CHICAGO - It's a long way
from Tampico, Illinois to sainthood. Ronald Wilson
Reagan, dead at 93, made it - at least by the standards
of the hagiographic, wall-to-wall, mega-festival in his
honor, an ongoing psalm until at least the funeral next
Friday. For hardcore conservative corporate media, and
for conservative-tinted mainstream corporate media, he
is now Saint Ronnie, with Nancy playing the part of a
stern Virgin Mary. History has not afforded young
America enough time to nurture her own St Francis, St
Paul or St Matthew. So sainthood is bestowed on dead pop
stars and presidents (Richard "I'm not a crook" Nixon
excluded).
"View the world" is the official
slogan of the Sears Tower skydeck in Chicago. Assuming
efforts by Osama bin Laden and a few misguided Arab
evildoers to bring it down were thwarted by the
resolution of true Reagan heir George W Bush and his
team, the skyline in the most all-American city of them
all may not be such a bad place to, indeed, "view the
world" post-Reaganism.
A human skyscraper
For scriptwriter Peggy Noonan he was a giant.
For Senator John McCain he won the Cold War. For NBC's
Tom Brokaw he was larger than life. For the Chicago
Tribune, he was a revolutionary.
The weekend
overlapping of the copy - George W Bush - in Normandy
and the original - Ronald Reagan - dying at home in
California, as observed from Chicago, was enormously
engaging, especially considering the Bush
neo-conservatives' irrational hate of all things French.
The first white men to pass through the Chicago River
were Frenchmen Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques
Marquette. The fabulous collection of the Art Institute
of Chicago is a feast of Chagall, Kandinsky, Matisse,
Gauguin, Cezanne, Degas and Monet: but Grant Wood's 1930
"American Gothic" would be more to the neo-cons' liking.
The crowning tower of the magnificent, 1925 Chicago
Tribune building borrows its design from the Rouen
cathedral in Normandy.
The city of big shoulders
could not but give us the skyscraper and the atomic
bomb. Reagan himself had big shoulders. Reading the
Chicago Tribune at Lou Mitchell's, one of the great
American breakfast joints, very close to the official
beginning of Route 66, America's Mother Road, one could
not but be reminded of the timeless French dictum:
"plus ca change ..."
Who said the
Reagan era was over? Bush, the candid cowboy, is not
really daddy's son ... he is the ideological son of
Saint Ronnie. Just like Saint Ronnie, he sold the
promise of a simple man, full of good sense, a man who
"says what he does and does what he says". Just like
Saint Ronnie with Santa Barbara, whenever he can he
escapes town to cultivate a love affair with his Texas
ranch (33 visits to Crawford, all or part of 233 days).
Just like Saint Ronnie fought the "evil empire", Bush
fights the "axis of evil". And just like Saint Ronnie
swore to end communism, he swears he will destroy
terrorism.
So ideology still reigns - now
stripped of popular legitimacy. In 1980, Saint Ronnie
was elected with 51% of the votes, and reelected in 1984
with 59% (in 49 states). In 2000, Bush actually lost to
Al Gore by 500,000 votes. Saint Ronnie got 54 million
votes in 1984: Al Gore got 51 million in 2000. Saint
Ronnie gave America a "war" against Grenada, a mere dot
in the map. Bush, a la Alexander the Great, invaded
Mesopotamia.
Unlike the myth carefully
orchestrated by conservatives for 25 years now, Saint
Ronnie was never terribly popular. During his era, the
budget deficit exploded; America's debt exploded; social
programs which benefited poor Americans went down the
drain.
Observed from abroad, Saint Ronnie indeed
left his imprimatur on the soul of the 1980s, in the
form of social Darwinism. Social inequality became the
name of the game, with America's rich getting richer by
giving very little back to the government, the middle
class basically getting by, and public services
descending towards levels that would provoke revolutions
in Western Europe.
Saint Ronnie's 1980s and
Bush's early 21st century are essentially the same thing
(Bush, on the record, defines his "base" as "the haves"
and the "have mores"): corporate heaven; low taxes;
practically non-existent social services; and - Praise
the Lord - all power to religion and "traditional
values". Jon Margolis, the Chicago Tribune' chief
political correspondent during Reagan's years, writes
that "at least a quarter of the electorate" in the US
"is devoted to Reagan's political vision". Certainly
those profited from Reaganomics - which Bush senior
himself defined as "voodoo economics".
But then
Saint Ronnie won the Cold War. It takes someone like
Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government, to risk a more measured view: "Pressure by
Reagan was one factor" in the fall of the Soviet empire,
"but the major cause was the failure of the communist
economy to come to terms with the communications
revolution".
Richard Haas, now the president of
the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, is a
realist: it was Mikhail Gorbachev who ended the Cold War
after all, because it was Gorbachev who reorganized
Soviet policies. Any serious Russian scholar attributes
the end of the Cold War to internal Soviet politics. If
this was a Hollywood movie plot, Gorbachev offered to
end the Cold War and Saint Ronnie - to his credit - rose
to the occasion.
When Saint Ronnie and Gorbachev
met for the first time in Geneva, in 1985, some people
were saying dealing with Gorbachev was worse than a pact
with the devil. Among them, two neo-con stalwarts: a
Pentagon official, "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle,
and a Congressman from Wyoming, Dick Cheney. As for
Pentagon head Donald Rumsfeld, everyone knows today he
was very close to a certain Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.
Win one more for the Gipper In the
current religious hagiography, Saint Ronnie is
infallible, and incapable of doing any harm. No one will
remember that in the 1960s, as governor of California,
Reagan was dubbed by Berkeley students as "the fascist
gun in the West". No one will remember that, referring
to AIDS, according to his authorized biography, Reagan
said that "maybe the Lord brought down this plague
because illicit sex is against the ten commandments". No
one will remember that by the end of the 1980s,
Americans' real wages were down. No one will remember
that Reaganism was anti-civil rights and pro-apartheid
South Africa.
No one will remember that Afghan
mujahideen - who later changed into al-Qaeda allies -
were received in the White House and praised by Reagan
in person. Nicaraguans don't have much to celebrate
either: Reaganism led to more than 30,000 dead in
Nicaragua, victims of the dreaded Contras. Nicaragua,
according to Reagan, was about to invade Texas. As for
the Iran-Contras debacle, Reagan first denied
everything, then denied that the deal was part of an
operation to free American hostages, and finally denied
denying there was a deal, while denying he knew anything
about it.
These, of course, are minor blemishes.
How not to miss Saint Ronnie? He managed to reunify
America - after Vietnam and Watergate - with his
"infectious idealism" and "true charisma", as pundits
never get tired of saying. Compared to the current,
bitter polarization of America, that was quite an
achievement.
So under the spell of Frank Lloyd
Wright's skyscrapers and Buddy Guy's electric blues at
the city of big shoulders, one is reminded once again of
Karl Marx: history does not repeat itself. America
instinctively knows it: the overwhelming Reagan
nostalgia seems to indicate that the original was much
better than the copy. So what do "the American people"
really think? A true representative of "the American
people" is to be found right here at the crossroads of
the settled East and the wide-open West, not far away
from the Chicago Board of Trade - where 80% of America's
agricultural produce is bought and sold. He's not
Hispanic (32% of Chicago's population). He's black. He's
unemployed. He's hungry. And he's homeless. "Reagan?
Bush? Get off my back, man, they are the same, they
declared war on me! Got a dime?"
Saint
Ronnie 
