Bill:

The emotional orgy about burying Ronald Reagan is disgusting.

Are we to forget how Ronnie heated up racial antagonisms?

How he campaigned in the South?

How he evoked old issues of “States rights,” not implied since the Senator Claghorn days on radio?

He rejuvenated prejudices, and brought out the worst tendencies of southern Democrats.

Reagan widened the gap between the poor and the rich.

The gap has been widening every since.

The “fall of the Soviet Union”?

Reagan brought down the Soviet Union?

With Star Wars from a movie he had heard about?

The Soviet Union fell, because it was fragile.

We didn’t know that.

The CIA didn’t know that either.

When the crash came everybody was surprised except Reagan.

Reagan said: “Look what I’ve done.”

The CIA breathed with relief.

It was all a show.

So what are people weeping about?

William:

Bill as usual has more exaggerations than issues, more feeling than fact.

The most intractable fact that he will not face is this:

We have only one person for both head of state, and head of government.

Indeed, we may be the only major country where this is true.

In many countries, the head of state is monarch, or president; the head of government, a prime minister. The division has survived because it works. I have heard that Europe today still has nine monarchies. Off hand I remember only seven of them, but there may be some countries too small to bother about.

Indeed, the Netherlands even has two separate cities: I think the practical governmental city is Amsterdam, and the one for historical hysterics is the Hague, but it may be the other way around. Even Russians and Indians—I mean real Indians, from India, you know—make that useful distinction between a President and a Prime Minister.

And small wonder: India got rid of the Raj mainly because Mountbatten had plenipotentiary powers, responsible only to the British Crown, and so a freedom was granted that would never go through Parliament. (If we only had some sort of arrangement like that now, how easily we could handle the difficulties in Iraq.)

When Franklin Roosevelt died, the practical governmental politician died too, and people mourned the reign of Roosevelt the Good, while Republicans had to suppress their rage at his grin, his upturned cigarette holder, his give away at Yalta, and other unspeakable infractions of common sense.

So too we have to reckon with the reign of Reagan the Friend.

As Tip O’Neil said, Reagan would have been a good king, and he was a good king. Reagan embodied the sense of earnest family values, as he floated over divorces as if they didn’t exist. That’s like the British, if you stop to think of it—their Monarchy seems to have survived in spite of persistent onslaughts—so many instances of illicit and unmitigated heterosexuality.

Look at the turmoil caused by the death of Diana.

Queen and Huntress Chaste and Fair?

Why shouldn’t we be equally irrational, and enjoy an emotional orgy when a President dies?

If Bill insists on getting out his political bile at the wrong moment, he will only exclude others from a much needed catharsis. He'll spoil a good show.

The poets & scholars Bill and William Sylvester, joined at birth within the same body and fighting for primacy ever since, are frequent contributors to Buffalo Report. They specialize in subjects with more sides than one.