By RON SCOTT SMITH
T here were so many cops out on Arizona Avenue Saturday night that for a minute you might have thought it was another DUI checkpoint operation in progress. Either that or they had the notorious SMDP “newsrack bandit” cornered, but then again, they already got that guy, didn’t they? That thoroughfare was tied off tighter than a tourniquet, but it turns out — it was just another president rolling through.
Residents on Arizona weren’t permitted to move their own cars for 48 hours? The CIA was there, along with sharp-shooting snipers on rooftops? The guy just died, gentlemen. Did you think somebody might still have assassination on their mind? One local resident, whose urgent need to get somewhere in her car didn’t measure up to the need to protect the deceased president, declared to a SMDP reporter, “He was a nice guy, but come on.”
Leaving no (tomb)stone unturned, reporter John Wood spoke to Mike Ross, owner of the Gates-Kingsley Mortuary, scene of the Saturday night fever where stage makeup would be applied for the last time to the actor-turned-president. Ross must have been working on his stand-up routine when he told the reporter, “I’ll take this experience to my grave.” The straight man of the act, co-owner Bob Boetticher, deadpanned, “It’s the pinnacle for a funeral director.”
What provides a “pinnacle” to the careers of Ross and Boetticher only brings heartbreak to millions of Americans who continue to mourn the passing of the beloved 40th president. Thousands endured eight-hour lines for the chance to take a slow stroll around the flag-draped casket in Simi Valley on Tuesday. To protect their eyes from the blazing valley sun, rose-colored glasses were worn in abundance.
Ronald Wilson Reagan might have been a nice enough guy, as the lady on Arizona Avenue said, and he never conjured up the same fear, gloom and doom that the current White House occupant does, but Mt. Rushmore? Yes, Mt. Rushmore. There is a serious movement afoot to carve Reagan’s face into the side of that mountain, where he would join Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt.
I can almost hear him say, “There you go again, loose-cannon columnist,” but as Reagan also once said, “Facts are stupid things.” He meant to say “stubborn things,” but it came out slightly twisted. Facts, indeed, are stubborn things. They don’t disappear under the ground with a lowered casket.
One stubborn Reagan fact that won’t go away — he had an “affair” in the oval office that made Clinton’s romps with Monica seem like foreplay, err, child’s play. Clinton was impeached for his oval office secret. Reagan ran a secret renegade government from that office, out of sight and out of control, selling American arms to an enemy nation — Iran — to generate hidden revenue that would finance covert military action against a friendly nation - Nicaragua — military action that Congress had explicitly prohibited. Reagan skated. His National Security advisor, John Poindexter, took the fall, and was convicted of five felonies related to the Iran-Contra Affair.
Another stubborn Reagan fact: Homelessness became an American institution during his reign, as he pinched every penny he could out of the social safety net while dogmatically pursuing the “rugged individualism” philosophy that just plain doesn’t have room for the impoverished, the mentally ill, or other unfortunates among us. An avowed enemy of “big government,” Reagan made it smaller by cutting every cent he could out of school lunch programs while declaring ketchup to be “a vegetable” in order to assure the poorest kids that they would still be adequately nourished as they dipped their French fries and learned how to spell.
Funny how these self-avowed enemies of “big government” sit proudly in Washington in charge of exactly that. They spend billions more than are in the bank while pretending not to, yet inspire their masses by repeating over and over again that this thing they’re running is out of control and no good. Reagan ran up a record deficit while insisting upon huge corporate tax cuts. Sound familiar? He could down-size school lunches and close mental institutions, but somehow found billions to spend on a dubious “star wars” missile-defense-shield brainstorm that to this day — with the current president a staunch advocate — has been proven to be a miserable, money-burning failure. Whatever else these guys hang their hat on, friends, don’t let them hang it on the anti “big government” rack.
One more stubborn Reagan fact: The “trickle-down economics” that he swore by — you know, where you give as many breaks as possible to the wealthiest and then wait for the overflow of their bounties to trickle downward to the huddled masses? It’s a scam — “voo-doo economics” as the elder Bush called it. When I hear the term “trickle-down,” I think back to the Brackbill family living down the hill from where I grew up, and how my best friend’s father down there teased us about the laws of gravity. “All we get from you big shots up there is your dirty water, trickling down the hill when the pipes clog up.” There’s your trickle-down. (Ron Scott Smith majored in Reaganomics. Email him at EdgeoftheWest@aol.com).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 10, 2004. Read the original PDF.