Feliz cumpleaños, Ronnie

Un tributo a Ronald Reagan, de un amigo de la casa.

Excerpts from "Confidence" (2003)
from "Silent America"
(c) Bill Whittle

[...] It was an early evening in November, 1980, during my sophomore year at the University of Florida. As we were getting into costume and make-up, we were making the usual plans to head out for beers after the show, and maybe watch some of the early Presidential election returns.

Just before we went on, a woman burst into the dressing room, sobbing hysterically. I wish I were making this up.

‘Reagan’s won! He won! My God, we’re all going to die! “

‘Wait, hold on, that can’t be right. The polls just closed a few minutes ago. And that’s just the east coast–.’

‘He won, I tell you! Carter conceded! Oh my God, there’s going to be a nuclear war!‘

Even then, even at the height ‘ sorry ‘ the depth of my liberal thinking, I thought this was laying it on pretty thick. I didn’t like Reagan, though. In fact, I couldn’t stand him. I just thought he was old, wrinkled, feeble-minded and way, way out of touch with his retro patriotism and his idiotic smiling all the time.

See, I was twenty. I had it all sussed. We were a whole new generation, baby. The laws of physics do not apply to twenty year olds, let alone the lessons of history.

I knew nothing. What I learned about life under the Soviets I learned from Sociology Professors who had grown up in the same bland comfort and freedom I had. I was an idiot. They were idiots too. But! They should have known better! That’s what we were paying them for.

Then, not long after, I met a friend who more than anyone, got me serious about writing. He was a Bulgarian poet and refugee, a man who risked his life sneaking across borders, hiding out in fields, eluding guards with orders to shoot him on sight. And this man was an intellectual, one of their best and brightest. He was a privileged victim, given access to good apartments, better shopping, even allowed access to western books and magazines. And that was their fatal mistake, you see? He knew what life was like in the west. And he risked that life ‘ the only life he had ‘ to come here.

That is where I unlearned the doubts and suspicions I had about my country, thoughts placed in my head by my own egotistical sense of rebellion against my parents and by professors with agendas of personal failure and eyes blinded by bitterness and rejection. That is where I learned, second hand, what life in real Police States was like from someone who bore the fear and anger and frustration and contempt on his face every time he talked of home; home being a laboratory of misery where even the smallest human deeds ‘ traveling, buying food ‘ were turned into thousands of little lessons in brutality and humiliation. [...]

[...]



Some people reading this were too young to remember what America was like in the late seventies. Moon landing? Been there, done that. We had just come off of a bitter, endless, pointless war. We had seen riots, assassinations, inflation, stagnation, and international impotence. The Office of the President had been tainted by scandal and treachery, lies and cover-ups, and frankly seemed never to recover. We were weak, we were scared, we were worried and we were timid. We were, in fact, much like I had been in that nightclub, immobilized by fear of failure. The idea that we could succeed at something great and noble had the saccharine taste of nostalgia. Our vision had left us. Our confidence was shot to pieces, lying in a rice paddy, below a Book Depository, in the kitchen of an LA hotel, and inside a DC condominium.

Then along came this man, this former lifeguard, and right off the bat, he had the brazen confidence to say something like this:

‘The Democrats say that the United States has had its days in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems, that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view.’

And it was all uphill from there.


‘Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process.’

What does that mean? It means that a planning commission in Paris or Washington may think they know more about how to run a gas station than the man who runs the gas station.

But they don’t. And this:

‘How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.’

Brilliant. I honestly used to think this man was an idiot. If all I wrote in my entire life was a single line that pithy and on-target, I’d be deliriously happy. And this:

‘Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.’

I don’t know about you, but I’m speechless.

Shelby Foote, writing in his immortal trilogy, The Civil War, describes Lincoln’s power to write and communicate as music, as in, ‘And then the Lincoln music began to sound.’

Ronald Reagan had that music. We hear in it again and again, that one pure note of confidence, the belief that what we are doing is right.

‘Putting people first has always been America’s secret weapon. It’s the way we’ve kept the spirit of our revolution alive ‘- a spirit that drives us to dream and dare, and take great risks for a greater good.’

I’ll fight for that. I’ll fight for that idea of humanity. I will, so help me God.

And for anyone who loves this nation and this ideal, what can we say about America that can compare to this image:

‘I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here’

‘After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

Note to the worried: Our music sings : Come here and prosper, not go out and pillage.

I was one of those pilgrims, hurtling through the darkness of my own ignorance, towards this home we share and love so deeply. It’s good to be home, at last.

Ronnie, forgive me. I’m sorry. I just had no idea at all.