Personal Voices: At Reagan's Side

By Roberto Lovato, AlterNet. Posted June 11, 2004.

Ronald Reagan Memorial Library, Simi Valley, California

With a copy of God and Ronald Reagan tucked under my arm and after waiting more than three and a half hours, I arrive at the casket and am unexpectedly silent. Midway on our life's journey, I found myself among the thousands of American pilgrims waiting to bid Ronald Wilson Reagan farewell. I waited in the serpentine lines of a huge parking lot that would, like Dante's circles, eventually transport believers from the sloth and sin of this fast troubled world towards the "shining city on a hill" that was Reagan's biblical vision of America.

On our journey to reach the summit of the hill housing the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, we must traverse the Ronald Reagan freeway and wait in the crowded and carnivalesque parking lot of Moorpark Community College where buses will shuttle us 3 miles east to the city of Simi Valley and then another winding mile and a half along Madera Road to the golden gates of the library atop the tallest hill in the valley.

Most mourners and curiosity-seekers in the lot don't know the final resting place of Reagan as I do; they don't see the legacy of the shining city from my perspective. During my frequent drives along the Reagan freeway from the university where I taught to the library (I was researching a book on Reagan), I often wondered what I would think and feel when Reagan died. Those of us who just five years ago founded the country's first Central American Studies program (CASP) at nearby Cal State Northridge had many things to tell the world about Reagan. As I pass the stations of the journey to the library, I lack the words for the man in the flag-draped casket. Overcast, smoggy summer skies over the grand pageant are unhelpful. Lacking the flowers and flags of the faithful waiting in the Moorpark College parking lot, I search for messages Reagan will take on his way to meet his Maker. Having prayed and proselytized for his election in 1984 as a newly born-again 21-year old homeboy seeking redemption, Roberto the adult ponders whether America's fortieth President will be among God's Elect in 2004.

As I enter the snaking line of thousands squeezed into the parking lot and pass the smiling, blonde, California-dreamy young Christians in shorts handing out water and pamphlets -- "Are You Good Enough to go to Heaven?" -- from the Cornerstone Church van parked next to a row of Port-a-pottys in the lot, I think how, despite the best intentions of pundits and politicians, paupers and the powerful, the Reagan legacy will undergo the dialectical twists and turns of interpretation. History has not ended. How we interpret and define the Reagan legacy in our lifetimes will be a measure of how clean or excrement-filled the values and institutions atop our shining city are. With a smile, I accept the water and pamphlet before braving the perfumed Port-a-potty.

After two and a half hours we reach the end of the line and inch towards the heavily secured Metro-line buses commandeered for this historic, but edited event (no cameras allowed except for those of officially designated media). To our right, satellite antennaed news vans are parked next to a makeshift altar where well-wishers cry and meditate before flowers, cards and jellybeans on the table beneath a white tent. The scene makes me think of how the Teflon President made Americans feel like a chosen people of a chosen country with a divine mandate of freedom. Many among the overwhelmingly white (approximately 95% despite multicultural mourning on TV) were probably looking southward at the browning City of Angels -- where a just-released UCLA study finds that 775,000 mostly non-white Angeleno souls are regularly enslaved by hunger; those congregated in the lot long for the providential America prophesied by the Great Communicator: "I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land."

After passing through metal detectors, I climb into a bus that speeds eastward to the Madera exit. En route to the library entrance we pass museum-sponsored banners bearing pictures of past presidents. I recall similar banners on Simi Valley streets promoting a library exhibit I visited -- Walt Disney: the Man and His Magic -- a couple of weeks before September 11, 2001, and am still amazed at how actor-politico Reagan's own magical ability to connect the makers of entertainment fiction with the makers of political fact came at precisely the historical and economic moment when companies like Disney fused the levitas of Mickey Mouse with the gravitas of ABC news under one corporate roof; a new age of merged media and politics was upon us.

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