Much has been said about Ronald Reagan this week: that he has been a brain-devouring zombie for the last twenty years; that he and his administration got a good laugh out of AIDS when the queers were dropping like flies; that, if Jesus had any balls, Reagan would spend the rest of eternity--that's at least aleph-null moments, even in a quantised universe--riding a flaming pitchfork in the lowest, foulest anus of Hell, but that even so he wasn't as bad a president as the one we have now...All this has been said (by me). But with this torrential downpour of hagiography soaking us all to the skin, it is easy to lose perspective. Dazzled by the glittering mosaic of Reagan, the Senile, Malicious Old Bigot here erected in glowing tribute, one loses sight of Reagan the Man. At times such as these, when we as a nation blubber uncontrollably into our little lace hankies like a bunch of girly-girls, it behooves us all to dry those eyes and wipe the glistening snot from those noses, pull our mucus-smeared heads from the Rectum of Tribute, and have a look at the big picture.
Ronald Reagan was not only a warmed-over carcass worked by hidden strings and gears, spouting platitudes and snippets from old films, emptying his tired old bladder upon the greatest health crisis in modern American history. He was also a man. Ronald Reagan had a heart; and he had lungs; and he had a spleen. He also had a brain, pancreas, a gall bladder, a liver, kidneys, a colon, a small intestine, a stomach, adrenal glands, a thyroid, a thalamus, a hypothalamus, an amygdala, a hippocampus, a cerebellum, axons, dendrites, mitochondria, plasma, lymph, platelets, adipose tissue, skeletal muscle, smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, an aesophagus, a larynx, a bladder, a pineal gland, a pituitary gland, nodes of Ranvier, femurs, ulnae, radii, humeri, ribs, cervical vertebrae, thoracic vertebrae, lumbar vertebrae, a sacrum, a coccyx, at least one maxillary process, a dura mater, a corpus callosum, dermis, epidermis, and testes.
They're all dead now, and going all rotten and soft like a McDonald's hamburger.
Can one understand the legacy of Reagan, if one does not understand that all of his bits and organs are now utterly dead and decaying away to mush and dust? Can one truly understand what Reagan meant to the world, particularly to portions of Central America, and to the people of Iraq, without contemplating for a moment rotting corpses and the slow erosion of bones stripped of flesh by ravenous maggots and worms?
I think not.
I think not.
Posted by aloysius at June 11, 2004 12:48 PM | TrackBack |