Apparently the Republican candidates spent their recent debate going on and on about how great Ronald Reagan was and blah blah “Morning in America” blah blah Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! blah.
Oh, Republican candidates. You silly creatures. You really should know better than that. Because now I’m going to have to open a can of Tony Kushner on you:
“I had a great degree of loathing for the Reagan administration,” he explains, “and I will hate Ronald Reagan’s guts until the day I die. You had this bizarre ideology predicated upon the idea that selfishness is generosity, that the best way to take care of society is to look after yourself as much as possible.”
What Tony said.
Don’t make me go get more.
Oh, OK, just a little more, because listening to Tony is like sweet spicy Tom Kha Tofu soup for the soul:
The specific cause is that in the first six years of his administration, as the AIDS epidemic was growing and growing and growing in terribleness, Reagan said not a thing, literally not a thing, about AIDS because he couldn’t afford to alienate homophobes in his conservative-reactionary political base. He behaved in a disgraceful manner. I lived through those times and saw friends die horribly and part of what was horrible about their death was that they were dying a kind of pariah death.
Is it possible that there were good things that came out of the Reagan years? Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t change my absolute conviction that he was a bad president and that he was the beginning of something very, very bad in American democratic life. I feel that way even more strongly now.
So knock it off, Republicans. Because there’s more Tony where that came from!
(h/t Norm for the first Tony interview. Post title inspired by …)
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UPDATE: For some reason I decided to make this my first crosspost at Daily Kos, so here’s the link to my diary if you want to see what the comments over there were like. Interestingly, the dread Cthulhu himself showed up in the thread and was insulted at being compared to Ronald Reagan. Thoughtless of me — even baleful elder gods have feelings …
Was that where the bad thing in democratic life started? With Reagan? I could have sworn it started with Nixon, then just went further and further downhill once Reagan came in. I thought we could never, ever have a dumber President or more mannequin-like First Lady. Until January 2001.
Either way, Tony nailed it on the whole AIDS thing–for one of the Republicans, who pride themselves on their courage and stiff lips, Reagan was an incredible pussy (I don’t care if he’s dead…how many more are, because of his silence?). As much as I disliked Gadhafi, he called that one perfectly: “an impotent actor.”