Reagan and me

It is one of the oddities of my academic career that my subject matter can easily be misunderstood. When I used to tell non-academic friends that I was studying the popular culture of the eighties, I kept getting asked loads of trivia about MTV and new age. Sadly enough, I didn't even know enough of this kind of stuff to guarantee a victory in the eighties edition of Trivial Pursuit.

The situation among academics is no better. It would, I assume, be very easy for a stranger to read my cv and assume, with all the occurrences of the word "Reagan," that I am some right-wing nutter. This is one of the reasons that, in my more recent scholarship, I have shied away from the eighties...that, plus I was suffering from eighties fatigue after the dissertation.

What I do need to clarify, however, is that even though I am miles away from being Rush Limbaugh with a higher degree, I am also not doing this specifically to bash Ronald Reagan. Granted, there are many things about Reagan that cry out for thrashings. His obliviousness to environmental issues, including such jems as "all the nuclear waste produced in a year would fit under my desk" and "trees are the major source of global warming," certainly qualify as jab-worthy. His slips into geezer-speak, including calling the USSR an "evil empire" and forgetting he authorized illegally selling arms to a sworn enemy responsible for terrorist acts against us, should make us wonder why this man was so respected. And his downright indifference to the growing AIDS crisis undoubtedly slowed research and cost many lives.

However, through all the accounts I've read and all the research I've done, I also have come to an unexpected conclusion: I'm pretty sure that, had I met the man, I would've really like him. He was undoubtedly funny and charismatic. He could tell an awesome story. More importantly, however, he seemed to genuinely be working towards what he saw as the common good.

We could get into the discussion of whether it's scarier to have someone who doesn't know they're evil than to have an aware villain, and this is a debate I've entered in the past (mainly around our current president). But, for the purposes of this project, it's just not important.

I'm more interested in Reaganism as a social identity. Obviously, this does require a certain amount (okay, a lot) of examinations of the presidency and the politics. I end up relying on these more than I would like, because I don't have the time, resources, or training to do ethnography...plus, I just don't have a time machine.