Sun - June 6, 2004 at 08:46 AM in

Idiots.


Ronald Reagan passed away yesterday. I really feel for what Nancy went through, since my own grandfather also went through a period of slow decline over many years (my grandfather's decline wasn't Alzheimer's, though, it was something else).

But I happened to be listening to the beginning of Prairie Home Companion , and when Garrison Keillor announced at the beginning of the show that Reagan had died a few hours earlier, you could clearly hear one audience member cheering and shouting. What an idiot.

Now, I never voted for Reagan (I couldn't, actually, since I was 15 the last time he ran for office), and back in my teen years I wasn't always a fan of his policies.

But even for his most vehement political opponents, Reagan was never the sort of evil mastermind like Hitler or Stalin whose death you cheer. He was a politician, and when a political opponent passes away, all differences are forgotten. Why?

1. Delighting in the death of a political opponent makes you look like an insensitive clod (even if, in the case of Norm Coleman, it helps your career).

2. The death of any human being is a small tragedy, even if it was a long life and a slow decline at the end.

3. He no longer has the ability to defend himself.

In a way, I think this one little cheer was emblematic of how low political discourse has sunk in this country. For better or for worse (mostly worse), we now live in an era where people are labeled "traitors" for their political beliefs, where dirty tricks and gaming the system are considered acceptable behavior as long as it works to political advantage, and where there seems to be little interest in finding common ground.

This didn't happen overnight. It has been going downhill at least since the beginning of the Reagan years, and politics has never been the career for people who want to take the high road. But it seems to have gotten exponentially worse in the past decade.

Posted at 08:46 AM   Permalink      

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