(no subject)

[den]

why do people wait for a bloke to die before they list all the bad things he did? Would you have said these things before he died? If so, why didn't you?

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I lost two grand parents to Alzheimers, so I know what it can do. When Reagan announced he had it I thought "poor bastard" at the time.

I disagree with his policies, but listing them now that he is dead seems pointless.

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

I think the point is to balance out all the nominations for sainthood.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

there is that.

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

Yep: it's reaction to the laudatory statements from so many places, public and personal. I'm not bashing him or lauding him, but I understand the impulse to say something even if I'm not doing it.

I didn't like Reagan when he was president and specifically voted against him. I was openly and vocally opposed to most things he did and did not do. However, there hasn't been any point to saying anything recently: the man hasn't been in power for coming on 20 years.

As a person, I feel sorry for him--more so for his wife, frankly, even though I was never a fan of Nancy, either. As a president, his attitudes and the policies they contributed to angered me.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

In retrospect, it's painfully obvious that the Alzheimer's was already starting to develop while he was in office. If he'd had any integrity, he'd have done a Charlton Heston. So yes, I think it's appropriate to point out that his policies ultimately caused a lot of harm. We (Americans) are still paying for the whole "deregulation" fiasco; look at the Enron thing, which happened quite recently but is in fact directly traceable to Reaganism.

[ngarewyrd.livejournal.com]

because, there's less fear of reprisal? or perhaps the things that needed to be said were forgotten until he appeared in the public spotlight again..

or maybe I just don't know what the hell I'm talking about again.

all I know is that I didn't like him that much back then, but he's dead now, so there's not much I can do or say about it now

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I agree with your second point. His death put him back in the spotlight. I also agree with your last pont too. Why do it?

Oh all right... and your third point. You don't know what you're talking about. 8)

[targaff.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. But I don't believe in not speaking ill of the dead, either. I haven't come across anyone yet who wasn't looking back through rose-tinted glasses or actually had any experience of him other than on the television; really, I think they can deal with it.

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Thank you!! I've had a fair few arguments over this in the last couple of days.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I've been watching your argument. It's sad valkywench was caught in the fallout.

He was at best, as Jenny says below, just another President. I know he did bad things in office (don't they all?) but to gloat that he is dead is nasty, and to blame him for the spread of AIDS is silly. Sure, he did nothing about the disease in the early days, but people are blaming him for *no one* understanding how bad it was going to be.

It was known to be a sexually transmitted disease, and yet people took no precautions and "screwed like weasles," as someone not a million miles away said. I'm not going to get harsh on the people who have died, but I will get cranky at the people who blame Reagan for its spread.

It's one thing to counter Reagan's claims to saint-hood, it's another to be a bastard about it.

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

My point precisely. I didn't ask that people had to think of him as without blemish just because he's dead; that'd be ridiculous. I did expect that, at the very least, people would be tactful in what they said, be respectful about it. And one particular person couldn't be and didn't accept that even if he didn't see the problem, I did and just maybe THAT was worth respecting if nothing else was.

This particular person has a major issue with respecting others, always has since I've known him. Frankly, all I feel I've lost by being unfriended there was a headache. One less person who doesn't listen, oh waah.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Disclaimer: I haven't seen the entire exchange, and am not sure I want to. But if what Griff posted in his own journal was in fact what caused the fight, then I think you seriously overreacted by calling it "disrespectful".

There is a big difference between saying "He's an awful person and I'm glad he's dead" and saying "He wasn't a particularly good president, and he made important decisions that were not things to be proud of, and I think the adulation is getting over-the-top." It sounds to me, based on what I have seen, as if he said the latter and you heard the former.

