Reagan Roundtable: The past is a different country. Except that it’s not. by Onparkstreet
Charles has crossposted here his own contribution to the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz.
Doc Madhu, a.k.a “Onparkstreet” also had a post up last week:
Ronald Reagan Roundtable: The past is a different country. Except that it’s not.
….After the First Lady’s talk, while in conversation with someone or other, I remember saying that, “I would NOT shake the President’s hand” if I met him in person. The young man speaking to me was incredulous. “You wouldn’t shake the President’s hand?”
I can’t remember now why I was so adamant. I wasn’t political as a teen and my hard-working immigrant parents rarely mentioned politics at home. By what form of cultural osmosis had I absorbed the idea that President Reagan was a bad and terrible man? By the osmosis of growing up in a college town surrounded by the children of faculty and life-long Story County Democrats. If you click on the Ames Historical Society link above, you will find an Ames Tribune photograph of a demonstration against President Reagan’s policies held during the First Lady’s visit. “Cheese for the POOR and champaigne for the RICH” reads one sign.
In the college town environments of my youth and early adulthood, Republicans were universally understood to be cold-hearted stupid warmongers. There was no, “I don’t like his policies but I like him personally” stuff. By what process of misremembering and selective editing have we smoothed over the roughest edges of that era, the nasty snide anti-Reagan jokes, the huge anti-Reagan missile protests in Europe, the near universal disdain of the man and the movement among intellectuals? A certain percentage of said intellectuals admired their own personal starry-eyed vision of the Soviet Union and that’s the truth.
You want to know how bad the disdain was in some corners of our society? When President Reagan was shot, my junior high classroom erupted into spontaneous applause. To the credit of the teacher, she became immediately and visibly distressed and told us to stop. She was shocked. I am shocked to remember it. We were nice kids growing up in a middle-class Midwestern college town, dreamily innocent in some ways, and primarily concerned with getting good grades and impressing that cute boy or girl. Yet, our first instinct at that moment was to clap. I remember being surprised at first, then smiling in confusion, then noting that the teacher was upset so that our reaction must be very wrong. How had we preteens thought such horrible behavior appropriate? What must we have heard, day in and day out, for that to be our response? How bizarre. How remarkable. How shameful.
Ha! I have a similar memory.
I was in Jr. High school at the time, and in Social Studies class, when President Reagan was shot and, most unusually, a TV was rolled in by the instructor, so we could watch the news reports. One of the class fools, a minor bully, stood up and laughed very loudly and brazenly said something to the effect that he hoped Reagan was dead. The class started to laugh but it turned to shock in a heartbeat because the teacher, a bantam rooster sort of guy in thick spectacles, had sprung from his chair and unceremoniously knocked the kid flat on this behind with something that was less than a slap but a lot more than a shove.
He had our attention.
Today, if he had done that, the teacher would be fired and sued, if not hauled away in handcuffs, but my school was in a blue colar community in the era when male teachers, especially coaches and assistant principals, were still known and expected to occasionally use a hand to straighten out boys who were acting like punks. It was less true of classroom teachers of academic subjects but it happened. We just never saw it happen so fast!
We were also surprised because our teacher, an ardent liberal, had never hidden his political disdain for Ronald Reagan and everything he stood for in his lectures, offhand comments or jokes. Most of the teachers had the same attitude. But our instructor launched into an impassioned speech about how the POTUS, whomever he was or what we thought of him, represented all the people of the United States and that his assassination would be an attack on not just the president, but on America. That we had certain obligations and duties as citizens of the United States at a time like this, and showing respect to the President of the United States was one of them.
He went on to describein detail how he felt and how people had behaved when President Kennedy was killed and contrasted it with our behavior, telling us he was ashamed and embarrassed for us that we did not know any better. When he was finished, a loud silence reigned supreme.
A teachable moment.
February 13th, 2011 at 5:52 am
How things have changed, as related in the narrative that you and Doc Madu shared about how your respective classes reacted to Reagan being shot. I vividly remember the day President Kennedy was shot and how the universal reaction was swift and cut across all strata’s of society and political thought. I also remember the day Reagan was shot. I was running a unionized trucking company and after it was announced to a crowd of burly teamsters, silence fell across the group and then someone offered up a prayer. These men; all with the memory of Kennedy in their past, knew that an attack on the President was an attack on all of us.
February 13th, 2011 at 5:49 pm
Funny that we had similar experiences and yet were in different environments. I wonder what that means? Maybe my interpretation is incorrect and we Gen Xers are just jerks, full stop.
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– Madhu