Redstate

By tacitus Posted in Republicans — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I was five years old, bundled against the cold, and munching on caramel corn as I sat atop my father's shoulders and heard those words in Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address. I remember vividly the chill air and bare trees of the National Mall, and the tiny figure in the distance whom we had all come to see. My uncomprehending self did not grasp the politics of the era, still less the issues, but they were beginning to grasp the persons, and I knew, because I was told, that this was the President of the United States.

Fast forward four years, and we are in Cold War Korea, with its air raid drills, its abortive evacuations, its border incidents, its paranoia of terror and sabotage, and its ceaseless drumbeat of Communist threat. Very real Communist threat, I should add, and wonderfully focusing for a boy of almost ten with an expanding awareness of the wider world. It was November. Election Day. The time difference meant that Seoul awoke -- as always, to the sonic booms of reconnaissance craft -- just as the polls closed in the United States. The Armed Forces Korea Network achieved a stupendous feat of signals engineering and brought us the live feed from NBC. I sat in my parents' bedroom and watched the antiquated Trinitron, transfixed by this new phenomenon of elections, and desperately hoping that the right man would win. It was no secret who that man was: it was assuredly not the man who preached accomodation, and whose rhetoric connoted a sad forgetting of John Stark's toast. It was the man with the will to confront the totalitarian evil facing the world; the man against whom the North Koreans spat venom with -- even for them -- rare fury; the man who saw the present danger and responded with grace, determination, and optimism. Reagan's color crept from east to west across the map of America, and I knew the republic was safe.

Fast forward four years: I am in northern Virginia, watching television as Ronald Reagan boards Marine One for the last time. I contemplate his self-assured stride and confident mien, and I see a man not relieved from duty, but liberated from office. No yearning for fame nor wistfulness for power are in his future -- and indeed, he was among that small stratum of great men for whom those base lusts never did compel him to that greatness. I also contemplate his successor, and I think I will be waiting a long time for his like to return. I still am.

Fast forward nine years: I am about to be commissioned an officer in the United States Army. We are a small group, my class, but we have traveled a hard road, and now we enter the nation's service. I have a commissioning ceremony program in my hand, put together by my father, on whose shoulders I sat and watched the Great Communicator almost two decades before. I flip through it, and turn to the last page. Inscribed on it is a single sentence:

We have every right to dream heroic dreams.

The happy warrior is gone. In so many ways, he has been gone for a long while now: robbed of his final years by the cruel disease that led him "into the sunset of my life." To say that is not to pity him his fate overmuch. Indeed, he would not want that: he was a man, like Lincoln, like so many of the Founders, of indeterminate, if Christian, religiosity; yet he was at once a man with a profound awareness of God's blessings. And those blessings were many: a devoted wife (and who, in her steadfastness and ceaseless love, can now see Nancy Reagan as anything but heroic?), many children, material wealth, and the Presidency of the United States of America. Being of a bygone generation for whom such references were commonplace and familiar, Reagan would have understood that "[f]or unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required," and so the happy warrior repaid his debt by doing nothing less than saving the world.

This is not overstatement, nor hyperbole: Ronald Reagan came to office with the empire of Soviet Communism at its hideous zenith, engorged with a decade of conquest, heartened by the tottering self-doubt of the great democracies, flush with the addition of millions of slaves to its grim machinery, and ever more willing to risk the destruction of civilization in pursuit of its messianic despotism. He left office with that empire in its death throes, the first President since Hoover to not concede a square inch of territory anywhere on the planet to its malign designs, and was rewarded short years later with the grand fruition of his grand vision: hundreds of millions of the world's oppressed rising up, shaking off their chains, and grasping their birthright of liberty. He stands in the pantheon of titans with Washington, Lincoln, and FDR as one of the great liberators of humanity. But in a fallen world, greatness is so often reviled by those in whom it casts deep shadows. So many hate Ronald Reagan, and in coming days and weeks, you will see them out in full force: unable or unwilling to deride a dying man, they will assault a dead one. They will do so by bleating about the gap between rhetoric and reality (Reagan was human); they will do so by denouncing starkness of moral vision and the inadequacy of simple truths (Reagan was common); they will do so by advancing a mechanistic, deterministic thesis of history in which inevitability is the iron law and heroes are mere spectacle (Reagan was irrelevant). Remember this -- and it is all you need to know about them -- these men and their prejudices would have left those hundreds of millions, and their children, and their grandchildren, in chains. Ronald Reagan did not. Ronald Reagan dreamed heroic dreams.

Ronald Reagan is dead. But we know, from his lifetime of lifeguarding (in which he saved 77 people), to his wisecracking in its very face, that he did not fear death. For as Stark said, and as Reagan remembered, and as Reagan's nemeses forgot, death is not the worst of evils. You cannot fear death and fully love life. You cannot fear death and fully love America. Reagan's very being was suffused with a profound love of life and country, second only to his reverence of God and his unyielding devotion to his beloved wife. Today, he passed from the care of one to the other. A more blessed end could not be wished.

Farewell to the happy warrior.