This evening, President George W. Bush was emboldened enough to emerge from his cave and deliver his farewell address to the nation before blinking out of existence on Tuesday. The last eight years have seemed so very, very, very long that I literally cannot imagine a world without him, and it reminded me of a very different time. When I was in eighth grade, essentially the only president I had ever known stepped down, and his farewell address wrecked me like a fifth of gin. I wrote about Ronald Reagan when he died and a friend/reader demanded that I do so.

In general, I think taking topic requests might be a great way to keep writing and often think about opening the Request Line over at iFanboy.com but don’t, because I am ****ing terrified by what sort of requests I would actually get.

Anyway.

Searching my site this evening, I was stunned and appalled to see that the original Reagan post did not survive the transition from SnipSnap to Wordpress. And so, dear reader, I reproduce it for you now, with the understanding that I will very soon– I promise– do more than just copy and paste old entries I know you didn’t read.

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Since you asked:

I voted for Ronald Reagan twice, both times proudly and enthusiastically. During the 1980 race, I even went so far as to join his campaign, fashioning and coloring an elephant of construction paper (what an elephant had to do with strong defense and tax cuts, I still do not entirely know; I think that in 1980 I decided that the kindly old man behind the podium on television looked wrinkly and large, and that that must be the idea) and attaching it to a straw to make it into a crude picket sign. My zeal before the polls closed had very little impact, then as now; in the Sacred Heart kindergarten election, Jimmy Carter crushed my guy in a landslide. (Then as now, it was obvious that the electorate had no idea what they were voting on. Didn’t they see how boring Jimmy Carter was? Weren’t donkeys obviously lamer than elephants to anybody who gave it even a moment’s thought? Didn’t their dads ever make them turn off cartoons to watch the stupid, boring news?) Had the fate of the free world rested in the tiny hands of Sacred Heart, today page 14 of the newspaper would be mourning a genial old actor and union leader who died “after a long illness,” and I’d be saying, “Why do I know that name…?”

Fortunately, the right to a vote that actually counts has only been extended to people who are emotionally kindergarteners, so we got eight years with America’s grandfather. I remember liking President Reagan unreservedly; I would even go so far as to say that disliking him never occurred to me as an available option. Last summer, when I was surer than ever that the current president was going to bring about my speedy personal death, I went on a maniacal Reagan binge at the library in an effort to convince myself that the simple, prosperous times I remembered from childhood were actually just as complex and fraught with peril. (We didn’t start the fire; it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.) What I learned, other than the fact that it turns out I had no idea what was going on around me in the 1980s unless Optimus Prime was involved, is that there was indeed an option to dislike Ronald Reagan and people exercised it with such vigor that you could almost see little bubbles of spit froth forming in the corners of their mouths. Everyone everywhere loved him except for people who really, really hated him a lot.

At the time, though, I never ran into these people. (The only one I remember is John Cougar Mellencamp, on the 80s retrospective “Decade” that MTV ran in December 1989, ranting and raving like someone who was smart enough not to have written “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” You owe it to yourself to borrow this tape from me one day; there’s something about looking back nostalgically at a nostalgic look back that makes you feel like a bad mimeograph. Plus, kids, it counts as a primary source now.) At the time, my every day was Morning in America. Of course we were going to prosper. Of course we were going to triumph over the Reds, the ayatollah’s terrorists, the Decepticons. If cartoons were anything to go by, our enemies couldn’t even aim right.

I remember loving it when Reagan would interrupt shows to have press conferences. Which, I might add, he seemed to do all the time. Remember that? When the president was always on TV daring people to ask him questions? And then he’d answer them like it was his job, with wit and some off-the-cuff facts (most of which, we would learn the next day, he made up off the top of his head?)

(And remember when finding out the president was making stuff up off the top of his head didn’t bother America at all because he was so awesome? I just remembered for the first time in years the phrase “the Teflon president,” which increasingly bewildered pundits used to call Reagan because nothing ever stuck. We let him get away with anything; we didn’t even care! He was gonna kick those Commies in the ass! I never would have even entertained the notion that we were going to get nuked into our component atoms. Ronnie’s steering the ship! So what if he said trees cause more pollution than cars? He scares Kaddaffi more than he scares me, and my dad paid $.35 in taxes this year and bought me an Atari game with the leftovers! Ms. Pac-Man, muthaf***a!)

I remember one time, I had just seen the totally awesome Back to the Future, and then Reagan gave a speech and quoted Back to the Future! He was always referencing movies and giving medals to Michael Jackson (yeah, some of those are real) and sending his wife to visit the Drummonds on Diff’rent Strokes. And then, when I was ten, he tried to make Star Wars real! Laser machines in space?! Are you sure I can’t vote for him a third time?

