© 2004 by John Varley; all rights reserved

We are now into Day 5 of the canonization of Saint Ronnie, and CNN has transformed itself into the All-Reagan channel. (We haven’t looked at Fox News; it can only be worse.) We have watched in stunned disbelief, with the volume turned off, as helicopter cameras have followed a black SUV-like hearse over every mile from the Ronnieland Ranch to Simi Valley, and to the airport, and onto Air Force One, which I am watching take off as I write this. I know they won’t miss a mile of the drive in Washington, and the final drive to wherever they’re going to plant the sunovabitch. I’d suggest Hollywood Boulevard.

When I heard that Ronald Reagan was dead my first thought was, "How can they tell...?"

Now, stop that! I’ve been trying to restrain myself from speaking ill of or mocking the dead, no matter how much I disliked them in life ... and in his case I have seldom more disliked anyone I’ve never met until George W. Bush came along. And I have resolved to keep political rants on this website to a minimum, not to get into that unless I’m really angry. But something interesting has come up, and I feel I have to get it off my chest.

Yesterday I heard that Nancy Reagan has broken with the GWB, the Right-to-lifers, the Republican Party, and similar ignorant know-nothing yahoos by publicly stating her support for stem-cell research. This move was described as "courageous."

Well, it might have been politically courageous if certain other Republicans did it, but what does she have to lose? I certainly understand her feelings on the matter, and I feel the deepest sympathy for what she has gone through the last ten years or so. Her ordeal is not something I would wish on anybody. To my way of thinking, the two worst things that can happen to you before you die are Alzheimer’s and surviving third-degree burns over more than 50% of your body. I feel sympathy for Ronnie and I never thought I would; I wouldn’t wish Alzheimer’s on anybody. (Well ... maybe GWB, but again, how would you know he had it?)

But I object to the word courage. To mount a campaign against an evil that has affected you or someone in your family is not courage, it is self-interest. Courage is seeing something horrible that does not affect you or yours, and working hard to do something about that.

This highlights something that Lee and I have observed about conservatives. Not all conservatives, they can be as varied a bunch as liberals, but it’s a common syndrome and Ronald Reagan had it very strongly. Reagan was capable of the most sincere and heartfelt empathy with an individual case of hardship, poverty, suffering. He could tear up while describing the plight of a hard-working single mother with a sick child. Yet while his left hand was wiping away the tear, his right hand could be signing a bill that would make that mother’s lot much more difficult. He didn’t see the contradiction.

(I’m not letting liberals off the hook here, by the way. Lee and I have met many of them who were capable of suffering agonies of conscience over the plight of a group of people they had never seen and had little concept of, as in the case of some prison reformers or "labor activists" who had never gotten their hands dirty in their lives ... and be the stingiest, meanest, most objectionable people you would never want to meet on a personal level. Like those battalions of college students in the '60s who urged grunts in Viet Nam to desert from the safety of their II-S draft exemptions, or who expressed their solidarity with the third world or farm laborers or [fill in your favorite oppressed group] from the comfort of their luxury apartments)

Full disclosure: I am a Type-II diabetic, and stem-cell research shows promise of being helpful to me at some point in the future. However, I would support it even if there was no such prospect. I think the good it can do for humanity is immeasurable, and I am so angry at those who would throw up idiotic barriers to it in the name of fetal rights I can hardly express it.

I was going to assert here that GWB, if faced with Alzheimer’s for himself or one of his loved ones, would quickly change his tune on stem-cell research ... but I’m not sure he would. Apparently his wife has experienced Alzheimer’s in her family and still opposes it. And GWB believes that God is guiding him in his decisions (maybe the most frightening thing about him, because once God speaks to you, you can’t change your mind until He speaks again, and God doesn’t make clerical errors, does He?). So maybe GWB would be capable of watching his bitch of a mother or one of his spoiled daughters die slowly and painfully of some condition that might be remedied by the fruit of the murdered flesh of a blastocyst that was otherwise to be thrown into the garbage ... but if so, his commitment to "stay the course" would not make me respect him. Exactly the opposite.

P.S. Don’t think Barbara Bush is a bitch? Think she’s a sweet old granny? How about this quote from her: "Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths? ... Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch [my son] suffer." Oh, how I wish she could have watched her son suffer in the combat he avoided but is so eager to send other mothers’ sons into. Screw her, her idiot son, and her beautiful mind, too.

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