Ronald Reagan: 1911-2004
by James Norton

After years of appearing to America's young people as a distant, untouchable political icon, Reagan can be triumphantly reborn. After an obligatory avalanche of tributes and commemorations, he will re-emerge — as a distant, untouchable political icon.

And so this weekend, the shock for twentysomethings is not so much that Ronald Reagan is dead; it's that he was ever alive in the first place.

Growing up as a young kid under Reagan meant that you never really had to worry about how America was doing. With Grandpa Reagan at the helm, things always seemed to be going pretty well. Sure, there were blips of excitement, like that thing in Lebanon, the time we bombed Libya or the deal with those air-traffic control guys, but generally it was steady going.

For whatever damage he might have done to the national economy, America's struggling underclass or the entire conservative movement, Reagan always seemed to keep his cool. And when you're 10, it doesn't necessarily matter whether that cool is kept as the result of complete mastery of a complicated political landscape, or as the result of being so completely out of the loop as to be on permanent vacation. They both look the same on TV. Whenever the president appeared, what we saw was pure American cool and a healthy dollop of old-school Hollywood class.

That said, he didn't necessarily connect with people in a one-on-one way.

An anecdote in son Michael Reagan's autobiography, cited here, describes when the president visited Michael's prep school in Arizona to give a graduation speech. Michael went through the reception line; his father didn't recognize him.

Whoops. But of course, that's not really the point of Reagan's presidency, at least as a cultural moment. The point was that we recognized him on a visceral, almost subconscious level. Consistent and stylized to the point of self-parody, he was easy to "get," and consequently one of the most comforting presidents to hold the office. Lacking the self-doubt of Carter, the paranoid bad vibes of Nixon or the ball-breaking brutality of LBJ, Reagan was a steady hand. He embodied stable predictability. Warm geniality. Complete undentability, even in the midst of Iran-contra and similarly sized distractions.

He was a man of contradictions — a Hollywood actor who assumed the most powerful political office in the world, an affable image that concealed a frozen core and a supposed fiscal conservative who expanded the size of government and buried the Soviet empire by out-spending it.

Only in the years after he left office in 1989 would we grow up and see behind the facade. Too late; our childhood recollections of Reagan have been frozen in amber by a group of conservative memory-makers who have labored for more than a decade to erect a collossal statue of American conservatism.

Remember how Reagan looked to you when we were 10? Get used to it. That image is going to stick around for a long time.

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.