Death of A President

I was not a fan of Reagan the politician. I was not even particularly a fan of Reagan the man.

But he was a man who learned how to recreate himself and did not allow age to define his role or his activities. For that I admired him.

It was hard to believe he was dead because he had always been…he was older than almost everyone and had been a fixture of the public landscape so long that it seemed impossible that he was not…

And that sense of "missingness" is what I think has swept across almost everyone I know, that something is missing from the American scene.

We are inundated with coverage of his death. It is almost as if we had just lost a sitting President rather than a rather elderly one when he left office now sixteen years ago. He lived to 93, even now an almost unthinkable age. It should not surprise or shock us that he is gone.

So why is it that we are experiencing near round the clock coverage of the death of this man? It is a question that has perplexed me; until I had a conversation with my friend Medora who captured why it is that I think we have fallen into such deep mourning.

We are a nation, at this moment, in need of a hero.

We are a nation that is feeling very battered right now and very un-heroic after the scandals of Abu Ghraib. And it is not a scandal that goes away.

Richard Cohen, on WashingtonPost.com, reveals that John Ashcroft's Justice Department prepared a number of memos that attempted to define the meaning of "torture". One of them runs to fifty pages apparently and is only one of a number.

Why, I wonder, was it necessary to spend so much time defining "torture" unless one was thinking about using torture? Was it that the Justice Department was attempting to create an elaborate definition of torture that allowed torturers to believe that they were not torturing?

It all sounds like those Catholic conversations about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Except in this case it is about how many lashes make a wound?

I found Mr. Cohen's article very disturbing.

Because it was disturbing and because this whole period since we invaded Iraq has been disturbing is it any wonder we need, want, demand someone to lionize? Ronald Reagan's death comes at the exact moment when we are desperate to have someone to think of as a hero.

He works.

He did bring down the Soviet Union by outspending them in the arms race until they had to cry "uncle!"

He was friendly, had a great smile and was charming when he goofed his lines. He was earnest and folksy and during Iran Contra took responsibility for which everyone was so grateful that it didn't matter that what he'd done was something he shouldn't have done.

He came to the presidency after the humiliation of the Iran Hostage Crisis that followed the debacle of Nixon and the horror of Vietnam. He called for us to see that it was "morning in America" again.

He also turned his back on AIDS at a time when quick, decisive and fast action could have helped bring us more quickly to a moment when there might be some hope in the AIDS battle, which, by the way, is still a battle and is far from won.

As I said, I am not a fan of Reagan.

But we are sorely in need of a hero. Ronald Reagan has emerged in death to provide us, as he did when he was alive, with the reminder, rightly or wrongly, that there might be a "morning in America" again.

After Abu Ghraib, that is what we want, for it to be "morning in America" again because right now we seem to be caught in the hours after midnight, when dawn seems a far, far time away.