested to know what varlet might have played the part of the salt shaker in that scenario.)

The simple yet significant scene that this poem calls up is to me one of the chief characteristics of Billy’s work.

I am brazenly dropping the poet’s first name here because, following his reading, our friends Phil and Susan introduced us to him and to his writerly partner, Suzannah Gilman, and we had an opportunity to chat with them a bit.  I have to say that Billy was great to talk to - thoughtful, pleasant and charming.  Naturally, I wondered what his scheme was.  “He must be trying to make us like him,” I thought to myself, “What’s up with that?”

Darla, much more naïve than I, simply concluded that his personal warmth is like his poetry. She thinks that he is the Fred Astaire of engaging human-heartedness.