Dry Humping Reagan
The first anniversary of the death of Ronald Reagan has just passed, and for some inexplicable reason, an angry mob did not descend on his Simi Valley grave, dig up his corpse, drag it from the back of a Prius, string it up legs-first from an oak tree and thrash it with golf clubs and weedeaters until nothing remained but a dusty clump of hair. Comparisons would surely have been made to the cathartic pinata-flogging of Mussolini's carcass exactly 60 years earlier, not just because the two spectacles looked so similar, but because necro-lynching Reagan would do a lot to restore the dignity of most Americans.
But dignity for middle- and lower-middle-class Americans is so remote in the aftermath of the Reagan Revolution that the concept seems quaint, sort of like job security, health care and hot tubs. Instead we have a country of wretched, overworked suckers numbed by self-deprecation.
Last year, when Reagan finally died, witty lefties assailed "the media" for its weeklong eulogizing of that wicked vampire. They rightly pointed out that for most Americans, life had gotten worse since he took power. Just to cite one example, in 1979, CEOs of large companies earned roughly 30 times the average salary of their employees; by 2001, they earned 531 times their employees' salaries.
Where lefties got it wrong about last year's Khomeini-esque canonization is that the very victims of the Reagan Revolution demanded, even craved, the grotesque pageantry that they were fed. I remember reading a story in the Washington Post about some former members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, which was one of the few unions to support Reagan's run for president in 1980-and the first major union to subsequently get crushed by him. By 2004, some of those former PATCO employees were still unemployed, and one they profiled is now homeless. Homeless people: another wonderful Reagan legacy.
This story perfectly encapsulated the sucker-mentality that today is a major premise of American life. Millions lined the streets to "pay their respects" to the same vampire who sucked them dry, and by gum, they're not ashamed to admit it. The sad truth is that even if you gave an American white collar worker-stressed, underpaid, his company's pension fund recently stripped in order to pay off the CEO's golden parachute-the chance to spend 10 minutes alone with Reagan's corpse, and handed him a duffel bag full of blunt instruments, lighter fluid and hydrochloric acid with instructions to "do as you please," if you were to open the door ten minutes later, you would find that worker dry humping Reagan's bones, crying out to the Lord, "Take me, not him!" The Italians in 1945 had more dignity than the Americans of today.