Not to Praise, But to Bury
Not long ago, The Shakespeare Theatre produced Julius Caesar set in Reagan-era America, so the echoes of Antony's soliloquy here seem appropriate.
I've been thinking a lot about history and memory as it applies to Reagan. What, for example, does it mean to remember a president whose death was cause by a disease whose primery feature is a loss of memory?
I'm thinking of "remember" as a transitive verb--can we remember a man to history who cannot remember his own history? I'm sure Dave has something to say about this in his dissertation chapter on Edmund Morris' Dutch, but given the current events, I think it appropriate to examine the fetishization of memory for a man whose memory left him.
I do not recall vividly the response to Nixon's death, although his presidency was certainly less popular than Reagan's. However, it seems to me that there was far less hoopla. Instead, we are seeing reactions to his death compared with Kennedy's--a man whose presidency was in the present, not 16 years gone.
How then, are we to read this outpouring following years of virtual silence, besides the occasional right wing evocation of a nostaligia for a politically more dominant era?
Perhaps it is that Reagan's loss of memory excites a certain anxiety in ourselves to exercise ours. In that way, nostalgia (itself a a feature opf Reagan's presidency and political appeal) and memory are irrevocably linked in his death. We remember him fondly (and I admit, I remember him fondly mostly because I was not yet politically conscious by the end of his presidency--he was just "The President") perhaps because we remember fondly. That is, we are fond of our capacity for memory in light of his loss of that capacity.