Reagan,Communism and Social
Ideals
I felt sad that I wasn’t sadder, regretful that I didn’t feel more regret. I felt somewhat ashamed—of myself—that I couldn’t totally share in the nation’s love of this man at the time of his death, any more than I could in his lifetime. While according him the respect and honor due a fallen leader, I also had to recognize that, for much of his life, his values and principles were different from—and, in some cases, radically opposed—to mine. Ronald Reagan emerged as a major political force just as I began to acquire a political, cultural and moral consciousness. Luck, fate and circumstance would put us on opposite sides of virtually every fence. Indeed, where politics was concerned, Ronald Reagan and I were natural, perhaps inevitable, enemies. Where I saw the civil rights movement and the struggle for racial equality as the greatest movement of moral progress in my lifetime, I believe Ronald Reagan sided with the voices of reaction and backlash. (He wasn’t an avowed segregationist himself, but he heartily welcomed such people into the Republican Party of the 1960’s.) Where I anointed the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa as both personal and cultural avatars, and embraced the emerging rock culture, Ronald Reagan was firmly on the side of the cops and sheriff’s deputies who beat up the longhairs on the Sunset Strip and harassed the hippies in Haight-Ashbury. Where I saw Cesar Chavez and the California farm workers as the natural successors to all the great labor struggles in American history (including the one in my hometown of Lawrence, MA in 1912), Ronald Reagan represented the interests of those who would literally rub them in the dirt. Reagan seemed to go out of his way to make it easy for people like me to despise him. Of the Mexican-American farm workers toiling in his home state, Reagan said that such work came “naturally” to them, because they were “built close to the ground.” Of the student protests in Berkeley, he said, “If we’re going to have a bloodbath, let’s have one and get it over with.” (Reagan’s core group of admirers have made it an ongoing practice to savage certain people—John Kerry, for obvious instance—for statements and actions made in the heat of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The next time they do, such statements as the above should be kept in mind.) Yes, Ronald Reagan was ultimately proven right about communism; it is indeed an evil system. Yes, the New Left and the counterculture of the 1960’s made some horrific and horrendous mistakes and misjudgments. (Interestingly and ironically enough, several of the most nihilistic, eccentric and violence-prone figures of those movements—Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Timothy Leary and Lyndon LaRouche among them—ended their political odysseys firmly in the precincts of the Reaganite Right.) Yes, liberalism made more than its share of mistakes, such as in the area of public education. If you want me to say that Ronald Reagan was vindicated by history in any number of areas, I can’t and won’t argue otherwise. But Ronald Reagan was also wrong about many things, too., Birchers and religious zealots who formed the core of his own political movement. As the media dutifully reported that “thousands of Californians” paid tribute to Ronald Reagan, I asked myself: “Which ‘Californians’?” The Chicano farm workers of Delano? The black people of Watts and Oakland? Where were they? Not that they would have been inclined to show up anyway, but since the memorial was held in Simi Valley—the place where Rodney King was beaten—they likely knew they weren’t welcome there, or anywhere else in Ronald Reagan’s America. For me, that was the
biggest regret of all. Send your questions
comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com |
Prior Columns by Hartley Pleshaw |
As I
watched Reagan Week unfold before me on television, I
was, like many others, filled with sadness and regret. It
was, however, a different kind of sadness and regret from
those being expressed by the many mourners in attendance,
in California and Washington.