Record demands clear-eyed scrutiny

Because we were going to school in the area, my friends and I went to Ronald Reagan’s first presidential inauguration. We’d never seen one up close, so we blew off classes and boarded the Metro to crowd onto the Mall with the rest of America, for whom, we were told, it was then morning.

Except we went to protest. We four — Southerners all — were upset that our man Jimmy Carter had been booted out of office (shellacked, really), and in the arrogance of our youth, we felt it right that we let people know of our displeasure. Attending the inauguration was the equivalent of a collective foot stamp.

Protesting seemed so retro in the early ‘80s, not cool and incendiary like it is today. The protesters of a decade earlier had ended the Vietnam War, we told ourselves. We were of the era of rainbow-hued Izod shirts and “The Preppy Handbook.” My Army-surplus fatigue pants pegged me as the throwback loser I was.

Nevertheless, we stood there on the Mall holding fairly innocuous signs. If I remember correctly, mine said, “Reagan No!” I thought it pithy.

The people around me thought it rude. Perhaps you can imagine how very popular we were among the red-white-and-blue-wearing crowd chanting the new president’s name.

Back home in Missouri, my family tuned in to watch on television, and to see if they could catch a glimpse of me, the wayward daughter who’d thrown her vote away on the peanut farmer and argued loud and long over the capabilities of Dutch, the Gipper. That I’d be close to their new leader superseded the fact that I’d be there as a fly in the ointment.

I was a very small fly, as it turns out. We stood so far from the actual event that the new president was barely a speck, but we could still hear the speakers. I took a picture in the general direction of the podium when he announced the release of the 52 hostages who had been held in Iran for 444 days, and then I tried to explain to the people around me that the whole thing was staged. The hostages could have come home during Jimmy Carter’s watch, but no. This made for better theater. Or television. Or both.

No one likes a noodge. People were in D.C. to party, and can you blame them? I did then, but I don’t now.

I woke up, politically, during the Reagan years, and for that I will always be grateful. When the Great Communicator sent formerly institutionalized mentally ill people into communities ill-equipped to deal with them, when he let social-services budgets languish, when he ignored the growing AIDS crisis, I took note. When the press began to call him the Teflon president, particularly during the Iran-Contra affair; when he cut taxes and increased military spending; when he promoted the freaky Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars”; when he played into white suburban fears and made up a story of a welfare queen who’d bilked the government for $150,000, I paid attention.

It was a wonderful time to wake up, with ample opportunities for youthful outrage.

And now the king is dead. And while we in the American media have a way of elevating our fallen warriors when they die, I wish it weren’t so. In this freefall of worshipful coverage since President Reagan’s death on Saturday, I wish we would hold the dead no higher than necessary. When President Clinton dies, there should be discussions of the ramifications of his so-called welfare reform. No matter the political bent, there should be a clear-eyed examination of the legacy of every president when that president passes. To do less is a disservice to the man, and to the truth.

So on today, our national day of remembrance, I will turn off my television and think fondly of those first days when I couldn’t believe what was coming out of Washington. There is something to be said about coming of age when the powers that be are disagreeable. It makes you think. It makes you seethe. Better yet, it makes you vote.