(SDI aside, the real connection in my memory between Star Wars and Reagan was when I came home from the store one day with a new Empire Strikes Back pop-up book to learn that Scooby-Doo was not going to be on because the president had been shot. That was one time his surprise appearance on television did not interest me, though it seemed to grab my mom’s attention pretty effectively.)

I think I was more interested in presidential politics when I was nine than I am now, and Ronald Reagan was the reason why. (When you’re nine, all you need is a president who quotes movies and cracks you up. At twenty-nine, I’d settle for a president who quotes anything and cracks you up intentionally.) I remember his speech after the Challenger explosion like it happened this afternoon. I remember his debates with Mondale in a way that I don’t remember my most recent meal. The only thing he ever said that made my spider-sense tingle was when the debate moderator in ‘84 asked him why, if he was so moral, he never went to church, and he replied that his presence would be too disruptive and a Security Threat. “mmmmThat smells a little funny to me, Mr. President,” I remember thinking, though I was probably just annoyed that someone else had figured out a way to skip church and still make it sound like he was doing something good.

In later years, of course, there was Iran-Contra, but I couldn’t engage long enough to figure out what was going on there. Something about shredding Oliver North’s papers or something; all that really registered was Fawn Hall’s big ol’ hair. I was in seventh grade by then and had other things on my mind. I do remember a lot of Carson jokes about a presidential astrologer. (Now, Carson, I still miss.) By then, I guess the lustre had started to fade a bit. None of that changed the fact that, when Ronald Reagan gave his farewell address from the Oval Office, I sat alone in my living room and did everything I could not to start crying. In 1989, I had only really gone to one school in my life and had only really had one president, and now both were ending pretty much simultaneously. All my friends and authority figures were scattering into the sunset, leaving me with George Bush and high school and who-the-hell-knows-what-else. In hindsight, it would have been nice if someone’d tried to walk me through that one. As it was, I was left sitting in front of our 3-ton oak-paneled television with a severe case of Ending Overload trying not to choke up.

Strange that I would feel that way then and not now. I suppose that’s a kind of secondary symptom of Alzheimer’s. My grandmother had it for roughly as long as Reagan did, and when she died in January it was almost like we had been at her wake for ten years. We were no less sad that she was dead, but we finally got to go home and get out of those clothes. Six or so years ago, I went to visit her and she asked me if I was still in the service. Six months later, she couldn’t narrow down my gender. Shortly thereafter, she went nonverbal and nonambulatory. Then she got stuck there in a thick, murky, sooty fog for years. She would get sick; she would pull through; she would sit there, either unaware of it all or unable to do anything about it. When they called and told me she had pneumonia this year, I said, “Oh my God, that’s terrible. I guess. Relatively, you know. I hope she… gets better? I don’t– help me out: what should the prayer be here, exactly?” I’m still not sure I know.

The Long Goodbye aside, time does all sorts of things to perception. I sometimes wonder about what I would have thought of Reagan if I were twenty years older, if I hadn’t been looking at the space lasers and exploding rocket ships through the eyes of a ten year old, if my mind wasn’t processing the Soviets and COBRA as roughly equivalent. What is it like to be a fully cognizant adult who turns on the television in time to see your president hold up his veto pen and say to congress, “Go ahead; make my day”? To hear your president call the world’s largest non-you superpower, which has the money for leaky nuclear weapons (to point entirely at you) and essentially nothing else, an Evil Freaking Empire? I would have had a daily coronary with my waffles. “What’s in the paper this morning?… Hmm! we seem to have bombed Libya. Didn’t see that coming! How does our leader explain this, I wonder? Ah, there it is: ‘They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.‘ I see. Sounds good! I’ll be back in bed.”

Would I vote for Ronald Reagan today? Oh, probably not. It’s all moot, of course; if my older cousins are anything to go by, if I’d been in high school in 1981 I’d have been too high to care about any of it. Also, to a large extent, I no longer have to wonder what global presidential hijinks would be like. Just typing the paragraph above gave me a powerful feeling of Eeee!ja vu. The current president is still trying to build a magic missile shield, and he has assured me that his mission is to wipe out the Evildoers, particularly those in the Axis of Evil, evil evil evil, etc. It’s kind of encouraging, in a roundabout way; we did, after all, live through the eighties. I thank Mr. Reagan for that (and any number of other things) wherever he may be.