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

The problem is in part that you didn't see the original post since Griffen decided to delete it from my journal after I'd responded to it. Context is important, as always. However, I didn't just mean that he was being disrespectful to the deceased but also in that case to the person he was speaking to, the writer of the journal. If my post about it didn't make it obvious that the death had affected me on a personal level, then I'm not sure how else I could have said it... but there comes Griffen, telling me in essence that I'm feeling sorry for someone whom he considers complict in mass murder by pandemic. Respect for my feelings would have perhaps led a person to think, "Maybe this isn't the time or place." Sadly, this is something that I don't think he's capable of giving, seeing his own version of the truth as being more important than anyone else's perceptions or feelings.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. Thank you for giving me your side; I agree that the difference between "disrespectful of the dead" and "disrespectful of the person whose journal you are posting in" is significant, and that was a context which had gone missing.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I campaigned hard against him in 1980 and 1984, and spoke out loudly and often. I stopped speaking out as much when his Alzheimer's hit, and after he'd left office, as I didn't see the point.

[jenny_evergreen]

I was a kid...but I voted against him in the school mock election, with great fervor. I never once wanted him to be president or admired him. I considered him mediocre at best and inept at worst.

There are presidents MUCH more worthy of beatification than Reagan, and I, and, I suspect, many of my peers, have been sideswiped by this sentimentality about and glorification of Reagan (which got into full swing, I point out jadedly, right about the time that the Republican party started swinging into election mode), and many of those peers have felt the need to say, "What?! At best, he was just another president." I don't see anything wrong with that...in the end, it balances out.

Reagan, redux

[ursuscal.livejournal.com]

I guess the reason so many of us speak out against him now (and *did* in the past) is to prevent revisionist history from forming around him. The Republicans love synthetic icons, and if we don't learn from the mistakes he made, we'll repeat them. President Bush is currently trying to repeat the nuclear/star wars farce, with nuclear bunker-buster bombs (oh, goody, just what we need: more nuclear pits stored at the Pantex Plant in Texas, with half-lives of thousands of years -- they haven't even "disposed" of the thousands they currently have there, some in rusting containers). I doubt many are gloating about what Reagan died of -- just the hipocrasy of the lionization that's already formed around him.

[tygermoonfoxx.livejournal.com]

I don't understand it either. He was like any other human being --- he had some things he was good at and other things at which he wasn't. Reagan WAS a good people's president; the got down to their level and communicated with them all --- rich, poor, all economic classes. I still remember the time he stopped in the town in which I grew up. His press people wanted him to stay in Denver but he insisted on coming over to the western slope as well and in stopping in the small farming towns to see how people were doing and what could be done to help.

Conversely he trusted people to do a job and do it right when told to do so. He vested too much power in his staff and didn't check back on them. It had some bad results.

People don't seem to understand that a president is only human after all.

And I don't hold with ripping on the dead. It's stupid and pointless and half of what's being said isn't even true.

[emeraldkitty.livejournal.com]

Be you a Republican or Democrat, Reagan fan or not, there is absolutely no reason to become inflamed by the things the man did almost 20 years ago. The president is, as has been pointed out before this, a man and therefore fallible. The thing I really wish people would figure out is that A) the man is dead. nothing he did or said or set in motion can be changed whether those things were good or bad. B)When someone dies it is commonly accepted practice to try to remember the good things about them and to downplay or not mention the bad. It's called respect, both for the newly dead and the surviving members of his family. It's bad enough that his family lost him but it seems some of you advocate destroying his legacy and their good memories of him too. C) The American system of government was created to allow a GROUP of elected officials to make decisions for the country based on the desires of the majority. Not all of us fit into the majority (there is after all a minority) While the policies from Reagan's era carry his name, he is the equivalent of a figurehead. He did not single handedly make the decisions and policies that many of you disagree with. Much like Microsoft, Bill Gates is the man everyone blames for every problem but in reality he has very little to do with most of what people complain about. So to complain only of Reagan's involvement in policy making is ignorant. The point of democracy is for every man, woman, and undecided to have a voice in what goes on around them. Blaming the President for decisions that also involved Congress and everyone else on Capitol Hill will never bring about the changes many of you seem to desire in government policy. Write to your congressman and representatives. Actively promote the policy changes you desire. But until you do those things and find yourself in the majority, quit complaining about things that happened 20 years ago. Move on please. Concentrate on the present and the future which you can change instead of the past which is now and forever history.